|
Audio Asylum Thread Printer Get a view of an entire thread on one page |
For Sale Ads |
172.56.34.202
"After being creators of jazz and blues, we're the only country in the world without a minister of culture. Americans don't know the sources of their own music, from bebop to doo-wop to hip-hop."
Follow Ups:
I'm genuinely curious and I hope no one takes this as trolling:
How many of you have lived in a country with a formal culture ministry? Do you think it has resulted in a deeper appreciation of the arts? Do you think that artistic achievement is greater?
I'm a lifelong resident of the USA, so I don't know.
Happy listening,
Jim
"The passage of my life is measured out in shirts."
- Brian Eno
has arts ministries at both state and federal level, funding many many forms of endeavour in expression. Their impact waxes and wanes a bit, depending on the degree to which leaders of government are cultured or merely homo economicus.
On the whole, though, they do provide training in excellence (Australian National Academy of Music turning out working classical performers, National Institute of Dramatic Art turning out, um, folk who appear in TV advertising ...), grants - generally very modest amounts like $10-20K - enable individual artists to write or travel and gain exposure, and support high art performance in ballet, opera, orchestral music.
Main art galleries are publicly funded.
Whether these ministries raise public consciousness of the arts I am not so sure. There are still more creators than audience for them. We prefer sport, where we punch above our weight etc sun-bronzed famous victory etc etc etc
And we have a publicly funded broadcaster, as do several civilised countries - Canadia, France, UK. There are those who see this as creeping socialism of course, and point to the excellence of commercial TV in the US as a model of the market at work.
Thanks.
Many Americans (myself included) believe that our publicly funded broadcast networks (including radio and TV) are far superior to their commercial counterparts.
Happy listening,
Jim
"The passage of my life is measured out in shirts."
- Brian Eno
I have and I have also seen the results in other countries. I spent much of my early life in Canada and was a beneficiary of the Canada Council for the Arts, which paved the way for me to further my career in New York. In New York I see musicians from all over the world, but many from countries with strong support for The Arts. Regionally the strongest support is in Europe, and that is also where touring pays off the most, both because there is funding and because the audiences have an appreciation for it. France, Germany, Netherlands, Italy, Denmark, Sweden, Norway all have vibrant scenes and musicians that have come to prominance from there, and governmental support plays a large role in that. The people in those countries have an awareness and appreciation for art, and they have a cultural identity in their compatriots that have come to prominance, which of course feeds back into their interest in the arts.
It's a hard thing to pinpoint "x is because of y", but ultimately it's a matter of whether the benefits are deemed "beneficial". Most likely, people that have an awareness will have an appreciation and consider it beneficial, and those that lack it won't.
Here in the US we have private sources of funding such as the Doris Duke foundation, MacArthur Foundation and Guggenheim Foundation, some funding from the State Department and some local funding, but it is on a much smaller scale than countries with governmental support.
Dave
Thanks very much for your reply. Food for thought.
Meanwhile, my copy of "Impetus" arrived today. I'll post some thoughts after I've had a chance to give it a few listens.
Happy listening,
Jim
"The passage of my life is measured out in shirts."
- Brian Eno
Very cool Jim, thanks so much for the support!
Dave
It's not possible to have too much of the yartz.
nt
Love it!
in all the right directions!
Thank you - IF we had a Minister of Culture here I
might have discovered Barry Humphries a LONG time ago.
As is is today will do.
Brilliant guy.
"Once this was all Black Plasma and Imagination" -Michael McClure
Nobody has any money. Piracy is a problem but the reality is that it doesn't much affect the bottom line - the people downloading it would NOT be buying it if they could not download it. And if the computers didn't have the ability to download movies and music - people would not be out buying 5 terabyte hard drives in quadruple Raid systems - for movies (of all kinds) and music.
The buying power has been dramatically curtailed in the west. My career as a teacher has seen a 50% reduction in buying power since 1985. From 1992-1999 I work as an Accounts payable clerk - that job in 2015 pays the same as it did back then but housing has tripled, food has gone way up, gas has more than doubled (maybe tripled since I have not had a car in 4 years) so a bit out of the loop.
Vinyl has come back because the music industry can actually sell them and not worry too too much over it being copied. But it can be copied and some do it.
Education has been cut to shreds in Canada and probably in the US and the FIRST program that gets cut is almost always Music and then closely after Drama and in some schools Art. The pricey programs to run.
