The Knives Were Three

What do the arts, Lincoln Center, and over-tourism have in common? You're about to find out.

Photo credit: John B Arnold

For those of us who make our living with our pen, and are not otherwise supported by a spouse or a trust fund, it’s a Faustian bargain we strike between writing what we want to write versus writing for the market.

By that I mean following market trends in publishing (for a long time now, it’s been BIPOC and other marginalized voices, in which I cannot, by dint of race and sexual orientation, participate); before that, it was writing romance novels of varying “heat levels.” An Amish romance, for instance, might have some earnest hand-holding and a little kissing, no tongue. With a full-on erotic romance, you’re getting into 50 Shades territory.

Romance is what writers write when they actually want to sell books. That’s not to say other writers, a scant few of them at least, don’t successfully move units that are written in other genres. They do. But the time when a professional hack like Yours Truly here could eke out even a poor living writing romance is mostly over.

Case in point: An anthology I contributed to a few years ago featuring two name-brand authors—an anthology, mind you, that Publisher’s Weekly included on their list of “Top Six Summer Reads”—failed to net enough money to fold. I’m not exaggerating. The last royalty check I received was for $7.50.

Why making a living in the literary arts is now the cheap, tasteless tobacco one stuffs into a foolish pipedream is the subject of another Cappuccino, but accepting that truth led to my creative rebirth. Since what I wrote didn’t seem to matter anymore, I stopped writing for the market and started writing for me. Cappuccino is a byproduct of that new philosophy. So is the Mary Shelley/Claire Claremont/Percy Shelley/Lord Byron novel I’m working on.

George, Lord Byron, British Romantic poet: What an exhausting narcissist.

Do I think there’s a big commercial future for the Shelley book? Hell, no. For one, there isn’t any sex in it. But does that matter? I’m writing the novel my way. Instead of deferring to what I think “the market” wants, I’m doing what I want. Whether people read it or not remains to be seen, but I’m no longer defining my success by number of units sold. Instead, I’m sharing my vision of the Romantic poets and how their struggles (e.g., is polyamory a workable lifestyle choice or an elaborate Dangerous Liaisons-style head game?) are eerily similar to the ones we’re dealing with today. The idea of “How many people will read this?” has been replaced by, “Have I written something that imparts the strongest, most authentic flavor of myself?”

“Don't think about making art,” the late Andy Warhol once said, “Just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.”

This realization forced me to look not just at the publishing world, but the art world at large.

We’re doing this all wrong, by the way.

Here’s why.

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Long a bastion of high culture, New York City’s Lincoln Center (housing the Met Opera, the New York City Ballet, and the New York Philharmonic) may or may not be pulling out of a prolonged nosedive. In addition to ongoing renovations costing millions of dollars, in 2006, they put themselves at the mercy of Morgan Stanley and New York City Bank in a $73 million derivative swaps deal that permitted them to borrow against future earnings.

Then, of course, Covid happened.

In all four canonical gospels of the New Testament, Jesus smites the usurers. I sure wish somebody had smote Morgan Stanley. A repayment of that $73 million dollars had to be conjured up by issuing $140 million fixed-rate tax-exempt debt—at a premium—in order to refinance the bonds.

Photo credit: Rafael Leão

With that kind of financial pressure, it’s little wonder that Lincoln Center felt an urgent need to recreate itself. Their bread-and-butter subscription holders are old. So old, in fact, they’re dying off or moving to Florida. Henry Timms, until recently the president of Lincoln Center, summed it up this way: “The organization [will] need to appeal to a much broader, more diverse crowd to fulfill its mandate.” So, in 2021, he hired Shanta Thake as the Lincoln Center’s new artistic director. The mandate as she envisioned it? “Growing a Lincoln Center where all New Yorkers feel welcome no matter your background and where artists can shine and develop their craft in innovative and exciting new directions.”

Ms. Thake’s first order of business was moving a disco ball into the center’s plaza and organizing a “silent” dance party—participants paid money to clamp on a pair of headphones and dance to music only they could hear. The program was a dramatic pivot from a long-standing (and successful) program called Mostly Mozart to one now called the Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center, a far broader umbrella that includes pop, hip-hop, social events, and comedy.

But how exactly does this translate into butts in seats for Lincoln Center? A thousand venues across the city that actually specialize in hip-hop, pop, and comedy (in my opinion) do it better and more authentically than they do. To me, this kind of programming feels like propaganda, not art.

Photo credit: New York Times

But Lincoln Center’s nakedly ambitious attempt to appeal to the youth demographic betrays a woeful ignorance of what the youth demographic actually wants. Artistic Director Thake surely knows that, which is why she spearheaded an event called Symphony of Choice, where audience members downloaded an app and voted for musical pieces they wanted to hear in their entirety.

It’s the ultimate populist bid. Culture isn’t to be watched in marble mausoleums anymore, but in public parks and plazas. Culture has to be a participatory experience, a reflection of its audience. Young people don’t relate to dead white European composers, so they’re offered disco balls instead, “immersive” experiences, Instagrammable moments, and in one instance, “Cyboracle—the larger-than-life virtual avatar … Discover the history of the communities that have populated the land—from the original Indigenous people: the Lenape, to the diverse communities of San Juan Hill.”

But here’s a thought: Maybe paying the president of said institution $1.5 million a year is a mistake. Is there a better way to redistribute funds so the orchestral music Lincoln Center is most famous for isn’t shuffled off in favor of iPhone apps and disco balls?

