- What is the responsibility of the artist?
- What socio-cultural relevance does art have, outside of pure entertainment value?
- What, if anything, can art truly accomplish?
- Is theater dead, and what can we do to revive it? Is it even possible?
The responsibility of the artist in accordance to what? Society? Himself/herself? That is a clear distinction that needs some clarification. I will answer the question in terms of Society, as I'm not sure anyone can really place a quantifiable or classifiable answer on the responsibility one has to oneself.
If an artist is going to ask anything of society, then there is an inherent responsibility of the artist to provide something of net worth to society. If you want society to pay you, to provide housing, stipend, space, whatnot and whathaveyou, then there has to be a return on the investment of society. It is at that moment that the masturbatory action of art (making art purely for the self with no regard to the impact or involvement of society as audience) becomes puerile and wasteful. And in my opinion, the more an artist requests from society, the more he/she is required to provide, and the more relevance to societal questions the art needs to have.
Okay, Question two. Socio-cultural relevance. Big words. I'm almost intimidated, but I won't allow my colloquial self to go down without a fight. I think there is an intrinsic value to art, in a socio-cultural manner, and I would argue that to be communication. There is a reason that metaphors exist, and is it ridiculous to postulate that art is the greatest sense of the metaphor? In a secondary sense, I would also argue that art has a great capacity to initiate thought and stimulate feelings/emotions. As far as entertainment goes, I feel there is an implicit value to entertaining art because it allows art to encapsulate a larger audience and introduce them to your way of thinking. A way to preach beyond the choir, is perhaps the best way to say what I'm trying to say. Especially in this contemporary age, where there are so many methods of artistic delivery which have espoused a pure entertainment value approach, I think Art (with a capital A) tries to eliminate any sense of "entertainment" value in order to further distance Art from (for lack of a better word) crass commercialism masquerading as art.
I think the most that one can hope for art, alone, to accomplish is a inciting a different mindset. Art cannot change the word, but it can catalyze people into changing something.
Theatre isn't dead. Theatre is just stupid right now. And to revive it, we need to treat it like theatre. We need to see why it is theatre, and what reason the shows we want to put on are put on in the theater and not in the cinema, or not as a painting. We need to understand the wide variety of medium available and understand that to ignore the power of theatre, the tools of theatre causes it to go unused and rot. For the past hundred and twenty years, we have seen realism and proto-realism and pseudo-realism completely dominate American Theatre, and until that begins to relent in some way, we won't see anything but more of the same, and that more of the same is the death of theatre. Theatre lives on newness and innovation, and we've forgotten that. Also, contemporary theatre is like Velveeta Cheese. We've been feeding our audiences this bland processed chemical crap for so long, they don't know what else to do expect, and blanche when given actual cheese. We need to educate our audiences, and do it in a way that doesn't penalize them. We need to attract people to theatre because it's theatre, not admonish them. This, in a sense, ties into the ideas above about needing to provide entertaining theatre. There has to be a hook, you know?
Well, there are my answers for today. I'm going to reserve full right to completely change my mind next week, but for now, that's what I believe.
