Note: An earlier version of this piece was published on mnartists.org on September 9, and is presented here by permission. What's on offer here, however, has been upgraded with a special September 15 update that acknowledges the country's continued and deepening economic decline and slide into oblivion; its inexplicable and pathetic fascination with Sarah Palin; its continued and maddening political gullibility; and the suicide of David Foster Wallace, who once, appropriately enough, observed in his essay "Consider the Lobster": "After all the abstract intellection, there remain the facts of the frantically clanking lid, the pathetic clinging to the edge of the pot. Standing at the stove, it is hard to deny in any meaningful way that this is a living creature experiencing pain and wishing to avoid/escape the painful experience.”

 

The Day the Music Died

by Michael Fallon

FOR YOURS TRULY, JULY 15, 2008, WAS A ONCE-IN-A-LIFETIME, red-banner day. It was The Day the Music Died, the time of my own private Ground Zero, the moment I got kicked off American Idol, and the instant that my address changed from Stardust Avenue to the Boulevard of Broken Dreams. July 15, 2008, was the day I finally realized I would never have an answer to the question my mother had asked twenty years before: “What are you going to do with an art degree?”

To explain fully, I need to take you back a decade (bear with me) to 1998, exactly ten years after I had finished an undergraduate degree in art at UC Berkeley. For those who were too young to remember, the late 90's was the culmination of a lot of hot and steamy cultural and economic build-up, my little lost generation’s big orgasmic moment. Back then, the NASDAQ was spiking so far upward it was phallic, daily spitting out be-nerded, cash-rich Dot-coms almost as often as Monica Lewinsky was visiting the dry cleaner. The Internet was full of endless nirvanic potential, with little of the sinister tinge it’d have later—no pop-up ads, computer viruses or worms, no Trojan Horses, online predators or trolls, no spambots or spamtraps, no offshore gambling sites, no online social networks, and no blogosphere. 1998 was a good time to be alive in this country—with Seinfeld still on the air, Jordan hitting his shots at the buzzer, McGwire hitting #62, the government balancing its budget (for the first time in 30-plus years), and Pfizer finally getting Sildenafil Citrate on the market. And even with the onrushing economic e-jaculation of what they were calling the New Internet Economy, in 1998 all the various components of the American informational and entertainment industries (thriving civic newspapers, a booming music industry, independent bookstores and video stores, mainstream network television programming) were still flourishing and seemed likely to continue their productive, informative, entertaining ways for years to come. Culture still mattered in America in 1998, and American culture still mattered in the world.

In this heady atmosphere, just past the midpoint of the year, I planted my proud flag in the Twin Cities—in the state of Minnesota, where the economy had been performing, at least for the last few decades, well better than the national average and where the unemployment rate was, at 2.7%, half the national. After a decade of struggle to establish myself in the arts, during which I strung together a series of part-time teaching (and other) jobs that (barely) supported my evening habit of painting, book design, printmaking, and papermaking, I was ecstatic to be in such a place as Minnesota, which seemed so rich with possibility—both economic and cultural—and with a real, honest-to-goodness functioning art scene. “OK,” I thought, “finally, I’m going to have something to show Mom!”

And in short order in 1998 in Minnesota I obtained: an artist residency at a community art center, a regular opportunity to write (for pay!) on art for the local newsweekly, a number of art exhibitions (both group and solo), an offer to teach one adjunct course at a local art college, and a day job doing book layout and design. I even sold enough art here and there to keep me in Stabilo pencils and Arches Aquarelle, and later won a few of the locally prized grants and fellowships.

The year I arrived in Minnesota, I finally felt I was well on my way. Any day now, I thought, it was all going to come together, and all the years of hard art study (undertaken in lieu of my family’s dreams for me to study medicine or engineering) were actually, at long last, going to pay off.

LET US NOW FAST-FORWARD TEN YEARS—to July 15, 2008. What a completely different picture we see. On this day in particular, I woke up with a swirl of dark clouds of dread and worry hanging over my head. The back spasms I had been coping with for the past few months (a consequence of the stress at my job in the arts) were particularly acute. It took every bit of mental energy I had, on this day, to drag myself out of bed and clean myself up enough to be presentable at work.

