Terminally Ill Arts Orgs Get Lingering Death Prolonged By Dumb Rich Patron
The NJ Reports:
Five of Delaware’s largest arts organizations have launched a campaign to raise $12 million in three years, money they say will secure their immediate future.
The Delaware Art Museum, Delaware Symphony, Delaware Theatre Company, Opera Delaware and The Grand already have their first pledges: Tatiana Brandt Copeland and Gerret van S. Copeland of Wilmington each has promised $1 million to the campaign, called Arts for Delaware’s Future.
Representatives of the Wilmington nonprofit groups came together in secret early last year at Tatiana Copeland’s invitation. Copeland, an accountant, is a member of several arts boards and had become alarmed by the financial states of the organizations she most treasures.
Arts for Delaware’s Future (AFDF) will divide among its organizations the money it raises. The exact distribution hasn’t yet been established, but members said it likely would be based on a combination of need, urgency and budget size.
The thing is, nobody needs Opera, and the people who kind of like Opera can go to NY or Paris to get good Opera. There is no reason for Delaware to have an Opera company. None.
Regional Opera companies and Symphonies are dead. Let them die already. Pull the plug.
The only way theaters can avoid the same fate is to generate some earned income. If they can’t get paying customers interested in what they are doing then they need to hang it up.
To paraphrase the comic book guy . . . most ignorant post ever!
an opera lover eh?
Feh!
This is a dumb post. Is it the Copeland name, Jase? I mean, I agree about the Opera and the Symphany ain’t my bag but the museums and the theatre are another story.
MBNA was their sugar daddy. MBNA also lead the trend for the arts to garner charity monies from agencies that are traditionally social service charities like United Way of Delaware. Not a good thing, especially in these recessionary times, to squeeze pennies from the hands of destitute children in order to serve the elites’ sensibilities.
It isn’t Copeland. It is the fact that putting money into Opera or Symphony is an afront to reality. I’m a realist.
The only folks still interested in these dead artforms are drawing a paycheck and that check is based on keeping up the illusion that the patient still has a pulse.
If any rich dummies want to flush thier cash that is fine with me, but I would hope they would try to find some more worthy arts projects befor investing in these evolutionary dead ends.
I suppose that there are some slobs who consider rap to be music that soothes the soul.
Those who worship the trendy and eschew the classics may betray a mindlessness that is also reflected in their politics.
I (partially) remember some words by William F. Buckley when some radical student referred to W. S. Bach as ‘an old dead punk’. To wit: “The very least of his cantatas have brought more joy to the human spirit than all of your black student unions.”
Buckley may not be infallible but he is on target with that one.
Perhaps a disconnect from true beauty in the arts may be a factor in societal decline.
What a jackass you are, Art Downs.
ditto Mr. Matthews.
What Art is missing is that the parochial little state we live in can’t afford these high end arts unless the elite fully fund them. Originally, Uncle duPie WAS the arts’ source of funds. The great age of stockholder greed took that off of the table. Corporate dollars must go directly to the bottom line.
Art, if you want the real Lowest Common Denominator, deary, look to Reagan’s policies that began the downward spiral of corporate loyalty to anything but cash.
You snobbily conflate liberal politics with societal decline. I say look further to the votes you have been casting for class warfare and greedy maximized returns that globalization threatens to take the US into hellish depths of impoverishment.
“The only way theaters can avoid the same fate is to generate some earned income. If they can’t get paying customers interested in what they are doing then they need to hang it up.”
Wow! I go away for a while and come back to find Jacey Boy espousing conservative principles. There may be hope for you all yet.
Hey Jason, I gotta differ with you on this one. The Arts, including the symphony and opera, enrich our community in ways that nothing else does. I don’t want to have to go to Philadelphia or New York to enjoy a couple of hours of pure escape from worldly woes. I prefer to have my spirits lifted right here in Wilmington. Especially if I can do so with money from rich Republicans. That’s money they aren’t pouring into think tanks designed to keep them getting richer and the poor getting poorer. They so rarely share because, as we all know, everything should belong to them because they are so superior. If, just once, they want to contribute something to the community let’s cheer them on.
