Innovation and Art
Tradition, Technology, and Blockbuster Ballet
It’s only November, but corporate America has officially begun to look forward to the holiday season. Radio stations are playing a rotation of Christmas songs, red and green decorations have replaced the Halloween candy in the seasonal isle, and the New York City Ballet has started promoting its famous version of “The Nutcracker.” Performances won’t begin until November 25, but tickets are already on sale. This year, the New York City Ballet and Lincoln Center have coordinated to bring audiences the December 13 performance on film in movie theaters around the country, making this particular holiday tradition more accessible than ever.
Showing performance art in theaters is nothing new, but the decision to broadcast “The Nutcracker” surprised me. The film version of the corps’s performance will only air on the night of December 13 in select theaters, perhaps in order to replicate the uniqueness of each live performance or to preserve ticket sales for the rest of the show’s run. The strategy of bringing performance to a wider audience in theaters, especially with the special appeal of a one-night-only experience, has some obvious advantages. More people will see the show—not least because of the cheaper ticket prices for the theater viewing—and an otherwise fleeting live performance will be carefully shot and preserved permanently on tape. Despite these advantages, though, my initial reaction to this news was negative. Wouldn’t the performance lose something crucial if the audience wasn’t actually in front of the dancers?
Broadway Lies in the Web It's Made
Living in New York last summer, I found it hard to avoid talk of the long-awaited opening of “Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark,” which finally premiered in June after a record 182 preview performances. These previews were riddled with mishaps, including long technical delays and failed aerial stunts that caused some serious injuries among cast members, many of whom left before the actual opening. By far the most expensive Broadway musical ever produced, Spider-Man will have to become a perennial box-office hit to stand a chance of recouping the $75 million–dollar cost of production. Given the show’s generally negative reviews, the chances of this seem slim, to say the least. Along with its numerous technical calamities, the show’s music—arguably the most important aspect of any successful show—provoked negative reactions from many critics.
There are a lot of different molds into which we could try to fit the motivations for “Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark.” It could be that producers wanted to attract a younger audience to Broadway—an audience whose collective consciousness might never be penetrated by Broadway without such a gimmick. Maybe they were trying to modernize theater to meet the expectations of a general public that is growing more and more accustomed to the increasingly immersive magic of Hollywood, including advanced 3D technology, massive IMAX screens, and breathtakingly realistic Computer Generated Images. Regardless, it seems the ambitious stunts were meant, essentially, to place the viewer inside a high-budget action film. The critical and financial failure of “Spider-Man” suggests not only that this is almost certainly not the most practical strategy for theater to pursue, but also that the most basic principles underpinning this strategy are flawed.
Letting Our Masterpieces Go to Pieces
In recent years art conservation has emerged as a fast-growing industry. Graduate schools across the country now offer programs in the field. Without conservation work, we would not be able to enjoy masterpieces like Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, the pyramids in Egypt, or many of the beautiful buildings right here in Boston. But something about altering the works we hold most precious for the sake of preventing future alteration seems counterintuitive.
Not long ago I was watching a museum’s educational video on their conservation methods when the image of a man happily layering new paint atop an ancient masterpiece as he spoke casually with the film team made me cringe.
Classical Rock: Genre-Breaking Music
On August 26th, I was waiting out the last few days of summer when a friend’s parents offered to take the pair of us to a concert at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MassMoCA) in rural North Adams, MA. Since the audience was mostly middle-aged parents, I expected something that I would consider “traditional”—and, to some extent, that’s what I got.
The headlining group was Roomful of Teeth, a handful of classically trained young singers who had come to the MassMoCA to take part in an unconventional new project. They sang mostly folk music from various traditions, including a few of their own original compositions. They caught my attention by performing old folk music in the style of a modern a capella group, but what made me slide to the very front of my seat for a better look was the moment halfway through the concert when Roomful of Teeth invited Merrill Garbus from the experimental band tUnE-yArDs to perform her own music with them. Applying classical training to singing styles from around the world is one thing, but bringing an indie artist with no classical training to perform with them was another level of hybrid between old and new.
Publishing Words: The Future of Books
The art community has not always welcomed change. It venerates tradition, and art-enthusiasts of every era are reluctant to deem worthy works that do not conform to time-tested notions of beauty. Despite increasing acceptance of modern and contemporary art, the same resistance to change may exist today. The opera and ballet stubbornly adhere to their traditional performance methods, and that’s how their patrons like it. Sometimes, though—as publishing houses around the country have discovered this year—change cannot be ignored.
What the publishing industry faces right now is a customer base that demands a digital product even as the technology that makes these products possible is still in its early stages of development. Random House has experienced a 200 percent growth in eBook sales this year, and every other company’s sales tell similar tales. The various devices on the market—the Kindle, the Nook, and the Kobo eReader, among others—all do different things. Thanks to each business’s attempt to dominate the market, they are mostly incompatible with each other. For example, the Nook and Apple’s iPad feature color displays for picture books, but for the time being the Kindle does not. How can a publishing house market a book only for those consumers who have one of those two eReader models? How can it spend millions converting the complex layout of a textbook into an electronic format when many of their customers don’t own an eReader at all? In the face of such bleak uncertainty, it is not surprising that the industry has been slow to transition.