Less traveled by?
The road to creative justice – or simply creative integrity – begins with truthful self-assessment.
“Midnight Oil Collective is a creator-led arts investment, development, and production group. Exhausted with navigating the gatekeepers of institutional art making, we employ a democratic business model and a creator-centered development process to empower creators and ensure that the profits of their labor go back to the creators themselves, rather than to outside investors. Our creators work collaboratively—be it in theater, film, music, or academia—sparking conversations around their work while remaining true to their overall artistic visions. By engaging artists and supporting their diverse visions through to fruition, we will generate highly diverse, original art that resonates across broader audience spectrums, thus also creating economic value for the collective.”
Okay, so what the fuck does that all mean?
The premise at its core is as disturbingly simple as we are at ours: money rules the world. Because of how very obvious that is, to say that it shouldn’t comes off sounding more like naiveté than any real ethical conviction. It rules the world, so knowing that, let’s all go about the business of life and, if we wish, pretend that it doesn’t largely dictate how we behave, both from without and within… Many make no charade that their existence is not primarily about the amassing and maintenance of wealth. Their behaviors, if not their spoken opinions, suggest that life is for living and large amounts of money are required to live it “well.” Thus it would follow that significant portions of a well-lived life be spent acquiring the fortune to live it so. Of course, this existential idea is rife with nuance, but nonetheless reflected in all that we do. Money’s influence on human behavior isn’t something that can ever be dismissed. It can be denied, which tends to manifest as a means we employ of thinking better of ourselves, but the masquerade nearly never passes the smell test. Why don’t American oligarchs pay taxes when even a seventy or eighty percent tax rate would still leave them with the sort of wealth that is only an abstraction to nearly every other human being on the planet? Why do airlines stuff passengers into an ever-tighter coach class as if they are transporting cattle and yet continue to tell insultingly disingenuous fictions in their advertising about how much they care? Why is it cheaper in food insecure communities to purchase nominally nourishing poisons for one’s children at McDonalds than it is to shop for a nutritionally balanced diet, and why would a company that knows lives lie in the balance exploit that disparity? Sometimes the answers to such questions are more obvious than others, and they are all fairly easy to obfuscate in explanations of economics if that is one’s objective. There are endless examples of our money first mentality—I would almost say the money first physiology of humanity—these above being among some of the more obvious ones. The truth is there to be accepted or not and is shaded variously from individual to individual. But should we really ultimately be arguing that, as a culture, we operate within any system of values that even approaches altruism? If any part of our primary drives had ever evolved or were evolving, we would have been doing things differently long ago. Avarice is a cocktail of equal parts survival instincts and ego, the lizard brain and the spirit’s human experience. We do money first.
So where sits criticism of cultural manifestations and innovations? Where is the line between acknowledging the power and beauty of human creativity imperative to cultural well being, and identifying where money—that is to say the feeding of someone’s wealth—is the most determinative factor with regard to which creative entities ever even get seen? While we must agree that the technology of the internet has brought valuable cultural up-leveling on countless fronts, we cannot miss the concomitant horrors it has seeded throughout American society, not only in its tendency to divide, but what have we become when the measure of a person’s worth is the number of followers on their social media accounts? And even when it is used for all that is of universal necessity—healthcare, education, connection—is it equitably accessible, or is that too always a matter of who owns the bandwidth and bases of distribution, and who can afford to buy it from them? Of course it is. So what do we say about the future for sale? What did we ever say about it?
Where art enters into this is always a dubious question. Art is an abstraction, and “good” art is an even more abstract abstraction. I prefer to think that any created thing that an individual finds aesthetically pleasing is art to that individual. But this definition makes “good” art so utterly subjective that the only way for a people as a whole—one whose cumulative driving impetus is to make money—to measure such a thing is by its monetary value. There evolves a focus on how to sell it and who will buy it. With this as the focus, creativity will always ultimately be conflated with productivity and fall prey to processes of streamlining production. Contrarily, contemplations on how to value the humanity in the myriad aspects of the creative process as a measure of the actual worth of what is created are relegated to the realm of philosophy and are never instituted as practice. On this last point, the idea of having any concern at all for creators themselves—Who has been afforded the opportunity to create, to learn to create, to embrace creation as a career path, or whose creative aspirations are at all relevant?—must seldom if ever enter into the equation if the measure of good art is only the money it can make. A Midnight Oil Collective colleague told me, “Good art tells the truth.” I like that, but truth seems mutable as well, particularly now. I suspect what she meant was that basic human truths are immutable, and that music, literature and visual art that can in one way or another vividly reflect them is good art. But ironically, I think the most basic of human truths, at least in the US, is the cultural inability to do any better than all that is described above. It is not an individual inability necessarily, but oddly cumulative. Meanwhile, artists of all sorts would love the wherewithal to think, work, create and thrive outside of the model that has kept the culture enslaved.
So let me talk about theater, since it is what I do, and is thus the sort of art that is most near to me. As discussed above, nothing in the American cultural manifestations and innovations of theater making is creatively just. Creatively just practices, from casting, to ensemble working, to caring for actors and other creative collaborators, to exploring forms of real creative equity are counter to every capitalist business model. Work that centers humanity, irrespective of the good that might come of it, is inconvenient to capitalism and cannot be embraced because it is an inefficient means to production. Clearly for the American capitalist model, the stories we tell with our art, and how we conspire to tell them, are not more important than the need for them to make us some money…
In working on Untitled Othello, it occurs to me ever more profoundly how the characters conspiring to tell the Othello story from within would be equally crippled in doing so if they were us conspiring to tell it from without. If Iago, whose prescription for living is “put money in thy purse,” were to be the white American theatre maker choosing as a staple of his season another recycling of Shakespeare’s flawed Othello, he would strive to find the most efficient way to box office profits. The question of whether or not the corners he cut resulted in a less relevant, less truthful story would be the least of his concerns. Iago is not a theater maker…but he is a profiteer. And aren’t Cassio and Roderigo as well? Isn’t even Desdemona, in her way, compelled by an inner drive for personal gain? And what will she overlook, ignore or rationalize away to achieve it?
Here is the shit… In order to explore how the characters in any truthful and revealing retelling of the tale of Shakespeare’s Othello are we, I have to push against what we are. I have to maintain awarenesses, considerations and compassions that are not my human nature. I have to strive for more time and thus more money, for collaborator parity, for diversity of collaborators thus inviting diversity of perspective. Good art being our reflected truth is both why we so need it and why it is so beyond our ability to make it. The characters in Othello can’t seem to manage to save themselves. Iago cannot suffer to contemplate the alternatives to his methods of self-service. Neither can we, apparently. As “a creator-led arts investment, development, and production group,” our striving for self-service is no less evident. The question to be pursued perpetual, if anything is to improve, is whom do we perceive as the self?