History has repeatedly proven that when culture (as represented by the arts ) declines, civilization (as manifested by the economy and social order) declines if not degenerates. For a deeper discussion, read Ostwald Spengler :
“Untergang des Abendlandes” ( “Decline of the West”) if you have the guts, the time and other requisite factors.
Also, classical music more closely corresponds to natural body rythms such as heart beat and brain wave patterns and is ,therefore, intrinsicly biologically harmonic. There are measurable health and intellectual developmental benefits to classical music. Try writing a research paper with any of the more modern biologically disharmonic forms playing in the background and then switch to Bach or Mozart. But, then again, most of us don’t have this problem, ab initio. Q.E.D.
In summation, anyone who would “pull the plug” on Delaware’s fine arts deserves to live in NJ. How ignorant does it get ??? Even chickens have a better sense of music. Egg production
increases when classical music is played in hen houses. Conversely, subjection to more modern musical forms may cause a decline in egg production in direct proportion to biological disharmony. [ The experiment is duplicated easily enough and I pity the birds in the control group.]
It seems that reverse evolution is once again raising its ugly head.
Devolution was predicted by H. G. Wells with the Morlochs eating the Eloi.
Music has many elements and the one of mere syncopation demands the least intellectial input from the performer or the listener.
There has always been a greater audience for the gaudy than for the elegant in every aspect of human activity. But what endures? How many ‘hit songs’ of the 1950’s still have value other than nostalgia?
A look at the Schwann catalog has pages of entries for Bach and Mozart and the number seems to grow. There is a difference between a tunesmith and a composer and many a modern ‘composer’ had created a hit by re-packaging a classical work.
Hollywood is famous for this. How many knew that the dramatic musical theme for ‘2001’ was verbatim Richard Strauss ‘Also sprach Zarathustra’? “A Clockwork Orange” used all classical works.
Some would do well to broaden their cultural horizons. It even transcends ideology.
That’s money they aren’t pouring into think tanks designed to keep them getting richer and the poor getting poorer.
That’s probably the best argument in favor of Opera/Symphony I’ve ever heard.
And yet I don’t see these arts orgs havingmuch of a future no matter how much money is pumped in. Thier audiences are dying and the efforts to build younger audiences are cringe inducing.
It all kind of reminds me of the DE GOP. No marketing vision beyond “same old same old”, no relevant selling proposition, no future.
I have no idea what you are trying to say.
And yet I don’t see these arts orgs havingmuch of a future no matter how much money is pumped in. Thier audiences are dying and the efforts to build younger audiences are cringe inducing.
This is pretty much the history of the “higher” cultural arts — they’ve always depended upon the largess of rich patrons. And somehow the arts are always dying, yet the Metroplolitan Opera is able to get spectacularly filmed versions of some of their performances into the multiplexes (if you haven’t seen these, they are beautiful), and, quite under the radar, one of the true growth areas for CDs is found at niche classical music houses.
These groups are not dead because their art is not dead. As for their outreach to younger audiences — well, they are, unfortunately almost the sole venue for teaching and exposure since both parents and schools have largely abandoned the project.
My complaint about opera is the same complaint my parents had about the lyrics of rock & roll: I can’t understand a damn thing they are saying.
My suspicion is most of hotties totties who support opera don’t understand it either. But it’s socially important to make everyone think they do.
The irony here is that we find a libertarian thought emerging at Delawareliberal–let the arts die if they can’t find a private sector patron–and the double irony is that I, as a Libertarian, don’t agree with it.
Taken to the full degree, Jason’s argument–“If they can’t get paying customers interested in what they are doing then they need to hang it up,” is an argument for eliminating the National Endowment for the Arts and any other state subsidies for the arts. Such an positions also arguably includes PBS–damn it if it can’t sell commercials.
Cassandra points out another historical truism: “This is pretty much the history of the “higher” cultural arts — they’ve always depended upon the largess of rich patrons. ” You’re right–no Medici patrons and no Sistine Chapel.
