In recent weeks Rocco Landesman’s comments on supply and demand in the cultural economy have led to a variety of responses, most of which accept to some degree or another his conception of the arts in a post-capitalist state. Here, a group called the Collective Arts Think Tank recommends first that artists should “stop making so much work” and that an artist must “accept the fact that you’re an entrepreneur, the proprietor of your own small business, a participant in the capitalist system, and make business plans and real cost budgets and all the things that business owners have to do. This is the world that we live in and it’s not going to change. And why should it?” (Emphasis theirs.) And along with less art, there seems to be an opinion that there should also be fewer organizations that present it — that it is in the best interests of the art itself that some organizations die, some flourish, and some join together, all for economic reasons and very few for aesthetic purposes.

To offer “less art and fewer places to see it” as a solution to the crisis in arts funding seems somewhat disingenuous, if not a complete surrender to the Culture Industry’s insistence that no art be served that does not also serve the Industry’s own purpose. It is another example of destroying the village in order to save it, a strategy which worked so memorably well in Vietnam. In the theatre one hopes to imitate the examples of dramatists like Samuel  Beckett, Edward Bond, Caryl Churchill and Howard Barker, with their absolute refusal to compromise their integrity and their visions (if nothing else joins these four artists, there is at least that), especially to serve the existing economic structure. Even farther afield from these four writers is reporter Chris Hedges, who in a post called “The Collapse of Globalization” at Truthdig today exhibits a similar courageous refusal to compromise with the victors of the post-capitalist state. In short:

We must embrace, and embrace rapidly, a radical new ethic of simplicity and rigorous protection of our ecosystem … or we will all be holding on to life by our fingertips. We must rebuild radical socialist movements that demand that the resources of the state and the nation provide for the welfare of all citizens and the heavy hand of state power be employed to prohibit the plunder by the corporate power elite. We must view the corporate capitalists who have seized control of our money, our food, our energy, our education, our press, our health care system and our governance as mortal enemies to be vanquished. …

We are seduced by … childish happy talk. Who wants to hear that we are advancing not toward a paradise of happy consumption and personal prosperity but a disaster? Who wants to confront a future in which the rapacious and greedy appetites of our global elite, who have failed to protect the planet, threaten to produce widespread anarchy, famine, environmental catastrophe, nuclear terrorism and wars for diminishing resources? Who wants to shatter the myth that the human race is evolving morally, that it can continue its giddy plundering of non-renewable resources and its profligate levels of consumption, that capitalist expansion is eternal and will never cease?

Dying civilizations often prefer hope, even absurd hope, to truth. It makes life easier to bear. It lets them turn away from the hard choices ahead to bask in a comforting certitude that God or science or the market will be their salvation. This is why these apologists for globalism continue to find a following.

I’m not saying that either Landesman or the CATT are “apologists for globalism” in their proposals for the cultural future of the United States, but I’m also not saying that they aren’t. I suppose it depends on your perspective. Hedges’ perspective, an answer to the seemingly rhetorical “And why should it?” question left by the CATT team, can be read in its entirety here. Some will think it has nothing to do with contemporary American theatre; others will think it has everything to do with it. The choice is the reader’s.