The Currents of Change : In Stormy Times, the Arts Provide Escape--and a Sounding Board

The dark clouds of recession and war overhang the arts this holiday season, as they overshadow everything else in our society. More than ever, the arts in 1991 are likely to be divided in their response to events--toward providing escapism from the grim pressures of the day and, on the other hand, toward a thoughtful and sometimes angry engagement with those pressures.

Movies

The great suspense story in Hollywood is what effect, if any, foreign ownership of four major studios will have. Matsushita will be taking over Universal; Giancarlo Parretti (who has already bought an Italian restaurant here in Los Angeles to be sure of proper nourishment) is at last in firm charge of MGM-Pathe; and Sony at Columbia and Rupert Murdoch at Fox are already well settled in.

Matsushita has insisted it has no wish to rock an already profitable boat, and there are no signs that the product mixture differs from before at Columbia or Fox. Nevertheless, there is anxiety in the creative community over film projects that might not get made because they are insufficiently international in appeal, generally meaning they may be too domestic in theme or heavier on talk than wordless action.

On the other hand, the Japanese takeovers mean infusions of capital and a potential increase in production levels--good news for Hollywood. The possible downside of the new money is that it may temporarily disguise the fact that production costs are higher than ever and growing. The average negative cost of a studio film has gone beyond $20 million, and the costs of a blockbuster are double that or more. (Negative costs of “The Godfather Part III” are reported at $55 million, which suggests it will have to gross nearer to $200 million to recover its production and distribution costs.)

The blockbuster mentality appears likely to continue to dominate thinking at the major studios. To the independents and the mini-studios will fall the opportunity as well as the necessity to make the low-budget and off-trail films that are often among the year’s most interesting (like last year’s “My Left Foot”).

For the independents, the problem, apt to grow more severe if there is a rise in major studio output, is to find cinemas to play their products. Despite the rise in multiplex cinemas with their many choices, a significant number of key screens are again owned or dominated by the majors, as they were before the antitrust action of the early ‘50s.

Hollywood keeps on being full of surprises, finding new faces and new creative talents. The industry that gave us “Die Hard 2” also gave us “Awakenings.” “Terminator II” is in the works, and big-budget escapist fare will, as usual, dominate Hollywood’s output. But there will, also as usual, be a few surprises.

Television

The home screen is likely to move in both directions at once. It will as always be the prime relief, the escape from the deepening crisis in the economy and the world. But if Vietnam became what New Yorker critic Michael Arlen called “the living room war,” the conflict in the Middle East could, given the technological advances of the last two decades, become an even more close-in experience for home viewers. The satellite could give a new war--presuming diplomacy cannot forestall it--an awesome immediacy.

The competition for viewers’ attention among the three major networks, Fox Broadcasting, the independents and the cable channels is certain to intensify. Cable News Network and C-SPAN have already been eating into the networks’ news audiences. With the percentage of cable-equipped homes growing daily, the loss of network viewers to arts and sports channels as well as news will continue.

Within the cable industry, there may well be some consolidation of channels as the competition heats up for ad dollars (likely to be fewer if the recession deepens) and for viewers willing to pay for additional non-basic channels. What is clear is that the kind of alternative television once promised only by public TV is now a reality, here to stay in an almost dizzying array of options.

Theater

The theater, which has been “the fabulous invalid” as long as anyone can remember but keeps on outliving us all, unquestionably faces rough going in 1991. As fears of a recession are abroad in the society, expensive theater tickets must come to seem more and more a luxury. The adventurous and admirable Los Angeles Theatre Center, in financial difficulty from the moment of its birth, faces extremely hard going in the new year.

The abbreviated run of a new production of “A Chorus Line” at the Las Palmas Theatre hinted of increased consumer resistance to an honored revival, just as the disappointing turnout for “My Children! My Africa!” in its Los Angeles run suggested that enthusiastic reviews of a new work are not enough.

Yet, there was evidence of great vitality in the local theater scene, from the experimental readings at the Mark Taper’s Itchey Foot wing to the South Coast Rep and the always excellent La Jolla Playhouse.

A. B. (Pete) Gurney’s “Love Letters,” its cast of two changing weekly, has proved a durable hit at the Beverly Canon Theatre, suggesting that the presence of stars in a bittersweet romantic vehicle offers protection from the economic weathers outside.

The new year begins with a three-month reprise by Michael Crawford of the title role he created in “Phantom of the Opera,” which will almost surely be once again the toughest ticket in town.

Changes in artistic direction at the Los Angeles Civic Light Opera and at the Pasadena Playhouse (where Susan Dietz resigned after three very productive years, and her replacement is not yet named) will create their own kind of suspense.

Local censorship, inspired by the furor at the National Endowment for the Arts and contemplated by timid city fathers under pressure from a handful of complainants, made trouble for some venues, including the Grove Shakespeare Festival in Garden Grove. But those troubles pale before the larger, de facto censorship of insufficient attendance and financial support. The empty seat is a wicked censor, and in 1991 could be the censor most to be feared.

Music

Some traditional musical bastions face potential transformations over the next year through changes in leadership. The fresh winds blowing through the Los Angeles Philharmonic on the appointment of Esa-Pekka Salonen as permanent conductor have already received wide attention. And elsewhere Claudio Abbado takes over at the Berlin Philharmonic, Kurt Masur replaces Zubin Mehta at the New York Philharmonic, Wolfgang Sawallisch will become conductor at the Philadelphia Orchestra in succession to Riccardo Muti and Gerard Mortier has been appointed heir to the late Herbert von Karajan at the Salzburg Festival.

