What should PBS be doing instead? For openers, it should air fine-arts programs that encompass the full range of the performing arts. That means not just "The Nutcracker" but ballet and modern-dance masterpieces of all kinds. It means not just ultrafamiliar operas but solo recitals and chamber music. It means not just Broadway musicals but performances of classic and contemporary plays. And these performances should take place not just in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco but in cities throughout America.
It embarrassed me to write that last paragraph, because every word in it is—or ought to be—humiliatingly obvious. Any TV network that claims to be "public" should be offering more than the ultrasafe programming in which "Great Performances" specializes. Nor should it air only operas performed at the Met, or musicals performed on Broadway. This is a big country, and you can see great performances of all kinds from coast to coast and in between.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704743404575127891014937732.html?mod=WSJ_LifeStyle_Lifestyle_5
This is a problem not just with PBS, but with "arts centers" nationwide, especially in medium-sized and smaller cities, which, I can tell you from extensive experience, bring a whole new meaning to Teachout's apt phrase "ultrasafe programming." From a steady diet of what they offer, you would come to the conclusion that the arts are always nice, inoffensive, occasionally "multicultural" in a "local color" kind of way, and slightly but vaguely morally uplifting. That doesn't correspond to any serious conception of art that I would endorse. At a very accessible level, South Park and The Daily Show are both more serious and more entertaining than arts center oatmeal. And PBS and the centers simply won't go to more challenging levels.
In an exchange on The Blackboard today, two of us realized that we had first seen Roman Polanski's great Polish debut feature Knife in the Water, as well as other significant foreign and silent films (King Vidor's The Crowd came to mind), on PBS in the late Sixties, when we were not even in our teens yet. Kenneth Clark's art history series Civilisation blew me away when I was still in middle school. I think it's good for kids to start getting exposed to "adult culture" as soon as they can handle some of it. PBS used to be a leader in that respect; it opened worlds for me, just as my local public library did. But no matter what Terry Teachout and I say, I doubt the network will take on that role again.
One way in which the arts can and should disturb "solid citizens" is that the political sympathies of artists can be unpalatable to us on both sides of the spectrum. Bertolt Brecht was a Marxist and a defender of Stalin and a great playwright; Celine was a ferocious anti-semite and an overall asshole and a great novelist. Such seemingly incompatible (but actually pretty ordinary) facts make a lot of people very nervous. In the Los Angeles Times Culture Monster blog, Mark Swed thoughtfully considers the case of composer Hanns Eisler, Brecht's equally leftist friend who was deported from the United States to East Germany in 1948:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2010/03/hanns-eisler-a-marxist-for-our-time.html
Also at Culture Monster, Christopher Hawthorne looks at the careers of the new Pritzker Prize in architecture winners, Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of the firm SANAA:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2010/03/sanaa-partners-are-joint-winners-of-pritzker-prize.html
http://www.archdaily.com/54212/zollverein-school-of-management-and-design-sanaa/
Their buildings, such as the New Museum in New York, are indeed exciting:
In that design, Sejima and Nishizawa, working with a lean budget, produced a precariously stacked collection of boxes wrapped in an opaque skin of aluminum mesh....as a symbolic presence in the Manhattan skyline....the $64-million New Museum was prescient. In its commitment to doing more with less, and in its suggestion of a real-estate culture teetering on the edge of collapse, it was among the first high-profile buildings to signal the end of a flamboyant decade for both top architects and the American economy.
Another renowned contemporary architect, Jean Nouvel, is in the knock-your-socks-off game, too, with his National Museum of Qatar:
http://www.designscene.net/2010/03/national-museum-of-qatar.html
Leonardo Finotti has made an enviable career of photographing buildings of this caliber. Here is an interview:
http://www.archdaily.com/53983/ad-photographers-leonardo-finotti/
Among notables born on this date are philosopher Rene Descartes, novelists John Fowles, Vardis Fisher, Marge Piercy, Nikolai Gogol (Russia), Alexandra Kollontai (Russia), and Borisav Stankovic (Serbia), poets Andrew Marvell, Edward FitzGerald, Octavio Paz (Mexico), and Nichita Stanescu (Romania), film directors Volker Schlondorff (Germany), Nagisa Oshima (Japan), and Alejandro Amenabar (Spain), screenwriter Valerie Curtin, politicians Al Gore and Barney Frank, activist Cesar Chavez, hockey player Gordie Howe, composers Johann Sebastian Bach and Joseph Haydn, ballet impresario Serge Diaghilev, conductor Clemens Krauss, country singer Lefty Frizzell, jazz vibraphonist Red Norvo, bandleader Herb Alpert, voice artist Lucille Bliss, and actors William Daniels, Richard Chamberlain, Shirley Jones, Richard Kiley, Rhea Perlman, Christopher Walken, and Ewan McGregor. Lucille Bliss, the voice of Crusader Rabbit, Smurfette, and many other characters, turns 94 today: Happy Birthday, Lucille! I took a voiceover class from Lucille in San Francisco in the late Eighties; there were only three or four of us in the class, so it was very individualized. Lucille is a great teacher and a great person (and with stories like you wouldn't believe), and even though I haven't used the training she gave me to go into the professional voiceover field (a highly competitive one where "name" actors have a current advantage), I still do use it every time I speak publicly, or even just teach. Learning is always good, because whatever you learn, you use, whether directly or indirectly. I have very happy memories of that class.
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