As noted in Mr. Holland's Opus
Vice Principal Wolters:
I care about these kids just as much as you do. And if I'm forced to choose between Mozart and reading and writing and long division, I choose long division.
Glenn Holland:
Well, I guess you can cut the arts as much as you want, Gene. Sooner or later, these kids aren't going to have anything to read or write about.
But hey there's always a billion for a new football stadium and hundreds of millions for police and lawyers and judges to arrest the $6 an hour, living on food stamps, check-out girl who downloaded a song.
If you don;t want people to copy then why sell them devices with a record button? Sue Sony and HP and Apple for being the dealer. Besides they have ALL THE MONEY!
I don't buy much of the first two paragraphs. I understand the sentiment but I don't believe that's the case or the sources of the issue.
I suspect there is a relatively large swath of the population that spends more at Starbucks in a week than they spend on recorded music in a year. What do people pay for mobile service in a year? For cable? Netflix? How many people own iPads? I don't really buy that people don't have disposable income. And the truth is, people fork out the money for those things, because there is no way to get it cheaper. If people could get all-you-can-drink Starbucks for $9.99 a month, I don't think many would pay $5 for a latte any more and I don't think Starbucks would have a viable business anymore. But they can't, and so they pay the price at Starbucks.
If people has no access to music apart from purchasing it, they would purchase it, just like everything else in their lives. The problem is that a going price of "nothing" has been established for music, and people have come to accept it and expect it. A general lack of musical education and cultural education only reinforces that. And it works out great for some in the short term, the problem is that there is a long term.
Dave
.
Your points are fair and I concur that there is a significant enough part of the population that will choose to take what they can get for free and only spend it on stuff they can't. And downloads isn't seen as stealing the same way as taking a bag of Starbucks off the shelf.
Music was devalued when the kids were in school - oh let's get rid of the subjects "that don't matter" and that "lesson" is learned at an early age. so not only are we not teaching music education but worse we're throwing it under the bus - well I say we but I didn't vote for the clowns who do that to give a tax break to Coca-Cola instead.
But there is far far more competition for entertainment than there was in 1950. People had the radio and a stereo and some people had a TV with what - 3 channels.
So I do agree with you that people will take the things they CAN take - but they still do have far less disposable income overall. So if they have their $100 and they buy 1 bluray, 4 Starbucks coffees, and a pair of jeans, and a belt - well they COULD buy the CD but they have to give up something else which means less money for the other vendor. 10 years later and they're still making that $100 and the price of everything went up 20% so they're already down 1-2 items. They're going to say screw the CD - I'll get that for free on the internet and that gets me back to being able to buy the other items on the list.
There isn't much that can be done about it. You can throw lawsuits around but who are you capturing - the person will likely declare bankruptcy and putting people in prison is far more costly than whatever they stole. And if they're in jail they certainly can't pay it back.
The solution is to go after the targets that can reasonably be expected to fix the problem - the computer manufacturers. Put in viruses on the CD with a warning label - and if you try to copy the thing your computer will shut down and never start again kind of thing - there has to be a way in the computer world to stop it. Video Games I am told are far more difficult to copy - DVD's are often region coded - I can buy a Blu Ray in America and play it on my machine in Hong Kong but not DVD. I have to buy some region free machine or get it hacked - but frankly all that requires too much work for most people that they won't likely bother.
Like I said the LP is such a great combat to all of this because you COULD copy it but you have to play the whole album in real time in order to do it. It's not copy 20 CDS in 10 minutes and upload.
Of course if CD's were sold for $3.99 then most of this would have been stopped before it started - I believe people tend to be lazy and cheap - it's find the right mix between how cheap and how lazy. If the CD was cheap they'd probably just say - ahh I'll buy the CD and can;t be bothered with downloading or taking the chance of getting caught. When the CD is $22.99 they will take the chance.
The music industry is mirroring society - all the money goes to the top 1% of artists and the middle artists are making far far less than they would have if this were the mid 80s early 1990s.
Which is a shame because it means many quite talented people will be forced at looking for jobs at Wal-Mart or some mind numbing soul crushing career in business making money for planet destroying organizations.
Well-said, I agree with most of that. I do think the disposable income gets spent according to what's needed and what it costs, were people still spending money on music they'd probably just buy one fewer lattes at Starbucks in a week.
