Everybody dance now!
“It doesn’t fucking matter if he means it, because the dancers need to dance!”
No, that’s not, in fact, the refrain of the latest techno hit burning up the dancefloor, but rather society chronicler David Patrick Columbia, talking with Zachary Woolfe about “the web of money, power and ambiguous motives that has for a long time successfully convinced the very rich that it’s their duty” to support the arts. [The New York Observer]
Isn’t DPC’s comment roughly what Orson Welles says to Joseph Cotton in the Great Wheel in The Third Man? That the civilized achievement is what matters — the murder or crippling of small children (which is what Harry Lime is doing in the movie) or the murderous mayhem of the Renaissance despots who patronized Leonardo and Michelangelo (and the other Ninja turtles) or whatever smokescreen for his nefarious manipulations behind the smokescreen of charitable publicity may be going on while Mr. Koch’s munificence earns our chary thanks?
I would also point out to the careless DPC that Frick’s art purchases did very little for the artists, since Vermeer, Bronzino, Rembrandt, Boucher, Turner, Ingres, Holbein et al. were long, long, long dead when he bought their works. (The Whistlers and the Monet, I believe, are later acquisitions.) Still, undoubtedly WE benefit who could never afford a Vermeer be it ever so tiny. And that Otto Kahn and Caroline Astor did not inherit their positions at the Met — the Astors were not-very-old money who had to help build the Met to out-snub the Knickerbocker aristos at the Academy of Music, and the Kahns were Jewish bankers who bought their way in — he also, I believe, married the daughter of an even richer Jewish banker — but being Jews, of course, they had intellect and taste as well as money.
Was it Sills who said, “Art is the signature of civilization”?
In any case, this is an important matter to the future of opera. What happens when the generation after the current donors decides that opera isn’t important enough to spend their money on? How much exposure has Generation X had to classical music from their baby boomer parents to get them to at least try opera? It would be great for the rest of us is high society pressure keeps the money coming to opera, but what if it goes to hospitals, educational institutions, etc. instead? Worrisome.
What a world to live in! Having enough money to ensure the future of opera. This is my dreamiest of dreamy fantasies about opera, you know – winning that lottery ticket and giving all the money to give to the arts…