From The Archives

A touch late for Commencement Season, a post from 2013 that's still (sadly) relevant

Aspiring Artists:Prepare to meet your indifferent, over-indulged, endlessly distracted audience….

In this commencement season, graduates from arts programs and conservatories will hear speeches about the importance of creating art and bringing it to our troubled world.

Someone behind some lectern will probably describe this career path as “noble,” and urge the new grads to persist in this time of economic uncertainty. There will be reminders that great art is not instant, and often forged through periods of adversity. There will be rousing stories about the power of art to transform the world in large and small ways. Inspiration will be served.

Those doing the exhorting will likely skip over a reality familiar to most who’ve been in the trenches for a few years: The creations of these newly minted artists are likely to be met with a distinctly modern “meh.” Not boredom exactly. Indifference.

There’s more artistic expression happening today than at any other time in history, and much of it is just a click away. As some optimistic speaker will surely point out, aspiring artists enjoy a level playing field, low overhead, and a direct Internet pathway to potentially huge audiences. If you have a story to tell or a song to sing, this is the time. Because there are few barriers to sharing it with people all over the world.

The flip side: Those in the desired audience are time-strapped and maxed on diversion options, and perhaps not inclined to receive a shiny new idea from some unknown. They are the herd Neil Postman worried about in his prescient 1985 book Amusing Ourselves To Death – a population that has become oddly passive, if not zombified, through exposure to constant entertainment. In its quest for “escape,” this audience expects to be bludgeoned by explosions in blockbuster movies (fire, one ancient way to counter attention deficit!), entranced into all-night marathons by epic video games, soothed by pop songs with the harmonic sophistication of nursery rhymes, bombarded with the lurid humiliations of “reality” TV.

If this is the age of the empowered arts bootstrapper, it’s also the age of the over-saturated, over-indulged, comfortably numb pop culture audience.

Through the Internet, consumers have instant access to everything they already know and everything they might be curious about – from Japanese art film to the latest cat-piano-playing phenom. These masters of the universe (consumer division) well understand their power: They’ve been told, endlessly, that their playlists rule, and what they “Like” is all that matters. When they encounter something that enchants them, magic digital bots beam them more of the same, in tacit confirmation of their good taste. When they’re displeased, after maybe just seconds of exposure, a simple tap of the delete key removes the offending art. No need to grapple with what isn’t immediately understood. Send it away! There’s always more.

The ready abundance seems, at first, like a win-win for producers and consumers, another example of search engines and smartphone apps enhancing the quality of life. But as any economist will tell you, when there’s abundance of a commodity, its value decreases. That’s what’s happening where art is concerned. The technology that makes it easy to share any creative utterance also can make each such utterance seem disposable, of diminished consequence. In this atmosphere of “Easy come, easy go,” it’s possible to graze endlessly while investing minimum attention, passion or energy into any single work. Studies on leisure-time choice suggest that many people find themselves paralyzed when confronted with too many possibilities. Neurologist, author and musician Daniel Levitin has argued that the simple awareness that there might be some greener pasture a click away has changed the way people listen. The proliferation of options “causes us not to bond or bind to (any) particular musical piece.”

Then there’s the much-discussed problem of rapidly diminishing attention span. To really sober up new arts grads, some commencement speaker should haul out a stopwatch, let it tick for 15 seconds, and note that this is roughly the amount of time the average Internet user is inclined to spend on an encounter with the unknown. Talk about pressure. In that sliver of time, the restless consumer makes a snap appraisal – should I stay or should I go? No matter that the art might unfold over several minutes, or take a dramatic left turn: Those in the smartphone generation have little patience for following a work that unfolds slowly. They’re wired for a Summly summation.

Art doesn’t work that way. Becoming engaged, and then immersed, in a work of creativity requires effort; the modern Netizen is averse to to expending too much of it on anything. War and Peace, the novel cited by Nicolas Carr in his controversial Atlantic Magazine essay Is Google Making Us Stupid?, is known to be rough sledding, and thus famously avoided. Likewise, it takes effort to listen to a classical piece at depth for 35 minutes, especially when the harmony is turbulent and the melodies don’t repeat every four measures. The act (discipline?) of following an extended work involves open-mindedness and focus, and also, crucially, a degree of humility. When audience members divert attention from the action to incoming status updates from Facebook or texts or email, they don’t simply lose the thread – they make a slight but significant value judgment that places real-life concerns ahead of the art. Rock stars I’ve talked to recently confess that they find it surreal to gaze into a sold-out arena to see thousands of people, faces illuminated in a soft blue glow from below, tapping on their phones during a performance. They’ve begun to wonder if performance alone is enough to capture and hold people anymore.

