Where's your Ring?

Everybody wants a Ring these days. Wagner's Ring. Yes, it seems that every self-respecting opera house wants to have a production of Richard Wagner's four-part operatic epic - The Ring of the Nibelungen - in their repertoire. In Germany alone, Lübeck, Hannover, Essen, Hamburg Berlin and Frankfurt all currently have one. And now Opera Australia wants to get in on the act. It is mounting a co-production that will premiere in Melbourne in 2013.

But why? Performing Wagner's Ring is the biggest undertaking in the opera world. And opera has in recent years gone all out to position itself as a an artform of spectacle, especially in countries such as Australia that do not have a long opera tradition dating back centuries. That is fine. There are certainly many spectacular moments in opera, especially in the late-nineteenth century repertoire which dominates our stages. But there is more to opera than just the big, the loud and the lengthy. And it is this side that is getting blended out, with the result that many people who are not grabbed by the bombastic, the romantic and tragic are turned off by the whole operatic genre. Two of these best opera performances I have seen in the last twelve months have been relatively small affairs: Benjamin Britten's chamber opera The Turn of the Screw and Joseph Haydn's comedy Il Mondo Della Luna. Both were at the opposite end of the spectrum from Wagner's Ring. But both are still very much "operas", in the best sense. It is only when we get a rich variety of fare that we really come to appreciate what a thrilling, exciting and rewarding form opera can be. And one with much wider appeal than it currently has in Australia. Let's have the Ring but balance it with some more varied and less-frequently heard repertoire.

Image: Kugel

Chasing tails

These days youth audience programs are all the range amongst arts companies. We are bombarded with dire warnings that the audience for the mainstream arts are "dying out" and companies are throwing large amounts of money to make themselves seem more attractive to the all-important under-35s. This is, of course, money that is coming out of production budgets. The idea seems to be that we should all like the same thing, that our arts companies should be everything to everybody, that there is something wrong if people under and over 35 don't have the same tastes. Some of these programs remind me of the over-50s who squeeze into the fashions of 20-somethings in the vain attempt to convince themselves that they are still young and 'hip', no matter how ridiculous the result.

But isn't a “bum on a seat" "a bum on a seat” no matter what age it is? Is the emphasis on youth alienating the older and more mature audience, which has always been the core audience for the “heritage” arts? There is also a demographic argument that says that the population is ageing and that in terms of pure numbers the population – and therefore the potential audience – is growing fastest in the over-50 bracket, so why throw large amounts of money at a population sector that is numerically in decline?

There is quite a bit of “group think” going on in this debate, i.e. “if all the other arts companies are chasing the youth market then we had better do that too”. Maybe a company that says, “we are going to different, we are going to look after a more mature audience” would be highly successful, if for no other reason than they would differentiate themselves from the rest of the industry. Or is that kind of diversity too frightening to our arts companies?

Image St Stev

Germany's first Hitler exhibition opens

The first ever German exhibition about Adolf Hitler opens in Berlin today. Under the title Hitler and the Germans, Nation and Crime the show is being hosted by the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin.

The exhibition is divided into sections dealing with the relationship between Hitler and German society, the Nazi state and the dictator's rise to power. In an article published in the magazine Der Spiegel the curators describe the great caution they have taken to ensure that the exhibition does not present any opportunities for perverse "hero worship". They have aimed to achieve "critical distance" to their subject and none of the items on display are thought to ever have been touched by Hitler.

Nevertheless, the exhibition marks a new milestone in the historical treatment of the genocidal dictator. With the passing of time, the proportion of the German - and European - population with first-hand experience of Nazism is below ten percent. Germany has become a "post-memory" society; at least as far as the Third Reich and World War II are concerned. People today only "know" Hitler and his regime from history books, films, family recollections, site visits and the education system - including museums. At the same time the Nazis have moved into the realm of popular culture and there is a risk that the full horror of Hitler's regime will slowly be lost on future generations for whom Hitler is little more than a mythical symbol of evil. To some extent that is an unavoidable result of the march of history. But it is also something that well-curated exhibitions can help prevent.

Image: Ruins of buildings and vehicles lie in Berlin's Mohrenstrasse after the Anglo-American air attacks on the 3rd of February, 1945, (source: German Federal Archive)

Save the Arts

Check out this video. http://savethearts-uk.blogspot.com/ It's a great example of contemporary advocacy for the arts.

Less is more

One of the great challenges for us today is dealing superfluity and information overload. The industrialization of information production has meant that we face a constant bombardment of information that cries out for our attention. The result is that as a society we have lost the ability to see the wood for the trees. Information is power, or so the saying goes. But wisdom is information on steroids. And yet wisdom - the ability to analyze, understand and organize information - has been pushed into the background by our fascination with information.

Here is another way in which the arts can help us. The sculptures of Constantin Brancusi or Alberto Giacometti, haiku poetry or the carefully crafted words of a great novelist show us what can be achieved by focussing on the essence and cutting away the superfluous. The creative process is often about going from the raw block of marble to the core truth. Artists can spend inordinate lengths of time refining their works, usually be removing, refining and cutting back in the knowledge that it is easy to be verbose but a great achievement to be able to reduce an idea or expression to its very quintessence. If our public and political life displayed a similar desire for cutting through the superfluous, the irrelevant we be a lot closer to being able to deal with some of the other great challenges facing us today.

Image: Alberto Giacometti, Standing Woman I, 1960 (photo: Dick Heiser)

Cultural overflow?

This afternoon I listened on CD to a symphony by a Russian composer. In the evening I went to my favorite Indian restaurant and enjoyed a fiery vindaloo. Later I got home and watched a great new documentary on the Baroque period of art history on TV. That is a fairly typical Sunday for me and probably pretty standard for many people these days. But in human and cultural history the consumption of such a range of diverse cultural experiences is anything but typical.

We have never had such easy access to the cultural expressions and practices of humanity. For around $500 you can build your own collection on DVD of, say, the 25 greatest films ever made. The same could be said of most other artforms, even if you would have to make do with prints of the great paintings.

This wealth of art and culture at our fingertips is fantastic. But what if it also reduces our ability to really get into one particular culture or artform? Are we becoming jacks of all cultural trades and masters of none? Have we also lost intimate and thorough contact with our own cultural roots as we jump from Russian to Indian and on to Japanese or American culture with apparent equanimity.

Image Balouxmix

The aging arts

Last Saturday I spent the day handing out how-to-vote cards at two polling booths in suburban Melbourne. Apart from the long hours standing outside, it is always a great experience. Because everybody in Australia has to vote it is a great way to do your own little social experiment and form your own impression about the Australian population. You take on a particular role that brings you into direct personal contact with hundreds of strangers from all age groups, economic and social groups and every type of political persuasion.

This year I was struck by the number of frail elderly people there seemed to be in my little survey cohort. We all know that most western societies are aging rapidly as birth rates drop and we all live longer, but to get a glimpse of this trend with your own eyes really brings it home.

It got me thinking (again) about the impact this demographic development will have on our arts and cultural life. It is accepted wisdom that most people become more conservative in their artistic taste as they age. The readiness to explore the new and to take risks often wanes in indirect relation to our delight in reliving the familiar and tried and tested. What does this mean for arts programming? Many arts companies today place great store in their innovation, creativity and novelty. But the audience for that is quite possibly diminishing in number. How will the arts look when half the population is over fifty?

Some would argue that the effects of this trend are already emerging with "heritage" artforms and "heritage" programming increasingly dominating our cultural landscape. Are the arts headed for a future as frail and aged as the people who I seemed destined to meet last weekend?