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PARTISAN REVIEW
New York Times
reports that NPR is following public radio stations
everywhere that are rethinking their cultural programming in response to
audience surveys showing classical music drives away listeners, who pre–
fer talk shows and news. The fact that NPR, along with PBS, which long
ago succumbed to middlebrow taste and
Masterpiece Theatre,
should
even conduct audience surveys in order to determine cultural policy
shows how completely public broadcasting has been swallowed up by
commercial values.
It
is not the only example. With the spread of corpo–
rate capitalism and the gobbling up of smaller arts firms by huge con–
glomerates, money motives, once at least competitive with questions of
polity, have begun to dominate all the markets driving our culture. Just
as Wal-Mart is now monopolizing the book business, and Time-Warner
the publishing industry, so the Disney block, having bought up most of
Forty-second Street, has begun to dictate the direction of New York the–
atre production. Not that Disney is the only corporate giant in the mix.
A conglomerate named Clear Channel, though I'm not sure how many of
you have heard of it, not only controls
1,200
radio stations and
19
tele–
vision outlets and
730,000
outdoor displays at present, but, having
acquired another entertainment giant called SFX, now owns and leases
135 theatrical venues in 3
I
cities, virtually monopolizing concerts, Broad–
way shows, and sports events in all these areas. Selwyn Theatre was
renamed the American Airlines Theatre. The Shuberts just sold the name
of the Winter Garden to Cadillac.
It
will not be long before you will have
the opportunity to purchase round-trip air tickets along with your
orchestra seats, or check out interiors of limos and sedans during inter–
mission in the theatre lobby. There is a computer game called Pac Man
that has always struck me as the perfect image of this process. It shows a
large mouth moving around the screen, voraciously ingesting everything
in its path.
When ruled entirely by profit, the quality of art is bound to the client
and so is any openness to risk or to adventure. The days are over, I think,
when publishers took chances on good writers who were unknown or
difficult in order to bring distinction to a list dominated by bestsellers.
Or when theatre producers searched out the exciting new playwright to
balance out a season of tired favorites like
Our Town.
But in addition to
the eternal financial issues, there are certain ideological pressures affect–
ing the quality and influencing the direction of the arts. In the old days,
these familiar evils could safely be assigned to capitalism, and the prob–
lem could be defined as Marxian, the fact that those who create the arts
are alienated from the means of production and distribution. But today
the problem cannot be attributed to or solved by a single political equa-