As to what will be played and how, both contemporary and traditional music will continue to show notable new energy and marked listener support. The trend in the older repertoire is authenticity--period instruments and as-written orchestra sizes for music up to and including Brahms and Bruckner. At the other end of the chronological scale, listener-friendly neo-romantics, post-Minimalists and fusion eclectics will vie for attention.

The possibility of recession-pinched fall-offs in donations as well as paying customers is a worry for all music enterprises, from chamber to dance.

Pop Music

The recession may well dent attendance at expensive concerts. On the other hand, there is apt to be an increased trend toward home entertainment, which bodes well for sales of CDs, cassettes, the vanishing LP and for viewership of the razzle-dazzle of MTV.

Economics aside, the pop music world seems to be heading in two somewhat contradictory directions. There is a good deal of what can be called cross-culturalization going on, as in rap music’s full entry into the mainstream pop world via such performers as Vanilla Ice and M. C. Hammer.

At a more senior level there are the pan-global musical explorations of Paul Simon, Peter Gabriel and David Byrne. Both trends are relatively tame, but they do open the door for more ambitious listeners to seek out the angrier raps and the less homogenized ethnic music.

Seeking the safe, tame and familiar is the motivation for another trend in pop music: The segregation of tastes. Moderately serious music fans once had eclectic tastes and were eager to listen to almost anything. Now radio stations stick tight to a formatted taste and style, and fans of one brand of music are unlikely to hear the hits in another style only a few dial numbers away.

The segregation also includes a widening generation gap. Many of today’s parents grew up with rock ‘n’ roll and have little trouble relating to their children’s fondness for New Kids on the Block or comparably traditionalist rock sounds. Nevertheless the parents cling to the music of their own generation, convinced that nothing good has happened since the Supremes, the Animals, the Byrds or, surely, the Beatles. Thus the proliferation of radio stations specializing in “golden oldies” and the 1967 rock hit parade.

Technology is also having a major effect on the pop scene (including the lip-sync scandal of Milli Vanilli). Sampling and synthesizers have removed the creation of pop music from the live performance stage or a new group’s garage to the high-tech studio. Thus the marketing of the music has little to do with actual performance (which may be largely pantomime) and more with image.

Jazz

In current jazz, there is a remarkable sort of generation closure visible and audible, with a senior generation of players and an extraordinary infusion of young players best symbolized by the Marsalis brothers. Both sets are giving jazz a vitality and, perhaps even more significantly, a visibility and outreach it has lacked in recent years.

Jazz, indeed, has seemed as much an invalid as the theater, and not necessarily a fabulous one, either. At times, it had appeared that more than Louis Armstrong died with him. Jazz was not much seen or heard on television, and jazz clubs were an imperiled species.

The millennium is not yet at hand, but the condition of jazz, thanks not least to the excitement engendered by the new young players, is stronger than it has been in several years. Compact disc technology, though the discs are still relatively expensive, has evoked a flood of reissues of classic recordings, from all of Bix Beiderbecke to the complete Commodore label.

Jazz parties and jazz cruises are becoming a major phenomenon. Some of the surviving senior jazzmen--the likes of Flip Phillips, Bob Haggart and Milt Hinton among several others--can tour almost continually here and abroad (where American jazz has always been more honored than at home). New jazz venues are opening in Los Angeles and elsewhere, and hanging on.

The good news for jazz is not only the emergence of new players, like Howard Alden, a wizard guitarist only now in his 30s, but also of young audiences. For a time, pop-rock had a stranglehold on young listeners, leaving jazz to an audience that was growing old along with the performers. Jazz, over its wide range from traditional to Condonesque mainstream to fusion and beyond, is finding new consumers in a young generation, as it had to do to stay viable. The fusion of young and older, onstage and offstage, is likely to continue in the new year.

Art

The sizzle appears to have fizzled selectively on those skyrocketing prices for acknowledged masterpieces of art, which may have peaked with Van Gogh’s “Irises.” Several important late-year offerings failed to achieve their reserve prices and were withdrawn. But the market has not so much collapsed as grown more choosy.

As to what the artists and the galleries are doing (and will go on doing), landscapes, portraits and abstractions continue to be made and shown in large numbers. But there is more importantly a continuing and significant increase in the political and social content of art (fueled rather than extinguished by the NEA flap about art standards and practices).

Museumgoer tastes tend toward the traditional, and the Walter Annenberg Impressionism collection packed ‘em in at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. More notable last year, however, and probably a precursor of things to come, were a flap in Little Tokyo about a Barbara Kruger mural on the Temporary Contemporary and the Santa Monica Museum of Art’s show of works by David Wojnarowicz, whose outspoken essay led John Frohnmayer to withdraw an NEA grant (temporarily) from Artists Space in New York. Guerrilla poster artist Robbie Conal’s show at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena also raised conservative hackles. Conal’s “Artificial Art Official” poster of Jesse Helms was one of the year’s most potent.

The controversies over the freedom and latitudes of artistic expression, which dominated the 1990 art news even beyond the high bids, are quite likely to resurface in 1991, in other settings but on the same lines.

A related theme that may be heard even more loudly in 1991 is the issue of multicultural representation in art institutions. In Los Angeles in 1990 the major attempt to redress past imbalances was UCLA’s Wight Art Gallery show “Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation.”

With multiculturalism comes an unresolved debate about quality. The traditionalists hold out for “standards,” while the disenfranchised argue that “quality” is a code word that translates as an excuse for excluding minorities. Some conciliators are talking about “cultural equity” instead of “quality.”

As Los Angeles itself becomes ever more multiethnic, the controversy over ethnic representation in public institutions will very likely heat up anew in 1991.

Contributing to this article were Times arts critics and writers Sylvie Drake, Daniel Cariaga, Steve Hochman, Leonard Feather and Suzanne Muchnic.