notes toward a longer essay
In an age of mass-produced entertainment and culture, the work of theatre will always be disadvantaged in the marketplace because it cannot easily reproduce and commodify itself for mass consumption.
Movies, music, and even the visual arts, survive in our economy because their products can endlessly sell. A film may play two weeks in a cinema, but it then sells tv/cable rights, then dvd rentals and sales. A consumer can go to Blockbuster (or, more often, click online now) and own the movie. That work of art that was labored over for so long by so many artists (whether it's Transformers or the latest Lars Von Trier "arthouse" product) can be perfectly commodified, and hence sold alongside any other product in the marketplace. (Just browse through Amazon.)
Music, like theatre, originates in live performance. But ever since recorded sound was able to isolate the audio from the experiential a century ago, an individual song can become a "hit single," endlessly circulated (i.e. sold) on the radio, on discs, and basically throughout an entire entertainment/broadcasting complex that needs constant music to underscore its programming, advertisements. Sure, people still like to go to concerts. But the music "industry" wouldn't exist without the ability to package the music experience in unlimited shrink-wrapped CDs for individual sale--or, of course, now in quickly downloadable digital bytes that are even more endlessly reproducible in that they are totally noncorporeal.
They say the downloading of music will ruin the music industry as we knew it. But it will only replace that older model with another. Someone is still profiting off of digital downloads--it's just Apple ITunes and not a "record" label.
As for how the artist profits, that's not really the point here. For the survival of ones artform in this economy depends not on whether you make a profit. It depends on how big a profit others can make off of your art. How does your art feed the economic gears of the culture industries? Can your producers sell "ancillary" rights to your art to other media? Can newspapers, tv shows, and websites generate more ad revenue as a result of mentioning or sampling your art?
If not, then the economy will simply ignore you, and you might as well be strumming your guitar in Astor Place collecting loose change in a hat.
The visual arts have particularly thrived in the current economy. Paintings and sculptures, for instance, are ready-made commodities, ready to be sold. (To owners who are then paid to lend them out to be exhibited.) Even if they cannot be mass-produced, their uniqueness enables a much higher price. And while not mass produced in sellable units, media outlets can virtually reproduce their images to attract their own advertisers and audiences, so they will want to photograph your paintings and sculptures. And you will have a gallery and/or press agent to mediate those transactions.
Of course the "old masters" make most of their money through outright reproduction: postcards, posters, t-shirts, and, yes, "reproductions." That profit, of course, usually goes to museums in their gift shops, where they conveniently shrink and commodify all the "live" art you just saw.
And lest there be any doubt as to visual art's value to the culture, just look at the coverage of them in our more cultured newspapers. Most articles are about auctions, letting us vicariously experience the pleasure of consuming something one supposedly cannot put a price on. The New York Times, for instance, tells us why Van Gogh matters today: he can generate a seven-figure sale. No matter that he'll never see his percentage.
And while it's been easy enough to commodify such pre-modern forms as painting, that accomplishment is nothing compared to a whole corpus of art created for the modern (or postmodern) marketplace--art that is always already reproduced and further reproducible. Photography, video, digital media, etc. Even Andy Warhol probably didn't foresee the ease with which the visual arts would adapt to an economy of endless commodification, and how thoroughly it would be built into the art itself.
So. Where does that leave the art of the theatre?
Theatre can still make money, of course. And there are still "commercial producers" who bet their fortunes on it doing so. Even major entertainment conglomerates like Disney think the artform's relatively modest prospects for profit worth its while.
Note, though, that those commercial producers who have made a bundle in recent times have done so by making their products as reproducible as possible. Cameron Mackintosh pioneered the "world tour" approach of "sit down" productions in multiple cities simultaneously, exporting the product across the continents. This model has been successfully copied by not only Disney (most lucratively with Lion King), but hits like Chicago and Rent.
Note that only musicals seem to be able to capitalize on this approach.
Theatre can also avail itself of various "merchandising" campaigns (another Mackintosh legacy, thanks to the Cats t-shirts and ubiquitous logo). Musicals have "cast albums" of course--but those profits go mostly to the record companies, don't they. And unless you are "Cats," how much really are some overpriced t-shirts, souvenir programmes, and other kitschy crap we see peddled on our way out of the theatre going to net you?
It used to be a play was lucky enough to make money through a healthy Broadway run followed by frequent regional and amateur rights paid to Sam French. In the current landscape, that is indeed a pittance.
There were also book sales, if a playwright was lucky. But unless you're Sarah Palin, nobody makes real money off of books anymore.
A play can only now be a revenue generator only by selling itself to and subsuming itself within other, more profitable mass media: becoming a movie, for instance, at which point it is no longer a play, according to the economy and enters a completely different realm of the cultural marketplace. Indeed the playwright, after the initial sale of rights, is usually disassociated from the new product in every way. As are his/her original theatrical producers--unless they succeed at nailing down "subsidiary rights" in the initial contract. (Hence why that's been such a hot-button issue lately in the New York theatre.)
I'm not saying theatre will die if it can't reproduce itself. I'm not saying it even can reproduce itself. But it will basically always be a loser artform in this economy--i.e. this country. And I mean "loser" in many ways.
So we better get used to it.
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
notes toward a longer essay