Capitalism is the Turnage's best hope | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's Note: This article originally appeared in the Beaufort Observer.

    The renovated Turnage Theater in downtown Washington is bankrupt. The building in in foreclosure. The issue of whether the Washington City Council should bailout the Turnage is on Monday night's (10-6-12) agenda, although it appears that the discussion will be in secret.

    Perhaps as an omen, there was a piece in the Wall Street Journal Friday (10-5-12) by Camille Pagila, who is an art teacher, entitled How capitalism can save art. We would commend it to the City Council as they consider whether to bailout the Turnage. The piece is not a "how-to save the arts" as much as it is a look by an insider at why some of the arts are not self-supporting.

    Does art have a future? Performance genres like opera, theater, music and dance are thriving all over the world, but the visual arts have been in slow decline for nearly 40 years. No major figure of profound influence has emerged in painting or sculpture since the waning of Pop Art and the birth of Minimalism in the early 1970s.

    Yet work of bold originality and stunning beauty continues to be done in architecture, a frankly commercial field. Outstanding examples are Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain, Rem Koolhaas's CCTV headquarters in Beijing and Zaha Hadid's London Aquatic Center for the 2012 Summer Olympics.

    What has sapped artistic creativity and innovation in the arts? Two major causes can be identified, one relating to an expansion of form and the other to a contraction of ideology.

    Painting was the prestige genre in the fine arts from the Renaissance on. But painting was dethroned by the brash multimedia revolution of the 1960s and '70s. Permanence faded as a goal of art-making.

    But there is a larger question: What do contemporary artists have to say, and to whom are they saying it? Unfortunately, too many artists have lost touch with the general audience and have retreated to an airless echo chamber. The art world, like humanities faculties, suffers from a monolithic political orthodoxy--an upper-middle-class liberalism far from the fiery anti-establishment leftism of the 1960s. (I am speaking as a libertarian Democrat who voted for Barack Obama in 2008.)

    Today's blasé liberal secularism also departs from the respectful exploration of world religions that characterized the 1960s. Artists can now win attention by imitating once-risky shock gestures of sexual exhibitionism or sacrilege. This trend began over two decades ago with Andres Serrano's "Piss Christ," a photograph of a plastic crucifix in a jar of the artist's urine, and was typified more recently by Cosimo Cavallaro's "My Sweet Lord," a life-size nude statue of the crucified Christ sculpted from chocolate, intended for a street-level gallery window in Manhattan during Holy Week. However, museums and galleries would never tolerate equally satirical treatment of Judaism or Islam.

    It's high time for the art world to admit that the avant-garde is dead. It was killed by my hero, Andy Warhol, who incorporated into his art all the gaudy commercial imagery of capitalism (like Campbell's soup cans) that most artists had stubbornly scorned.

    The vulnerability of students and faculty alike to factitious theory about the arts is in large part due to the bourgeois drift of the last half century. Our woefully shrunken industrial base means that today's college-bound young people rarely have direct contact any longer with the manual trades, which share skills, methods and materials with artistic workmanship.

    Warhol, for example, grew up in industrial Pittsburgh and borrowed the commercial process of silk-screening for his art-making at the Factory, as he called his New York studio. With the shift of manufacturing overseas, an overwhelming number of America's old factory cities and towns have lost businesses and population and are struggling to stave off disrepair. That is certainly true of my birthplace, the once-bustling upstate town of Endicott, N.Y., to which my family immigrated to work in the now-vanished shoe factories. Manual labor was both a norm and an ideal in that era, when tools, machinery and industrial supplies dominated daily life.

    For the arts to revive in the U.S., young artists must be rescued from their sanitized middle-class backgrounds. We need a revalorization of the trades that would allow students to enter those fields without social prejudice (which often emanates from parents eager for the false cachet of an Ivy League sticker on the car). Among my students at art schools, for example, have been virtuoso woodworkers who were already earning income as craft furniture-makers. Artists should learn to see themselves as entrepreneurs.

    Creativity is in fact flourishing untrammeled in the applied arts, above all industrial design. Over the past 20 years, I have noticed that the most flexible, dynamic, inquisitive minds among my students have been industrial design majors. Industrial designers are bracingly free of ideology and cant. The industrial designer is trained to be a clear-eyed observer of the commercial world--which, like it or not, is modern reality.

