For the last month or so I have been trying to figure out why, depending on the discipline, different elements of an artist’s background signal quality.
I realized that when people on my board or in my audience talk about a classically trained musician, they orient on what conservatory they attended first and then what ensembles they may have played in.
However, when it comes to actors whether the person appeared on Broadway or TV/movie is the most important. Lacking that, if they are based in NY or LA adds to their cachet. However, no one ever seems to care if they went to NYU or Yale Drama or University of Wisconsin for their training.
With dance it is usually which dance company they have performed with and where. Very seldom does the source of their training get mentioned.
Visual artists it is all about whether you can understand what you are looking at, whether you think it is any good and what the price tag is. Many people can discern whether an artist has had formal training or not, but I don’t think I have ever heard someone express confidence that an artist will be good based on the place they studied.
Scott Walters has long talked about the problem of actors needing move to NY/LA/Chicago so they can get work in their own hometown. I am not going to rehash those lengthy arguments.
But along those lines I wanted to toss the question out there about how and why this range of criteria about what constitutes quality developed.
I have come up with a lot of theories that don’t quite make sense. One idea I had was that while there are people who enjoy the arts in general, just as their are cat people and dog people, people who like the arts have one discipline they focus on. Otherwise, wouldn’t there be a single prime criteria that dominated, especially for the performing arts? Instead it seems people accede to the dominant criteria of each discipline, perhaps feeling they aren’t as qualified to judge as they are in their primary focus.
As I said, that doesn’t quite make sense. I can poke a lot of holes in that idea. I am left wondering where these concepts of quality originated from. Is there something that the music education and performance community did to signal a conservatory education is desired in a musician in a way that isn’t as compelling in the acting and dance community? Or is it that the audiences and communities that participate in each of these disciplines gradually oriented on certain signs they felt insured a quality experience.
Another thought I had is there an unconscious desire to be associated with the strongest name recognition. People on the street may recognize the Julliard name, but if given ten options to choose the Big Five orchestras, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Houston and Dallas might appear on the list more often than Cleveland based on general impressions people have of each city.
I am not saying people shouldn’t be getting credit for doing well in a conservatory program, especially if they spend a lot of money in the process. I have a suspicion if the underlying factors informing these concepts of quality were better understood, it might be easier to communicate that artists who don’t possess those specific associations and pedigrees can provide a high quality experience. Inversely, one could suggest an artist does not necessarily need those associations and pedigrees in order to be successful.
Granted, there is a continuum there. This claim is more true of having a NYC address than having formal training. It may be easier to break these conceptions now than it was in the past since the internet allows people to verify that quality and these signifiers don’t go hand in hand. (Though we can also attest that the same forum allows a lot of crap to get recognition while hard work and talent are overlooked.)
Anyone have other insights or theories?
Admittance to the classical music performance world has a rigid standard based on tradition. One must be vetted by an approved school to be considered qualified to perform the classical music canon. This goes beyond the standard of “quality” to approved “style.” Is a performer playing/singing in the “style” of the music correctly? That style should be one learned from a teacher whose pedigree goes long back into history, back to the originator of the style. So if a violinist studied with Gingold at Indiana University, it is known that Gingold studied with Ysaye, who himself studied with Wieniawski and Vieuxtemps and premiered compositions by Franck, Chausson, and Debussy. So Joshua Bell, who studied with Gingold at Indiana, has (with good management and lots of practice) a pass key to perform professionally the Romantic violin repertoire. Of course, he can branch out and play Beethoven and Stravinsky later as his roots become less necessary to promote with his own increasing stature in the classical music world.
So, the classical music world is about tradition. If a performer continues it, he is respected. If he has a strong link to it in his training, he is respected even more. That doesn’t seem to be the case in the other arts disciplines.
Well as an insider you know the value of Gingold, Ysaye, etc., but when I am planning a season or looking to promote, my board is going to say “ah, this person I am unfamiliar with went to Indiana so they must be good.” Most of them wouldn’t know Gingold from Gielgud. But if it comes down to a violinist from Indiana vs one from Julliard, there is a good chance it is going to be about Julliard unless I can pull out other resume credits that bolster the case for the Indiana grad.
This is all somewhat related to what I was getting at in a Harvard vs Yale sense of brand. Names of teachers and prizes that have relevance to arts insiders often mean nothing to audiences even for the simple fact they don’t know what the relative prestige between people and prizes are.
Sometimes it isn’t even just a matter of patience to learn. I was at a 4th of July party yesterday and we had a good 20-30 minute conversation about kids and the Suzuki method with people who weren’t familiar with it. They were pretty impressed by the concept and they had kids that might benefit from the experience. But I suspect if I mentioned Suzuki Method to them in two months, I would probably have to remind them about the details again. There is a lot of stuff going on in people’s lives so often the easiest thing to do is judge the quality relative to something you already know. My guess is that it won’t be long before you start hearing about a show that is the next Game of Thrones.
Both Indiana and Juilliard subscribe to the tradition, as well as the major orchestras. They must maintain their reputations. The lesser schools and orchestras care less about the tradition. These lesser orchestras, however, will definitely reprint the performer’s bio with its references to teachers, etc., in their programs. Thus tradition is continued, even when it is indeed meaningless to the audience. I think that most orchestras would like to break the mold, but the Force of tradition is strong!
There are several issues that come to mind in your question. One thing to consider is how much the idea of quality for a discipline resides in the hands of gatekeepers. Does the audience need to be told what counts for quality or is it obvious with a smattering of insight and/or education? It seems the more gatekeepers are responsible for deciding the issues surrounding quality the more we are tempted to grant that there is a difference between the perception of quality and quality itself. If untutored rubes like something that has not passed the approval of gatekeepers then we call it a matter of taste rather than a matter of insight into quality. You can like anything, but you are only ‘right’ to like quality (or so we might say).
In the gallery world gallerists are generally responsible for promoting ideas of quality that suit their own ideals of investment profiteering. So things like reputation and brand matter because they can be used as a shorthand for quality. They are often actually a substitute for quality, unfortunately…… It can matter more who made something than what it is. Picasso’s signature on a napkin was actual currency!
What the gatekeepers accept can differ from the public perception, and the role of specific variables in the ‘official’ determination can lie hidden in the background. It’s interesting that so much modern and contemporary art is determined to provide counter examples to the traditional aims for ideals of quality. Gatekeepers can be left scrambling to find how the new fits with the old, and often rather than admitting it doesn’t a new ism takes root. In the end the idea of quality is not what was important to maintain as much as it is the gatekeeper’s own authority over it. And of course actually understanding the new qualitative aims is less important than having the right to exercise judgment over them. This only feeds into the idea that short hands like reputation and provenance are the significant detail. We get to look at where things came from (often easy to determine) rather than what exactly they are.
To the extent that gatekeeping does this it seem the art suffers in some way. At best it’s like a plant that has been left to grow in a pot too small for it. We focus on the containers and not the things contained at a cost…..
A lot of interesting thoughts here Carter and your plant/pot metaphor at the end provides a great summation.