Lincoln Center’s previous summer program, Mostly Mozart, was popular for a reason: The quality of its music. The institution itself decided which pieces audiences were going to hear. That’s because, populism aside, it’s the job of the artist—or in this case, the artistic institution—to introduce culture to the people, not the other way around. Slavering after the youth demographic means letting market forces shape the Center’s cultural narrative.

Scrubbing orchestral pieces from the summer program conveniently checks a lot of boxes: No more dead white European relics, no having to pay for an entire orchestra, lots and lots of irreproachable virtue-signaling inclusivity, and most importantly, the de-gentrification of an institution widely perceived as white and possibly racist.

The problem is how much window dressing is required to make this believable. Forty years of neoliberalism have allowed the market to shape our artistic culture. Forty years. And what the market didn’t destroy, social media finished off.

But the real coup of neoliberalism is how green-washing and DEI now hide the fact that obscene amounts of money are still going to same handful of white guys.

Former Lincoln Center president Henry Timms is merely one of them.

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Photo credit: Mark de Jong

That hoary old chestnut, “Follow the money” is never more apparent than in post-pandemic hypertourism. Europe has officially become a museum piece. Budget airlines fly in ravening hordes of tourists, Airbnb property owners suck them dry with hundred-dollar cleaning fees and other costly miscellany, and social media encourages them to flood the Internet with yet more selfies holding up the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

Photo credit: Andy Hay

Meanwhile, (mostly) foreign investors cram once-characteristic streets with tacky souvenir shops. Rome, Florence, and Milan are full of such abominations. New York is no exception. Every vacant property is snatched up and turned into a short-term rental, driving up prices in all city centers, and making it impossible for most of the locals to afford them.

Europe is pushing back. Barcelona erupted in anti-tourist protests this summer. Some protesters squirted water guns at the tourists themselves.

A healthy amount of tourism is usually welcomed, but unfortunately, it isn’t the locals who are prospering; it’s property owners, budget airlines, and tour operators. Money rises to the top in 2024. It rarely trickles to the bottom.

Eventually, Europe will be stripped of the very charm that makes it so irresistible. Trastevere in Rome and the neighborhood around the Trevi Fountain are two grim examples of what happens when you cater to tourists to the exclusion of locals. Instead of the scrumptious Italian trattorias that once populated the area, there are chain restaurants and tourist menus. Instead of quaint, locally-owned stores (shoe repair, dress making, cheese sellers, etc.), it’s all tchotchke shops and discount pizza-by-the-slice joints run by non-Italians.

Rightwing nationalists like Italy’s Prime Minister Georgia Meloni make the most of this, conflating it with the wholesale destruction of the Italian way of life. Funny how no one seems to be calling for restrictions on the number of foreign-owned businesses or souvenir shops or chain stores. Nor are they doing the one thing that is guaranteed to keep those tasty tourist dollars coming in: Structuring everything around the locals. Affordable housing means a thriving local population that tends to create the kind of ambience tourists find so appealing. Instead, market forces are skeletonizing Europe like a piranha.

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So, what’s the common denominator? What ties art, Lincoln Center, and overtourism together?

The market.

More specifically, letting the market dictate what books get published, what music gets played, what movies get made, and which neighborhoods get overrun by short-term rentals. Do you find yourself wondering why books were better forty- or fifty- years ago? Market was a consideration back then, too, but so was art. Why was Europe better forty- or fifty- years ago? Tourism existed, but not in McDonald’s-sized amounts it does now.

Since art is being shaped by market forces, social media (which is almost entirely market driven) plays an outsized role, too. It has defanged art of its radicalism and made a boring, socially correct monoculture out of the only voice we have, besides academia, to rage against the machine.

Social media won’t stop. Capitalism fuels our growth-at-all-costs economy to our collective detriment. People are not going to put down their phones. The broligarchs (Musk, Zuckerberg, Thiel, Bezos, etc.) are not going to voluntarily pay a much-needed billionaire’s tax. After centuries of oppression, women and people of color are not going to pass up the career opportunities given to them at institutions like Lincoln Center. $100,000-a-year art schools and music conservatories are not going to stop churning out more institutionally-trained artists who are then spat, like watermelon seeds, into a market-driven economy that has no place for them.

Artists who see what’s happening will have to decide for themselves what they want to do, but I do not regret opting out of the market. Amazon was the death knell of my industry, and Kindle Unlimited (Amazon’s subscription service that, among other things, allows each member to read up to a million titles for “free”) gorged on the remains. There are few people more dangerous than those with nothing to lose; I have nothing to lose. Strangely liberating, that.

As for Lincoln Center, I offer the following: Remaking your august institution into a Zoomer beach party may attract social media attention, but I doubt that attention will translate into cold hard cash. Touching up your grays and putting on a pair of Raybans won’t turn you into anybody’s cool uncle, just an old dude trying to stay relevant. Your mandate should be art, not popularity.

Also: Stop paying your top executives $1.5 million a year.

As for Europe … The remedy must come from within. Europeans will have to get involved in local politics in a way that likely feels distasteful to them. There needs to be a cap placed on the number of Airbnbs allowed per neighborhood. There needs to be a cap placed on the number of chain stores, souvenir shops, and foreign-owned businesses allowed per neighborhood. Additionally, small business incentives will have to be implemented to get people involved in their communities again.

Identifying the problem is half the work of solving it. We know that neoliberalism—so-called “trickle down” economics—was nothing more than a money grab by the rich at the expense of all the rest of us.

Now all we have to do is dismantle the system, bit by bit, by disentangling ourselves from it.

Which leads me to a very important question.

Are you ready for a revolution?

Copyright © 2024 Stacey Eskelin