The importance of bad art
To cut to the chase: the creation of art is a risky business. There are few guarantees of quality, of profundity or of the longevity of the work’s appeal. The creation of any sort of art is therefore an experiment, and as with a scientific experiment, failure is a possible outcome.
Failure, then, is one source of bad art. But without the possibility of failure, success is at best limited to a narrow variation on what has already worked. But if we hope to see something original and news, we should realistically be prepared for the failed attempt.
More to to the point, we should not take the product of the failure to accomplish a goal as the intended goal itself. Artists do not set out to create bad art. It seems unlikely that an artist like Luc Bondy, who despite his relative obscurity in the United States, has been directing in the theater and the opera house for over 30 years, should continue in such a career if all he has to offer is shock value and disrespect. This is like a man who hates buildings dedicating his life to architecture; it just doesn’t make sense.
Similarly, even so reviled (by me, I mean) a singer as Renée Fleming surely doesn’t deliberately set out to annoy me or Bellini or Lerner and Loewe. Her conscious goal must surely be to sing expressively.
What is possible is for an artist to have poor taste, or for his talent to fail him when presented with a task that baffles him, or for that artist’s work simply not to appeal to a certain segment of the audience. But for some reason there seems to be a divide in the perception of the seriousness of creative artists like composers, as opposed to recreative artists, like singers or the dreaded stage directors. There are plenty of music lovers who, for whatever reasons, profess to detest the music of Wagner, and perhaps an equal group who cannot abide Puccini. But how many people say, “Wagner was deliberately smearing mud on music” or “Puccini had no talent, so he resorted to shock effects?”
Well, to tell the truth, out there on the interwebs you could probably find a few people who would endorse both these statements and more, but the only reaction I can offer to them is pity, because in their bitterness and prejudice they are missing out on some magnificent music. For the the larger group here and elsewhere who are ready, even eager, to condemn the work of an artist as “trash” sight unseen, again I can only feel pity, alloyed perhaps with a tinge of hope that one day they might have the scales fall from their eyes.
Though, admittedly, it’s perhaps harder to see good intentions when they’re not very well executed.
hi cieca – haven’t seen the Tosca, will see it Oct. 6.
absolutely, there should be experimentation. but I think it is naive to expect “experimentation” at the Met… Experimentation, as a term, has always struck me as meaning, essentially, that the director does not entirely know what the result will look like, nor whether his ideas will work. An “experimental” staging is a “workshop” piece.
At the Met there are such high stakes (leave alone even for a moment that this was an opening night Gala!). Should we not know what we are getting, and whether we like it?
Bondy is an experienced, nay benighted, European art-house director and should be capable of delivering his most impressive and engaging product under these circumstances. Did he?
As I often say in the comment field of your lovely Blog, It’s not about whether something experiments or not, whether it’s sparse or modern or abstract or literal – for me, it comes down to “Was there interesting Personenregie?”, “Were the roles well cast?”, “Did the staging convey something both congruous to the meaning of the piece AND challenge our thoughts on it?”.
Every generation could make their own “Traditional” staging of Tosca (ie: Candelstick=Candlestick etc) and every one would look different. A grand, expensive, literal Zefirelli production would STILL have to be remade after 25 years because it just. Looks. So. 80s. And there will always be a Cher Public to boo when you change it, because that’s how opera audiences are.
squirrel wrote: “Was there interesting Personenregie?”, “Were the roles well cast?”
Looking for info: do the directors choose the cast, or are they handed them?
Cruz-
we’re talking about ideals here. the success of a production largely depends on casting. these things matter. No, directors do not choose the cast (assuming your question is in earnest)
ALTO
You’re right. A “Hidebound Conservatism” is kind of like “Vast Right Wing Conspiracy” isn’t it?
And I agree wholeheartedly that we are all too often given a choice between “Traditional” and “Whatever anyone wants to slop onto the stage”. I am no arch-conservative, and yet I fear that we are cowed into accepting any non-traditional enactment of an opera simply by peer pressure from the media and marketing goons.
squirrel: my question was absolutely made in earnest. I know next to nothing about the inner workings of the opera house (although I did just pick up the Gatti-Casazza autobio from the library for some behind-the-scenes history). I do know that singers are often contracted years in advance, but I didn’t know about whether the directors and the singers were a package deal.
Thanks.
Oh, I thought you meant it sarcastically – no harm done! Sorry.
Indeed, conductors and directors and singers are hired by Peter Gelbs and forced together against their will. Which is a big problem. And that’s putting it very, very mildly.
That would explain why some of the singers (as reports went) seemed uncomfortable in the production. They simply might not have bought into the concept …
squirrel,
I think just about any new production is an experiment, to some degree. Even if the Met specialized in recreating successful productions from other (presumably smaller) houses, it would still be experimenting, because things that work in one house on one stage with one cast might not work on another. It’s all a question of degree.
But more importantly, every production has a risk of failure, nobody can be sure what they’re getting. Having big bucks to spend on the production doesn’t solve anything. History is riddled with stupidly expensive train wrecks in all fields of endeavor (look at, say, Hollywood).
It seems to me that the only way for the Met to avoid the occasional flop is to offer only concert performances. Obviously it will never be the venue for off-the-wall things like the Wooster La Didone from last season, but to say that it shouldn’t take risks at all is tantamount to demanding only insipid work.
Zimmerman”s La Sonnambula has been frequently cited as a recent FIASCO but I seem to recall La Dessay insisting that the production not be conventional, to the point of refusing to participate. I believe she had much to do with this diasaster, but I have seen no reference to her co-conspirator role.
Veloce- that’s because any talk of Dessay’s involvement in the process would have been hearsay. The buck stops with a director, and it’s the director’s name on the production.
Nobody who wasn’t in the rehearsal room can do anything more than speculate on how much influence any individual cast member had over what eventually appeared on stage.
Plus, did you read this place when ‘Sonnambula’ was on? Dessay came in for just as much as a kicking as Zimmermann did.