During the morning commute, what I heard on the radio didn’t help matters. Minnesota Public Radio had broken away to special coverage of George Bush’s July 15, 2008, press conference on the continuing mortgage-meltdown, and in the build-up to the president’s address commentators recounted the litany of bad news of the day: the government's 11th-hour bail-out of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; the value of the dollar increasingly low against the Euro; oil selling at all-time high prices; international investors selling off US bonds overseas; the US trade deficit at a record high; inflation worsening; stock prices falling; banks failing (and the FDIC increasingly worried); General Motors facing severe losses and plans to layoff thousands of workers. And on and on and on. Bush, when he came on, couldn’t disguise his own dire mood, speaking clipped sentences chipper with superficial optimism that sounded skeptical even of themselves.

 

The news of this day certainly meshed with what I had been observing on the ground. Minnesota’s once enviable economy had largely deflated; its unemployment rate, at 5.8%, was now twice what it was in 1998 and above the national average for the first time in decades. (We felt this personally: my wife had recently been laid off from her job at a local Fortune 100 corporation.) Meanwhile, over the past several years, even the once-vaunted arts community that had first attracted me to Minnesota was beginning to show signs of surprising decay. You could trace this back, most directly, to 2005 and 2006, with the financial implosion of numerous well-established and long-standing arts organizations and institutions. Since then, the growing list of local art failures included: Minnesota Film Arts, which, facing massive deficits, shuttered its beloved repertory theater, the Oak Street Cinema; the Minnesota Craft Council, which folded after 32 years of distinguished existence; the American National Ballet company out of Duluth and Ballet Arts Minnesota out of Minneapolis, both of which simply failed; and the collapse of the highly regarded Theatre de la Jeune Lune and the Minnesota Center for Photography. With significant downturns in charitable giving, government support, and audience participation, suddenly a wide swath of well-established, mid-sized local galleries, theaters, and organizations were struggling like almost never before. I’ve been hearing rumors even now—unverified and uncertain--that at least two other mid-sized organizations beyond those listed above are struggling under the weight of more than a million dollars of debt. Under the circumstances, it seems like additional organizational failures are almost inevitable.

Even if one had no way of knowing the financial health of arts organizations in Minnesota, one could have guessed at the problems based on the near-litany of high-level administrative resignations, defections, and layoffs in the local arts between 2006 and 2008. In this time period, an anomalously high number of leaders, curators, and administrators simply left behind their jobs at local organizations such as the Walker Art Center, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the State Arts Board, the Minnesota Museum of American Art, the Minnesota Artists Exhibition Program, and dozens of smaller organizations. One organization, the Southern Theater, reeling due to its “huge financial deficit, a building badly in need of repair, faulty and problematic accounting practices, personnel issues, low staff morale, and complaints from artists,” was forced to lay off its artistic director of more than 30 years—much to the shock and dismay of the local community. At the Minneapolis Institute of Arts—the state’s, and very nearly the region’s, flagship arts institution—a newly hired director, William Griswold, walked away from his position after only 18 months on the job. At just about the same time, a director at the State Arts Board, Thomas Proehl, who was hired to fill the position after it was vacant for more than a year (due to inability to attract a candidate), left after not quite one year on the job. The struggles of countless local arts organizations and institutions have been serious and constant in recent months, and rumors were rampant that much more failure, capitulation, and devastation is yet to come.

One can only guess what factors led Griswold and Proehl, for instance, to bail so quickly on their crucial—to the Minnesota arts community, at least—leadership posts. I suppose it simply could be that they, coincidentally, both got better offers elsewhere. Griswold went to New York to head the Morgan Library and Museum, and Proehl went to San Francisco to head the American Conservatory Theater. Officially, both were gracious about having been where they were. “This was agonizing in a sense because I hate to leave the Twin Cities,” said Griswold, “(but) I felt that this was really the only decision for me.” But perhaps too these leaders—and others like them—left their local positions because they saw, on the horizon, the massive oncoming tidal wave of failure, struggle, downsizing, and bankruptcy that was approaching Minnesota’s arts organizations, and they had the simple good sense to seek higher ground.

