The rich get richer: Salzburg Festival gains a sponsor

John Borstlap says:

The problem with exclusive state funding of cultural projects and institutions is that the audience is kept-out of the considerations. Regietheater, nonsensical Klangkunst projects, concept art museums thrive on tax money without the need to think of the audience as a serious partner, and the more their offerins draw protests from the audiences’ side, the better the state support is justified by ideology: ‘This is so special, so groundbreaking, so transgressive and progressive, that audiences cannot follow us and hence, they should pay for it via the taxation system.’ Destructive cults of nihilism and aggressive audience offences have become convention, solely because of state funding. But in a normal culture (not even a ‘healthy culture’), the audience / the public is part of a cultural system of production, interpretation, presentation and reception (= sharing), and every partner has to play its part in the whole.

Exclusive state funding makes culture vulnerable to populism: if political parties can win votes by cutting culture subsidies for the reason it is too elitist, they will not resist the temptation; if culture is entirely dependent upon private funding and corporate sponsoring, when the economy wobbles again, companies and patrons will reduce or withdraw their support. Paying for culture will always be a complex problem, but at the heart of whatever solution lies the awareness that culture is important for society as a whole and therefore requires responsible treatment. Unfortunately, responsible treatment is often absent on the side of both artists and organisers, due to state funding.

william osborne says:

The problem with your theory is that it is notably contradictory. The situation is far more complex. The private Salzburger Festspiel is notable for some of the more extreme Regietheater that has ever been created, especially after Mr. Regietheater himself, Gerard Mortier, took over the directorship in 2001. Private funding didn’t prevent Regietheater at all. And Salzburg has premiered several modernist oepras, including one or two from Berio.

As you note, state funding can be both detached from public opinion and populist. This illustrates that public systems can be quite flexible if properly administered. And that is what we see in actual practice. German houses, for example, usually aim for a yearly average of about 85% capacity. This allows for both popular and more challenging productions. Everybody from the common folk to the intelligentsia gets a piece of the pie. We see a lot of very traditional production, and a good bit of Regietheater as well.

Given the range shown in the actual use of public funding in Europe, we see that it is not inherent problems that causes programming bias, but rather misguided cultural norms within communities. I think this is what you actually mean to address.

Even though Salzburg would seem to be an exception, private funding in the USA does indeed create programming biases. Productions tend to be conformist to the point of banality because companies are deeply dependent on ticket sales. And the productions are often so cheap they are ridiculous — such as using watered-down orchestras, if not simply using a piano.

The difference with Salzburg’s private funding is that the private system starves the arts in the USA which results in publics that are less sophisticated than in Europe where opera is far more common.

Again, there is no direct link between state funding and elitism or populism. The system is extremely flexible, but private funding alone impoverishes the arts which results in naive publics only willing to support the most conventional forms of art, and companies that have little room for creative exploration.

As for your particular interests, in the USA we see a lot of neo-tonal new work, but very little in Europe. This isn’t a result of funding. Extreme serialism reigned in the USA for four decades under private funding. The move toward neo-tonality was a result of weariness with serialist music rather than financial concerns. Neo-tonality didn’t lead to more funding for new music, other than perhaps a bit more programming by orchestras.