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Alum Tells Obies that the Future Depends on Them by Gail R. Taylor New Yorker writer and editor James M. Keller '75 delivered a plea in Finney Chapel March 7. He asked his audience to continue attending cultural events in person.But he also expressed doubt that recently developed urban "palaces of culture" on the scale of such established complexes as New York's Lincoln Center -- still being built in cities such as Newark and Philadelphia -- can fill their massive performance halls in an era when "Internet sound quality will become at least as good as anything available through other broadcast media, and large-screen computers will provide image displays we are likely to find quite stunning." Keller's lecture, "The Future of Culture in America," was the last presentation in Oberlin College's 1999-2000 convocation series, "The Future of the United States." The series included lectures by nationally respected intellectuals from a broad political and social spectrum, including Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Garry Wills and Harvard University's W.E.B. DuBois Professor of the Humanities Henry Louis Gates, a noted scholar of African American studies. The series was presented with support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Office of the President.
Focusing on the arts and humanities, Keller predicted that powerful arts centers such as Lincoln Center or Washington, D.C.'s Kennedy Center "will persevere in some form deep into the future," but that mid-sized institutions in many cities will struggle as the Internet challenges museums and concert halls as a prime mediator between artists and audiences. With federal arts funding under duress and private philanthropy increasingly directed to other causes, arts organizations will become more dependent on corporate philanthropy, he said. The result, he suggested, will be a subtle "interweaving of corporate exposure in arts presentation." An oboist and musicologist who holds degrees in music history and French from Oberlin, Keller is a prolific writer on the arts scene, appearing in such publications as Opera News,BBC Magazine,and The New York Times.He speculated at Finney that electronic delivery will give audiences far greater control over the content of artistic products, and that the line between live and electronically reproduced per-formance will become increasingly blurred. Listeners will have the power to build their own concerts from archived performances, and even to alter digital performances to their liking. "I don't doubt that music aficionados will be able to combine performances with acoustic spaces," Keller said. "You like the sound of the New York Philharmonic but wish they didn't play in the acoustic tomb of Avery Fisher Hall? Well, why would you want to put up with that when with the click of a mouse you can plop the whole ensemble down in the virtual equivalent of Severance Hall?" Live performances themselves are increasingly shaped electronically, he pointed out. For example, the New York City Opera recently installed a network of microphones on the stage. "The sound system has allowed the company to project what comes across as very fine recorded sound in its live performances," Keller said. Some aspects of the emerging electronically mediated art world sadden him, Keller said. If audiences abandon live performances, "the spirit of human companionship, which is inherent in much of our current experience of art," will be lost, he said. He closed with an ironic interweaving of the live and the electronic, playing a recording of cabaret singer Claiborne Cary crooning to a nightclub audience that "There's Nothing Like a Live Performance."
"I think it's just fabulous that you all came out to see me tonight," Cary told her nightclub audience. "Thanks for coming out tonight," Keller repeated to his Finney Chapel audience. As audience members came forward to pose questions, he told them that the future of live performance is in their hands, and he predicted, "I think that Oberlin will be a holdout in the finer things in life." |
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Changes in Store for Arts in America
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All-Night Odyssey with Homer Fans of Homer's Odysseygathered in the Dionysus Disco (where else?) in Wilder Hall on a cold, Sunday afternoon in mid-February, and they didn't come out until the next day, after they'd read the entire 24 books of the epic poem. It was the sixth All-Night, Candle-lit, Bardic Reading Marathon, sponsored by the classics department. About 60 people spent some time at the event, during which 22 students and 5 faculty members took turns reading. "We do it for the interest and the fun," said Professor James Helm, chairman of the department. "It gives people a chance to experience the Odysseyas a whole, and it also gives some insight into the oral tradition of literature." Prior marathons have presented Homer's Iliad and Vergil's Aeneid,among other works. |