Of course the challenges of cultivating audiences are not new – the entrepreneurs at the Globe Theater faced them, and they had Shakespeare on their side. What’s new is the attitude of the desired audience. All day every day, computer users find themselves the target of torrents of options and marketing come-ons. The offerings are expanding, exponentially, while time (alas) remains finite. Add in the dizzying choices and the ceaseless interruptions brought by the smartphone, and it starts to look like a state of siege. Indifference becomes a survival strategy.

The rising crop of new artists might think about this indifference as a new status quo – and quite possibly the challenge of the age. While most university-level arts programs have ramped up emphasis on the practical tools necessary for developing and sustaining a business – through classes on digital delivery and piracy, website development and the establishment of a” brand” – there’s less discussion about what’s happening on the demand side of the equation. Perhaps it’s beyond the scope of an arts education. Or maybe it’s a head-in-the sand thing, because this indifference has horrific implications for the future of creativity.

And in some cases, the big multinational players in the culture business are, in subtle ways, actively encouraging indifference toward their product. Consider music. For a while now, the major labels have taken legal action against digital piracy – sending the message that the consumer is not to be trusted. Executives became so freaked about the stealing, they evidently stopped thinking about how to actually engage an audience with work that offered artistic challenges and not just cheap provocations. They bet on lowest-common-denominator product rather than investing in long-term careers. This encourages a casual level of interest: If you don’t like this year’s model, be it Beyonce or Justin Timberlake, a slightly tweaked new one is surely on the way. And what happened to the more serious artists who were once championed by big labels? They now work for themselves, or at smaller operations, where the business is driven by passion. (The vinyl resurgence can be seen as a slow-food-style return to the connesseiurship of the rock era, a time when devotees listened repeatedly to entire albums, in part because they didn’t have access to everything ever recorded.)

Then think about the quality of the audio itself. Big Music is happy to sell digital files that are flawed. In some cases, the transfers are so brittle, music that was lovingly recorded registers as icepicks on chalkboards. That sends a message: Don’t pay attention! Don’t scrutinize at depth! What’s more, the industry never stood up for the people who actually make what they sell, by insisting that digital files carry songwriting and performance credits. That might seem like a small thing, but not to the Nashville session guitarist. Those credits once served as breadcrumbs on the musical superhighway, encouraging a listener’s curiosity, opening up new vistas. Their absence reinforces the vague creeping sense that music is plentiful and disposable, sent over from the anonymous players working at the Garage Band Factory.

Alarm over this culture indifference has reached the typically sanguine realm of publishing. Recently, bestselling fiction writer James Patterson purchased the back page of the New York Times Book Review to ask “Who will save our books? Our bookstores? Our libraries?”

The ad features a long list of literary classics, then argues for a “bailout” of sorts for the ecosystem surrounding books. In essence, he’s asking people “Please care about this mode of discourse. It’s important.”

Patterson’s is a valiant and no doubt noble stand. But his concern is misdirected. He’s worried about the supply chain (the libraries and bookstores where the ideas reside) when the root problem lies with the demand. Or lack of it. Our young people have access to books – maybe they’re just not terribly drawn to what’s inside them. Their passions are fired by screens, and because they’ve been told over and over that their tastes rule, they can’t be blamed when they’re indifferent to any “old” way of thinking.

Minute by texting minute, they get along just fine without the philosophy treatise on Being and Nothingness, without the beautiful twists of a Faulkner sentence, without Salinger’s insights about human nature. Though it might please the old guard and the elite, a “book bailout” won’t suddenly make curious readers out of video game players. It’ll be another top-down panacea that ignores, just as many art schools do, the seismic changes that are undermining many aspects of the artist/audience interaction. Art needs more than another crop of young warriors and brazen talents: It needs open-minded appreciators, discerning fans and informed critics. It needs curious souls who are willing to set aside the cares of a blindingly hectic info-glut day long enough to devote attention – that elusive, ever-besieged “undivided” attention – to something abstract and nuanced, and possibly challenging. Success for the next generation of artists may not be measured in the sheer brilliance of an idea, or the cleanliness of its execution, but in the ability to move audiences beyond the one and only thing that unites them: Indifference.