In 1928 modernist composer Arnold Schoenberg said that “art is from the outset naturally not for the people.” And over the past 150 years or so, plenty of other Modernists have said similar things about their art, and this is certainly true for a lot of their work. But I sometimes wonder if all great art is a poor fit with today’s culture and in some real way an alternative to it.
All serious art — whether a Brahms symphony, a Basquiat graffiti painting, a Stravinsky ballet, or a T.S. Eliot poem — requires some level of understanding, patience and mental energy on the part of the spectator. The pop culture in which we’re immersed isn’t like that at all. It’s intentionally the opposite—it traffics first and foremost in ease and familiarity.
I’m thinking about this because my daughter and I went down to Austin last week. As I always do when I’m there, I picked up a copy of the city’s alternative newspaper, The Austin Chronicle, a weekly that began publication in 1981. It still provides the best account of the vibrant Austin art scene.
When I lived there, picking up the Chronicle was the best way to find out who was playing where. The amount of coverage given to music and the arts convinced working musicians that this was a place they wanted to be. To get a mention in it was to feel as though you’d arrived.
The country’s first alternative newspaper like this was The Village Voice, established in 1955 in New York City. Its founders were convinced that traditional news outlets like the Times completely missed—or ignored—most of the city’s real artistic energy.
In general, there’s far more that goes on in any city than local reporters can cover, and that’s even more true today in our age of constantly shrinking newspapers. Today’s alternative newspapers play an important role in a city’s art scene precisely because the arts are increasingly understood by mainstream culture as some sort of unnecessary adjunct to everyday material concerns. It’s why so many people don’t even bat an eye when the National Endowment for the Arts gets its authorized grant money taken away from it.
All that isn’t utilitarian in our culture today, whether in school classrooms or news broadcasts, becomes disposable, becomes “alternative” in a sense. This is the great power of alternative newspapers: They are the voice of one crying out in the wilderness. They testify about what we could see as important if materialism and utilitarianism, and above all our toxic individualism, weren’t so dominant. Every town needs such a voice.