Then Jason chimes in with, “Thier audiences are dying and the efforts to build younger audiences are cringe inducing.” Partly, Jason, they are cringe-inducing because the drive to eliminate almost everything in public education that doesn’t directly contribute to creating entry level employees with basic skills for DuPont and Astra-Zeneca (can we say Vision/Myopia 2015) has starved to death the arts and music programs in our public schools.
It’s really strange to see all the supporters of cultural diversity unwilling to support this form of cultural diversity, because (says Dana): “I can’t understand a damn thing they are saying.”
A lot of people couldn’t (and can’t) understand Picasso’s Guernica, either.
So we, as a society, have reached the point where we consign Mozart or Gilber & Sullivan to the dustbin? Well, at least at Delawareliberal we seem to have done so.
Here’s my point:
1) As long as we recognize a responsibility to provide public education for all American children, part of that education has to include the arts. For that to happen, there have to BE arts. As an English teacher in Dover once put it to a DuPont exec, who told him that “kids could get those artsy things later in life, right now they need math,”: “science and math without the arts may give you good corporate worker bees–they also give you a society that can produce Dachau.”
2) The elimination of the so-called “classical arts” leaves American culture totally at the mercy of Rap [and its violent, anti-female messages], Pop [vacuous and sung by real role models for your children], and Country [which I’m personally OK with, but I bet a lot of you don’t like the guns, the trucks, and Jesus who keeps popping up].
Who knew? A bunch of laissez faire capitalists hanging out at Delawareliberal….
It’s a known fact that children grasp math through music and art.
The irony here is that we find a libertarian thought emerging at Delawareliberal–let the arts die if they can’t find a private sector patron
I don’t think Jason was making a libertarian argument against public support of the arts. I think he was just (correctly) observing that Delaware does not need a symphony or an opera.
Thanks anon.
Also, classical music more closely corresponds to natural body rythms such as heart beat and brain wave patterns and is ,therefore, intrinsicly biologically harmonic.
*
Wolf, with a name like that I should guess how you have been trained. But I have a degree in brain and behavior and take exception to your statement. All music is potentially able to do what you claim is only provided by classical.
Also, classical music more closely corresponds to natural body rythms such as heart beat and brain wave patterns and is ,therefore, intrinsicly biologically harmonic.
*
Wolf, with a name like that I should guess how you have been trained. But I have a degree in brain and behavior and take exception to your statement. All music is potentially able to do what you claim is only provided by classical.
I agree with #17, no one here is saying that the high end arts aren’t great things to have.
I’d much prefer to see any public money put into the public schools music programs, bands and chorus.
I don’t think Jason intended to make a libertarian statement, either.
Which is why I found it interesting.
Read Jason’s own comment rescue for his argument that certain “high arts,”–especially classical music and opera–should simply be allowed to die because he doesn’t like them.
There Steve Newton goes again:
“It’s really strange to see all the supporters of cultural diversity unwilling to support this form of cultural diversity, because (says Dana): “I can’t understand a damn thing they are saying.”
Now where in my statement above did I say that I wanted to see opera die in Delaware? I don’t like it, and I don’t want to go hear one in Delaware or anywhere. I don’t like a lot of things that I believe people who do like them should have every right to see and participate in.
Hell, I don’t like the Libertarian Party and probably many of things it stands for this week, but if someone tried to outlaw it in DE, I’d stand next to Steve Newton w/ my protest sign resisting the crime.
Dana,
You’re right–I over-extended in my quotation of you, and I apologize. (Not a chance for you, Jason.)
But you have to admit that it was almost too good an opportunity to pass up.
It’s interesting that the Buccini-Pollin Group and other earth grabbing developers don’t make generous contributions to the arts…….oh, that’s right, I forgot they’re only here for what they can take away.
I could take a little pity on the artsy-fartsy group if it wasn’t so obvious they are not bellying up to the bar to do their own fund raising……….their product (arts) and their fundraising (highly expensive pay to play tickets) exclude the masses reducing the number of folks willing to support it.
There are some ‘hard core’ Libertarians who may well be total believers in social Darwinism.
Libertarian beliefs provide guideposts and not a recipe book.
Not all capitalism is a zero sum game and no economic system would be both pure and effective. There is a role for safety nets but it takes judgement to keep them from degenerating into attractive hammocks.