Blaming Us

The old adage is that you can't have great art without great audiences. Great audiences are ones that appreciate depth and sophistication in art.

I thought about this after re-watching the NFB documentary Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Leonard Cohen. It follows the 30-year-old poet and debut novelist—it was 1964, the year I was born—shortly after his emergence as a wunderkind of Canadian letters. He was not yet a professional musician or songwriter.

In the film, Cohen is seen reading his poetry to large, attentive, receptive audiences. In one scene, the camera moves from face to face in the audience, and they are positively rapt, especially the thickly mascara'd young ladies.

The size and enthusiasm of the audience was one thing. For a poetry reading! But the age was another. They were mostly young people.

By the time I was working at the Jewish Public Library in the early 90s, where I organized dozens of poetry readings and book launches, the average age of the miniscule audience was in its mid-60s. They were probably the same people, now retired, who'd gone to hear Cohen back in the early 60s.

Leonard saw the writing on the wall, pun intended, and turned to songwriting as his ticket to fame and fortune. He understood that poetry had peaked in popular culture back in the mid-50s.

Poetry requires attention to be appreciated and enjoyed. The poet creates a certain kind of space and then invites the listener into that space as a type of communion. In the visual arts, the successful painter does a similar thing with his creation.

But the audience must be willing and able to go there to partake in that communion. It's not a passive engagement, like watching a television screen. It's more like a ritual—the priest presents the Eucharist, the bread and body of Christ, and the audience is an active participant, bringing to the process their understanding and belief in order for it to have spiritual resonance and meaning. Otherwise, it's just eating a wafer and sipping wine.

It's the audience that makes the difference, and that's why, for the last 60 years or so, in terms of art, we've been eating wafers and sipping wine.

The unsophisticated, shallow audience mistakes utility for quality, and superficiality for importance. If great art is being made, and it might be, it's unlikely anyone knows, because there's virtually no audience for it. Without an audience up to the task, greatness becomes indistinguishable from mediocrity, Leonard Cohen from Taylor Swift.

Screen culture is the very definition of 2-dimensionality. That's why every concert these days has a giant one, or rather a bank of giant screens. The audience needs to have the performance technologically shoved down its throat. And performers like Taylor Swift, in her bright shiny costumes and hair extensions, are tailor-made—pun intended—for the screen. Try to picture a crooning Leonard Cohen on a giant screen.

You get the picture.

But I'm not here to trash Swifties. I want to eulogize our culture, and point a finger not at the artists, but rather at the audiences, at us, for killing it. We're the ones who demanded and accepted drek for decades. We're the ones who've been burying our heads in devices and becoming trained out of our desire or ability to distinguish a real-life singer from AI-generated slop. We're the ones paying thousands of dollars to fly to Paris to watch Celine Dion bombastically lip-sync her way to a career comeback.

Well, not me anyway.

But maybe there's some hope. Maybe culture works like agriculture. After commercial farming saps all the nutrients out of the field with its pesticides and poisons, it will lay fallow for a time, the natural elements will take over, and eventually restore the land so that it can produce a rich harvest once again.

At least, I hope that's what happens, and not desertification.