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Susan Passmore (left) and Caroline Brooks (right) doing their part to effect the perfect harmony that is the Good Lovelies: Above. The Good Lovelies are featured in an 8 part series celebrating the Turnage Theater in its brief run.     photos by Stan Deatherage
    Commentary

    Let's settle one issue immediately, and if you don't accept this proposition there in no need for you to read any further.

    The fact that the Turnage did not succeed is not because the "people" of Beaufort County do not support the arts. They do. They just don't support the kind of art the Turnage offered. The Turnage, and its genre, are based on filling seats. The money in art these days goes to venues that host more people in one concert than the Turnage hosted all year. And people, many from Beaufort County, pay more for that one concert than those who went to the Turnage for every performance did in a year. The money is there. It is here in Beaufort County. Even in an economic recession. And if you add in what is spent on cable and satellite you begin to see what the problem really is. It is the demand that is not there for the Turnage. Factor in the money spent by people in Beaufort County on iPods, ITunes etc. and it should be obvious to anyone that our folks "support art." Just not Turnage-type art.

    The reality is the Turnage will never be economically self-sufficient any more than the indoor swimming pool will be. Good entertainers cost money. You divide the costs by the number of seats and that tells you how much you must charge for the tickets. And that produces a prohibitive price in most cases.

    We think having the Turnage operating downtown is a great idea. Beyond that example, we think the arts in general contribute to the quality of life in any community. We hope the Turnage will survive and thrive.

    The question is not whether it is a worthy endeavor, but rather who shall pay for it.

    We will predict this: If the City buys the building and even if it rents it to a non-profit for a $1 a year, it will not break even. And thus it will become a growing burden on the taxpayers. It is highly unlikely the Turnage will ever be a financially viable venture. The numbers are not there. Washington, with slightly over ten thousand people and Beaufort County with a little more than 50,000 is simply not large enough to support a big operating budget for any venue. The seating capacity of the Turnage is not sufficient to create a critical mass of paying customers that will support the cost of bringing in performances that would pay the bills. The per-ticket cost was too high compared to the other competing demands on local families' dollars. And all the hype notwithstanding, the Turnage will not be a sufficient destination to produce sufficient revenue. If it ever were to achieve that attractiveness then privately owned venues will supplant its efforts. That is true simple because of the seating capacity of the Turnage. Thus, the Turnage will have to be supplemented by revenue from sources other than ticket and concession sales and advertising. It's just that simple. The business model will not work to allow the Turnage to be self-sufficient.

    And it should be noted that we are not suggesting that Beaufort County is too "poor" for the people to be able to pay the ticket prices that would be necessary to sustain the operation. If anyone doubts that just take a look at some of the marinas and watch Havens Garden launching ramp any weekend. An abundance of people have spent tens of thousands of dollars of discretionary income for recreation. And ditto what the public in general spends on sports. They just won't spend comparable amounts on community-based arts.

    And on this pint we might add, the Turnage supporters would do well to abandon this farce that the productions there attract substantial income for other businesses in town. There is not one iota of solid data to support that, and if one wants to use anecdotal evidence there is more that the Turnage hurts local business more than it helps. It sucks much of the money that is spent on tickets out of the community and coincidental sales at other businesses that would not have happened had it not been for a production at the Turnage are simply not sufficient to amount to a tooted horn.

    In such instances it is automatic for some to turn to the police power of the state to confiscate enough from the taxpayers to do what those who favor the enterprise are not willing to do from their own pockets. That will be seen Monday night.

    The Council must resist such raids on the people's treasury.

    We'll spare you the litany of how hard some people in Beaufort County and the City of Washington are having it now, just to make ends meet. The absolute fact is that it is morally wrong to use the threat of foreclosure on property owners to raise money for non-essential government services. And that is what the levying of taxes under the police power of the state is. It is morally wrong because it is the essence of theft by force. It must be resisted.

    The Turnage is one of the best examples we've seen in years for why government should not use confiscated taxes to support that which its people will not support on their own volition. It simply will not be successful. Alternatively, what should be done is to allow the Turnage to be bought by private enterprise and then provide those entrepreneurs with the flexibility to make it work. Enterprising private enterprise is the only way to save the Turnage. If indeed it can be saved.