CONCERNING THE PERFORMING ARTS ON TELEVISION

CONCERNING THE PERFORMING ARTS ON TELEVISION
By Slime Corner’s Professor Wayne

A recent attempt to transform the Poetry Slam at the Green Mill into a live webcast inspired heated debut in Slime Corner (the back stools at the Green Mill reserved for regulars), which, in turn, inspired Wayne Ducett, long time resident of Uptown, to write this essay.

Television despite its natural appearance on the screen is a highly controlled, restricted, authoritarian, and artificial medium. The clock rules it. The producers regulat it. Technology enables it. And the bottom line dictates its content.

Only authorized personal are allowed into the broadcast buildings, through the studio doors, onto the camera’s mark – get your identification card out! Put your arms up and be frisked. Go through the metal detector. Answer the screening questions. And if you haven’t been invited, don’t bother knocking.

And who are the gatekeepers of this “authorized only” atmosphere? Bureaucrats who call themselves assistant producers wielding petty political power in much the same manner as do the middle managers of a widget factory. On many occasions they work the con job of having an inside track -- lay down with me honey and I’ll get you through to the big office.

TV is an authority based, hierarchal structure that limits access to a select few who empower themselves (once on the in) to acquire positions of material opportunity far above their less fortunate, less ambitious, and less image-worthy peers. It seems so wonderfully democratic from below especially as framed by those at the top who propagate their own importance.

Do the performing arts as presented on the screen have the same effect as an art experiences in the flesh? Absolutely not.

Television art informs. It clues the mass audience to something they might not know. It exposes them to novelty. And on a few occasions, it jars the status quo, shifts fashion, changes convention, but only after the groundwork for such change has already been laid down off camera by activists and madmen outside the circles of propriety.

Would an Oprah or a Howard Stern have been allowed on air in 1953? 63? Did Oprah and Howard change the racial and sexual sensibilities of the white American middle class, daytime viewers, and late night insomniacs or were they changed already? Is television at the front lines of the current call for change and anti-war sentiments? Is television doing anything concrete to rectify the crimes perpetrated by politicians, corporate kings, and banking lords? What did it do (besides reporting after the fact) to amend the Savings & Loan scandal, the culprits who generated the gas shortage and money guzzles of 2001, and Wall Street scoundrels selling their nation short in 2008?

Television is talk after the fact. It does not create social movements. It mass produces fashion and fashionable ideas motivated by the bottom line. It has to. There are too many bills to pay. Too many investors to satisfy. (Too many assistant producers.) And while it is wonderful that people like Oprah (once they’ve gained access to this most powerful medium) try to do positive things with it, they are not the initiators. They are not the prophets. They are property owners and corporation moguls transforming the prairie wilderness of ideas into complex, wealth-accumulating strategies of commerce. They are demigods of fashion, sometimes reckless and arrogant, sometimes lord like and paternal.

True social change comes from personal passion. It turns collective when the passions are shared by a good number of people. Self-serving motivations are always a din in the mix, but Gandhi or Jane Addams or Eugene Debs could not have inspired multitudes to follow them fearlessly into controversy, conflict, and harm if those multitudes suspected that money and personal power were the purpose behind their leader’s passionate appeals. Justice, service, respect, and altruism are the true catalysts of social change.

Of course, nothing is so black and white. There are television projects motivated and dictated by passionate and generous causes – often they operate in the red. And there are producers who hold artistic integrity high above capital gain -- they work less than others. There are performers who do not compromise their principles for a paycheck or a salacious opportunity. But the medium itself, the system and structure of the television industry, as it has come to be, is a greed motivated mechanism as bureaucratic and dehumanizing (or should we now say species-threatening and life-deforming) as any other segment of the now “going-global” American military-industrial complex -- a.k.a. world capitalism.

If you are a crusader inside this system seeking to undermine its power base and turn the beast toward a noble cause, you should be applauded. But if you’re a self-aggrandizing artist type looking for a fat paycheck while posing as an agent of social change (spewing the politician’s artful tone of Clinton/Bush/Insert New Name-styled honesty and conviction) then, I say, you are a hypocrite, and should be called to judgment for the damage your false images may produce in the minds of the idol-seeking young and for feeding your talent into the machinery of distortion and social death.

If you’re hot to be part of the system, experience tells me, you’ll soon be a hot part of the problem. Wear whatever mask you want to wear, but some of us will always see you for what you really are.