As for solutions I believe the way to go is in restoring value to music, which I do believe is possible though with every new dirt-cheap streaming service we get further from that. Piracy can be dealt with to some degree, even at the height of Napster there were a LOT more people buying music recordings, I don't think it is the biggest problem and at minimum if people are pirating music they know it's something that they SHOULD be paying for. Music being "officially" worth next to nothing is a far greater problem.
"Which is a shame because it means many quite talented people will be forced at looking for jobs at Wal-Mart or some mind numbing soul crushing career in business making money for planet destroying organizations."
True, and the bigger problem IMO is that so much of our musical/cultural fabric is *cumulative*, meaning it's an extension of and built on what came before, and once that's broken - once there's a generation with very few professional musicians - it will have long-lasting effects that will take many generations to overcome.
Dave
A "minister of culture" won't accomplish anything. It will simply add another layer of politicization to America's entertainment culture. It's been grossly over-politicized as it is.
Americans "don't know the sources of their own music" because the American TV and print media acts as if these sources never even existed. (How many Americans born after 1990 have even heard of Quincy Jones?) And unfortunately, most Americans still get their entertainment primarily from the American media.
He is correct on both counts.
I don't know why we would need a so-called "minister of culture". And what would this individual/bureaucracy due in order to promote "culture"?
Promote free concerts? Build museums? We cannot afford, nor do we need
another bureaucracy which does nothing useful.
Do you think the average consumer of pop culture needs to be told what's
good, what's bad, what's desirable, what's not? Do you think the more
sophisticated consumers of culture - say classical music - need to be
told what's worth listening to and what isn't? Consumers of culture on
all levels know what they like. They don't need or want another useless and gigantic bureaucracy talking down to them.
Besides which, he seems to be talking mostly, if not exclusively, about
music, and music popular mostly with blacks. Thta's all right, I'd
expect that. He also seems concerned with musicians getting paid, and
that's a very valid concern. But getting paid for your product has
nothing to do with culture.
And while we can certainly say that Q has been involved with many worth-
while projects, he has been closely associated with some that are not
quite so worthwhile. It's difficult for me to reconcile his close
association with Basie with his close association with Michael Jackson.
The two are on opposite ends of the cultural spectrum.
His initials are "TV". May he and his new four-legged minion, "iPad", continue to guide us aright....
Pure ignorance
No doubt. Especially when we consider all the ineffable wisdom which
emanates from your keyboard and undoubtedly your mouth (I certainly do
wish we cultural cretins had the benefit of THAT).
Indeed.
I think you are kind of misrepresenting what actual ministers of culture in other countries actually do. they support the arts. I personally can't imagine how such an endeavour could ever be seen as not being "useful." We can afford it as a nation. Really we can't afford not to promote the arts as a nation. The results in not doing so have spoken for themselves. But I agree that we don't necessarily need a minister of culture per se. What we do need. What we desperately need is music education in our public schools. Not just music but arts and culture education. We can afford it and we desperately need it.
if 1% of the money spent on sports (for example) in this country were spent on cultural (music)
education, promotion... understanding... it would elevate our society at large.
1%.
"Once this was all Black Plasma and Imagination" -Michael McClure
Your post is spot on
In Russia, that would be Olga Golodets, who was responsible for the operation of the recent Tchaikovsky Competition:
Looks as if you'd better straighten up when you deal with her. ;-)
On a serious note however, I just watched the Gala performance of the various winners of the competition, attended by Putin (who spoke a bit before the concert) and other big wigs. I started thinking that I cannot even IMAGINE a US President attending a Gala concert by the winnners of, say, the Van Cliburn Competition in this country. God forbid that a government official here should be seen promoting anything that reeks of high culture.
+1 for you, Chris. I could not agree more. The dumbing down continues apace.
... we could have ministers of cultures galore. We're more interested in frozen yogurt cultures, I guess.
Edits: 07/04/15
I think that culture is a must in all civilised society.
And much more funds should be allocated to cultural events and promotion.
You do not need a huge bureaucracy to run a culture department, just the right people.
As an example I am French speaking and live in South Africa and I can watch TV5 a French channel that promotes French culture.
I can also go to "The Alliance Francaise" should I wish to learn French.
Just because good music is not "useful" to you doesn't mean it's the case for others.
The rest of your post is not really worthy of a response, so I'll pass.
Dave
nt
Post a Followup:
FAQ |
Post a Message! |
Forgot Password? |
|
||||||||||||||
|
This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors: