Just Another Lament (Or Two!) About the Creative Economy
How Friday’s NY Times Opinion Pages Sparked a Re-Think on This Creeping Story
How Friday’s NY Times Opinion Pages Sparked a Re-Think on This Creeping Story
Today’s What I Love About Print observation comes courtesy of the opinion pages of the Friday New York Times. Readers of the Times in digital form might have seen this letter from the professional musician who, perhaps predictably, is up in arms about the news that some opera companies are replacing full orchestras with digitally generated accompaniment.
Those same readers might also have seen professional author Tony Horowitz’ op-ed piece, I Was A Digital Best Seller! about his long (and, unfortunately, commonplace) odyssey with a nonfiction reporting project that didn’t exactly thrive upon its electronic publication.
Taken individually, as typically presented on the Web, these pieces probably appeared to be more routine complaining about the disruptive effects of a dynamic economy. Unexceptional.
In proximity on facing pages, however, they somehow registered differently — as a two-stage alarm signal, a matched set of loosely connected laments, a duet across disciplines on the futility of creative pursuit. The musician and the author were talking about strikingly similar diminished horizons, limitations on their ability to work in fields that demand specialized training and years of dues-paying. The side-by-side context, on the valuable real estate of the Times’ pages, underscored that this is not just the howling of elites. It’s a growing epidemic affecting creators at all levels — and by extension anyone whose life is enriched by art.
The shared plight of the musician and the author is a massive topic, confronted daily by those still scrambling in what’s left of the “music business.” But it’s not a sexy story. It’s a creeper, moving slowly and steadily through seemingly disconnected realms, ultimately flattening once healthy fields of creativity. Whether people — like critics, who’ve largely been disappeared already — are paying attention or not. It has no flashpoint, no central sympathetic character. Books about it, like Jaron Lanier’s trenchant Who Owns The Future?, are not exactly sparking a conversation — instead, the troubling cries of the displaced arrive one at a time, each distinctly compelling and each unsolvable. The cynic’s retort: Build your brand, fire up that Kickstarter campaign.
Crucially, the alarm voiced by these pieces (which reverberates throughout Lanier’s book and with increasing frequency in journalism; see David Carr’s column today) is not easily fixable. The creative economy depends on the passions and aesthetic inclinations and — let’s just come right out and say it, sophistication — of the audience. Right now in American culture, those passions run toward tquick facile thrills, the creative equivalents of fast food. They don’t include opera, or longform narrative nonfiction, or jazz, or magazine journalism — or any discipline that takes time and a bit of brainwork to appreciate. One relevant question: Is this just a reflection of what the marketing types call “evolving tastes,” or evidence of an irreversible decline brought on by the explosion of content on the Internet?
There may be no way to answer that one. This much, though, is certain: The tea leaves are there, sometimes in serendipitous juxtaposition. It’s up to us to read them, and connect the dots.