It’s been interesting to read think pieces about the crumbling of big gatekeepers of culture in our society. This opinion piece by Monica Byrne published on the Washington Post is one, and this post by Ted Gioia on his Substack, The Honest Broker, is another.1
While Byrne is writing about non-profit theater institutions and Gioia writes about larger “macroculture” institutions like major music labels, movie studios, and news outlets, a common thread running through their pieces is how the big institutions who have been gatekeepers of culture for a long time are now crumbling into obsolescence. Theaters have overextended themselves with massive capital investments and become top heavy. Music labels and movie studios prefer to play things safe rehashing the same old materials instead of investing in and rewarding creativity in new art. News outlets are having trouble adapting to a new world and keep turning to players from the old guard for answers that aren’t forthcoming.
Gioia points to examples of small creators thriving on new platforms and argues that this change is happening and indicative of consumers’ boredom with what the big players have been serving for a while now. Byrne argues that shifting away from the current non-profit institution model to funding artists directly is the answer to theater’s woes.
As someone who gets bored of old ideas and rehashes easily and prefers to seek out new ideas and fresh points of view, these arguments appeal to me. Back in 2014, I read David Byrne’s How Music Works, and his points encouraging more support for amateur musical performance rather than having everyone quietly sit in fancy concert halls listening to the pros play what’s been deemed high art really resonated with me. This seems like a related idea to what Monica Byrne and Gioia are writing about.
But when I shared that idea, broadened to include theater, with a much older colleague at work back in 2014, his response was that personally, “when I go to a performance, I only want to listen to or see the best.” There are a lot of assumptions contained in that statement about what is “the best” that I disagree with, but it also was a good illustration that people have different preferences and values.
So, back to the point about shifting to smaller creators, from “macroculture” to “microculture”, as Gioia calls it, I’d be curious to hear others’ thoughts.
I don’t know what things would look like after such big changes played out. Would it work to have a lot more direct funding of all sorts of creative professionals? I suppose it’s been gradually growing for years now in the comic books, visual arts, and board games spheres, with crowdfunding of projects. In a way, wasn’t the disaggregation of cable kind of like this, too? And that’s ended up with streaming services reaggregating. Though, that was just a different bundling of big gatekeepers rather than a disaggregation into small creators.
In any case, fascinated to see what happens.
What do you think?
I really appreciate Gioia’s writing about macro trends in culture and the entertainment sector and recommend his Substack.