(01-28-2026, 11:25 AM)cctop Wrote: MV72018, I'm still not clear on the point that you're arguing.
I think you're saying that Stanford should permit artists to perform on campus only if they meet some arbitrary standard of cultural excellence.
If that is a fair summary of your position, I would reply:
1) Morality may not be relative, but judgments of cultural relevance and excellence certainly are. I can pretty much guarantee that you would not consider Chinese opera excellent but one billion humans on this earth would disagree.
2) Who gets to decide (or gatekeep) what is culturally excellent? Even among the narrow demographic of old white guys on this board of which I am one, we will have major disagreements. You will never convince me that the works of Jackson Pollack and Mark Rothko are culturally excellent. It's one reason I like the music thread, as a way to combat the fact that most people's musical tastes ossify in their teens and early 20's.
3) Culturally excellent works are only apparent in the long view. What may seem excellent to people now may have no relevance 50 years from now. The examples you cite -- Beethoven and Wagner -- are from 200 to 300 years ago, and they wrote some stinkers in their time. Shakespeare wrote plays for the masses; it was only in the late 1700's that he really started to be elevated to the level he's at today. On a more recent time scale, just look at the list of Oscar winners for Best Picture from 20-30 years ago and see if you agree that they really were the best films of those years.
4) Symphonies, opera, ballet, other "high art" and fine art have rarely been financially viable. All have relied on patrons since the beginning. The SF Symphony plays live to the movie "Pirates of the Caribbean" to get the the funds to play Mahler the next week. I work in the film industry where this dynamic is well-known: you do one movie for the paycheck so that you can do your next movie for the art.
I would instead argue that when booking artists to perform, Stanford should and currently correctly does consider an artist's effect on society. Stanford should provide a platform for artists who uplift people and/or give us an opportunity to experience an aspect of our culture that we might not otherwise seek out. BTS would fall into that category in addition to making it financially viable for Stanford to host classical music and ballet performances on campus.
Cctop, thank you for your thoughtful reply. There is much I'd like to say in response, but it would take an essay to do so carefully and with attention to nuance. To take but one example, you write "Morality may not be relative..." Having thought and researched such matters for decades, my view is that moral judgments often have a dual nature: there is something subjective about them AND something objective about them (having to do with our shared basic human needs which must be sufficed for our well-being). It's not an either/or. In fact, the very term "Morality" (like "Ethics") is used in four different senses, although they are rarely parsed. But I can't go into that here.
I'll limit myself to a couple of quick hitters re contentions you made:
1. Alas, you're wrong about my views re Chinese opera. While it's not my 'cup of tea,' you seem to think I'm a naive ethnocentric critic. I'm quite confident that the greatest of Chinese operas qualify as culturally excellent, and not just within the genre of Chinese opera.
2. I happen to agree with you that Rothko's and Pollack's works shouldn't be regarded as culturally excellent, even if they are widely judged excellent within the genre of 20th century non-representational art. If you had reflected on the three criteria for high excellence that I articulated earlier in this thread, you'd have seen that one of my criteria was that the work must shed some non-trivial light on an aspect of the perennial human condition. To me, that disqualifies Rothko's and Pollack's works, whereas it admits Picasso's "Guernica."....If most people's musical tastes ossify in their teens and 20s, that's their fault and their life loss. I used to play R&R guitar in high school and rejected all attempts to expose me to classical music and opera. Happily, when I came to Stanford as a grad student, I happened to hear Wagner's Tristan at Tressider one Sunday afternoon in the Music Listening Room and that induced me to audit Music 1 taught by Prof. William Crosten, which really opened my eyes.
3. Re your "Culturally excellent works are only apparent in the long view." I disagree with that generalization. To give several counterexamples, "The Rite of Spring," "The Death of a Salesman," "Ulysses," "The Trial," "Appalachian Spring," "West Side Story," "Rhapsody in Blue," etc.
4. Re your "Symphonies, opera, ballet, other "high art" and fine art have rarely been financially viable. All have relied on patrons since the beginning. The SF Symphony plays live to the movie "Pirates of the Caribbean" to get the the funds to play Mahler the next week. I work in the film industry where this dynamic is well-known: you do one movie for the paycheck so that you can do your next movie for the art."
(a) First of all, this "dynamic" is a relatively recent arrival. Various U.S. symphony orchestras only started prostituting themselves relatively recently. Face it, we in America do a lousy job supporting even our most excellent performing arts institutions. Contrast that with how its done in Germany, Italy, and Scandenavia, where cultural excellence is supported. Look at what is happening to the cultural scene in America these days: Trump Center, slash NEH, the SF Symphony having to do more and more film music, KDFC's "Classical California's Top 250" increasingly populated with mediocre film-music pieces allowed to stick its nose under the tent in order to attract more listeners. A grim scene, IMO. Whether the masterpieces of great music, opera, and literature will still be accessible in another 100 years, is increasingly doubtful, a sad development for those whose souls and intellects have been shaped by them.
(b) Finally, re your "I would instead argue that when booking artists to perform, Stanford should and currently correctly does consider an artist's effect on society. Stanford should provide a platform for artists who uplift people and/or give us an opportunity to experience an aspect of our culture that we might not otherwise seek out. BTS would fall into that category in addition to making it financially viable for Stanford to host classical music and ballet performances on campus." Just two points:
1. I'm not as sure as you seem to be that Stanford really does consider "an artist's effect on society." Sometimes it may. The Stanford Live management may take that into consideration, along with considerations of inclusiveness. If it does, great. 'Uplifting people' sounds good to me -- as long as that means more than sending them into convulsions of excitement and pandemonium and not turning into nauseating "uplifting" in the form that "Up With America" used to peddle.
2. As for 'giving us an opportunity to experience an aspect of our culture that we might not otherwise seek out,' that too sounds good to me. But, frankly and with respect, the astonishing Japanese taiko drummers who I remember used to perform on campus seem to me to offer that much more than BTS does or will. How much genuine Korean culture that would expand our horizons is there, really, in BTS's performances? Hopefully more than there was in Psy's "Gangnam Style" performances -- which I found energetic and infectious but didn't think were that genuinely Korean (Psy himself went to Berklee College of Music in Boston).
Anyway, thank you for joining the issues with me. Perhaps I'll see you at the once-in-a-lifetime exhibition of over 200 indisputable cultural masterpieces by Raffaello at the Metropolitan Museum in NYC starting in late March. MV72018.