Whatever their reasons, I certainly couldn’t fault them for leaving Minnesota and its wayward arts community. I couldn’t because I, too, did the same. That is, after ten years of struggle to make good on the promise I saw back in 1998, this day was my last paid day making a living in the arts. On July 15, 2008, I officially gave up the idea that I’d be able to continue facing the “challenge” of keeping a mid-sized Minnesota arts organization afloat. On this day, I stepped down from a job that I had thought was going to be a culmination of my work in the arts, but which I discovered, almost immediately, was just another Bad Job. I resigned on July 15, after nearly two years on the job, my position as executive director of the Northfield Arts Guild.

We’ve all had Bad Jobs—ones that we’ve known, almost as soon as we’ve settled in, were just not right for us. At one time or another, we've all had to decide how to manage such jobs: Do I quit or bide my time? Do I throw myself into the work (in hopes things may eventually improve), or do I petition my boss for change? And there are all kind of Bad Jobs: Demeaningly Bad Jobs, Exhaustingly Bad Jobs, Wrong-Kind-of-Work-for-Me Bad Jobs, Badly Supervised Bad Jobs, and so on. The worst kind of Bad Job, however, may well be the Job that doesn’t live up to the high hopes we have for it, the one that simply can’t give provide us with a certain ineffable something that we thought we lacked, the one that causes one's psyche to completely crash and burn.

I was so ecstatic about becoming director of this arts organization that my enthusiasm and sense of arrival may have blinded me to the fact that I couldn’t have chosen a worse time—2006 to 2008—to take over such a position. Before I started the job, I later learned, the organization had seen a worrisome uptick in its regular annual deficits (this fact was glossed over when I interviewed for the job); within a few months of my settling into the position, the State Arts Board announced (mainly because of its concerns about these deficits I’d inherited) it would be cutting its annual support of the organization by nearly 50 percent. This one loss, combined with the fact that the economic downturn caused long-time business supporters to fall away, individual support to waver, and paid receipts (for theater shows, mostly) shrink along with families’ tightened budgets, made my working life immediately, immensely more difficult than it should have been.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. I should have been relishing my arrival in a job that, at last, allowed me to make some important contributions—after ten years of hard work researching arts issues, organizing arts organizations and programs, and writing about every aspect of the local arts—to the overall welfare of the arts in my adopted home state. I should have been employing lessons learned over a near-lifetime of work of all sorts in the arts to make a difference in the lives of this state’s artists. Instead, the job—day after day—was a misery of tough decisions over nickel-and-dime details and worry over the natural tendency toward entropy: broken elevators, crumbling mortar on a 19th-century building, spotty furnaces, dead fuse-boxes, disintegrating dance floors, collapsing ceilings, cracked front steps, and so on. I wanted to work at inspiring local artists to pool resources, mount their combined efforts, and push the organization into a new, more productive and integral era. Instead, I felt like I was under near-constant bombardment from artists who were selfishly seeking support, money, and attention--but only for their individual activities. I'd hoped to galvanize the community to support and prop up this unique, vibrant regional resource; instead, it was nearly impossible to get any person in the community who was in a position to help the organization even to take my phone calls.

For more than a year, I had the same nightmare over and over: I dreamed I was trying to dig myself out of a hole that is filling faster than I could empty it, all the while knowing I would eventually, inevitably be buried alive. I somehow managed, as director of the organization, to keep the lights on (mostly by cutting costs to keep us from going into the red), but the struggle was slowly killing me. In the end, I had no choice but to quit this Bad Job that had been my last Dream Job in the Arts.

AFTERWARD: SEPTEMBER 15, 2008: So it took ten long years—after giving it all I had to give—for me to fail in art. And while there are lot of platitudes that I could spout off here—about what one should do when given a bowl full of lemons, about what one should do if at first one doesn’t succeed, etc.—let’s be realistic for a moment. On July 15, 2008, I learned, plain and simple, that my expectations for art will never be met, that I will never be quite the success in art I hoped to be, that the arts community will never rise to the levels that I dreamed for it, and that I am lucky to have escaped.

I could point out that it took twenty wasted years, after graduating from college with a hopeful degree in art, for me to understand that a life in art is a doomed life, but I won’t dwell on this. Instead I’ll point out I’m not particularly unique in realizing the nature of the art world. The great German painter Gerhard Richter, for instance, said as much when he proclaimed: “Art is always to a large extent about need, despair and hopelessness.” The great American painter Jasper Johns said, about his early career as an artist: “I assumed that everything would lead to complete failure, but I decided that didn't matter—that would be my life.” The American realist painter William Bailey said: “…Frankly, I believe that every painter is in a state of continual failure. The only constant in a painter's life is failure.”

Now, in mid-September, two month after my grim nadir and a few weeks after the debacle of the lipsticked Pitbull, while the days retract, gardens dry up, and a wan chill fills the air, I look back at all the drama and despair of the end of my arts career, and I am happy I am still able to breathe. I say this full knowing that the economic and cultural woes have only deepened since July 15. Lehman Brothers has tanked; Merrill Lynch has been bought up (even after nearly 100 years of independent operation); the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped on his day by nearly 500 points (the sixth highest amount in history); and David Foster Wallace committed suicide after battling with deepening depression (ironically enough while living the hometown of my brother, where I had just happened to be visiting at the time because of the death, at age 84, of my grandmother).

Yet despite the ever-darkening clouds outside my existential cabin, I am placid now, after having removed myself from the turmoil of a life in the arts. I’ve started a new, more sane, less soul-sucking, job, and I’m quietly, after two years and two months of dismay, coming to terms with my potentially misspent artistic life. If I had been, back on July 15, more level-headed and more prone to thinking for the long-term, I might have realized that—despite the individual failures of thousands of young people like me, despite the constant struggle and eventual capitulation of all of us in the arts, despite the endless climb against the raging current—it doesn’t matter really. Art goes on. Art survives and continues to be made, usually by the next generation who, in their energetic ignorance, relives the failure over and over again. Over the long term, individuals like me matter little in the face of the painful human compulsion to realize beauty from the labors of the hand.

If I were more resilient and long-suffering, or perhaps more talented or more cutthroat, all I’d have had to do is wait until these things that are ruinous to us now—in the culture, and in the art world—had passed, and we'd moved on to a more optimistic and hopeful time. Some of my more long-suffering artist friends have already spoken such words to me since July 15, the worry-lines of resignation on their faces giving lie to their optimistic words: “Music always gets made,” one said to me, “and it’s up to us—each of us—to come to the music.” Those who walk away from the music, he seemed to be saying, aren’t worth worrying about.

Maybe, I nod outwardly. But inside I can’t help but wonder if there isn’t an end time looming in the arts. Yes, people will continue coming to the art in their way, sticking with it or not on their own terms, finding their own equations for success and failure, and all will abide. But I wonder just how many more of these smart and capable young people who become fascinated by, and fall in love with, art—against their better judgment—have to ruin their life because of it. How many of us will continue to fall in love with such a life partner, passing twenty rocky years with her until we find out she’s been unfaithful since the beginning? Yes, maybe the music will go on no matter who is there to make it. But will the music have the resonance and beauty it’d’ve had if the culture had somehow agreed to make at least a minimal commitment of energy to it?

Truth is, there’s just no good way to spin a post-July 15 world. The only solace, perhaps, are words by the Irish critic and poet Edward Dowden, who said, “Sometimes a noble failure serves the world as faithfully as a distinguished success.” Perhaps July 15, 2008, simply had to happen so I, and perhaps you, could at last look at the artless world with new, and clearer, eyes, and realize that failure just is our lot in the arts. It’s just the way it is.

And while it's sad that a person who’s dedicated so much time to art should be so bitterly resigned to failure now, perhaps this need not be a tragedy. Perhaps, in fact, this is a liberation and a blessing, a full license for me to investigate a number of new questions about art. Instead of wondering how I can survive the next week as an artist, I now can ask, with deep intention, why can’t the life of artists be better in this country? Instead of worrying about my next opportunity to exhibit or be on display, I can chronicle of the various aspects of failure in the arts in our time—with the view of someone who’s seen it and lived it—and expose the unaware to the depths of the problems faced by artists in America. I can take pause and wonder why can’t the beauty made of artists’ hands become a more integral part of the everyday life of Americans? Why aren’t we all working together—all of us, in all corners of the country—to prop up the arts and make our land more rich with beauty, with artistic ideas, with the well-crafted trappings of an elegant life? I can wonder exactly what it means that we’ve created a culture so antithetical to all the things that art stands for.

And so, with my hard-earned awareness of the precarious nature of a life in the arts I am driven now to seek potential answers about why, if art is doomed to failure, are we living creatures so attracted to its pain.