Oh lord folks are mad that Timothée Chalamet told Matthew McConaughey that opera and ballet are irrelevant.
Talking about trying to make serious art in film and then worrying if shorter attention-span audiences will buy tickets, Chalamet said he felt torn between the different directions of moviemaking, where you might want to do something slow and serious, but you worry about audiences who want you to get to the point quickly.
“I don’t want to be working in ballet or opera where it’s like, ‘Hey! Keep this thing alive, even though no one cares about this anymore,’” he said.
People who make their living from opera, rather than popular film, objected.
‘Irish opera singer Seán Tester posted on his Instagram to say that Chalamet’s choice of words “is the kind of reductive take you hear when popularity is mistaken for cultural value.
“They are not outdated art forms. They are living ones, constantly reinterpreted, constantly evolving … It’s always fascinating when artists with global platforms dismiss opera and ballet as irrelevant. Opera and ballet have survived wars … To call these art forms irrelevant says far less about the art itself than it does about how little time someone has spent truly experiencing it.”’
Opera singers Isabel Leonard and Deepa Johnny also shared comments about how ignorant and reductive Chalamet’s comments were, but none of their comments did anything to effectively refute his.
I’m laughing but I’m crying. Popularity is what there is for cultural value when almost nobody has access to so-called higher art forms. Tester inadvertently hits the nail on the head when he says that to call art forms irrelevant is really to reveal how little exposure someone has to them.
Here’s why opera and ballet are irrelevant as art forms: almost 100% of the world’s people have no exposure to them. Don’t live where there is an opera or ballet company; can’t afford tickets, transportation, or appropriate clothing to a performance; have absolutely no musical education to be able to understand or appreciate an art form that is deeply foreign to their everyday lives. And that’s because the “proponents” of those arts are actively keeping those people out.
Opera and ballet are for rich people to curate and for middle class people to aspire to. That’s it. If someone else accidentally gets exposed, good luck to them. These are elite art forms that our social and economic structures actively gatekeep, to prevent undesirable people from entering.
Here are two anecdotes to illustrate how and why that works:
I went to a Florida Orchestra performance last year. I saw Modest Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition.” It was fine. I would have enjoyed it more at home on DVD or CD, although the sound in the concert hall was undoubtedly superior. I picked that piece because I had some exposure to it in a high school music class.
What made the experience unenjoyable was the labor I had to put in to get there, and the atmosphere at the site. I could never afford tickets to the Florida Orchestra, but a foundation puts aside a certain number of free tickets for poor people.
You have to fill out a paper voucher with your name and address and your selection of up to three performances (you only get one performance), and then put it in an envelope with a stamp and mail it. Then you wait several months to see if you’re even going to get tickets.
The paper tickets come in the USPS literally a week or so before the performance, with no other notice or way to check on status beforehand. Hope you wrote down those performance dates and asked for those nights off way back when you mailed the voucher. Hope you didn’t have to move.
When we got there, the performance was sold out and the auditorium was completely full of old, rich, white people: exactly who you want to spend two hours with, coughing and farting and breathing on you, after a lifetime of them deliberately and systematically keeping you out of every desirable space except under very specific and onerous terms. Nah.
The other anecdote connects to the way this happens in the first place. Music education, or the lack of it.
I went to private school for all twelve years, and grew up in a functioning Catholic parish, so I had more music education than almost anyone I know as an adult. I had piano lessons, my elementary school had at least one period a day for music, and I sang in the church choir through eighth grade.
In high school, which I attended on scholarship, I sang in the chorus and played an instrument in a small ensemble. In contrast, my entire adult family network went to regular poor people public schools and received zero hours of music education. Zero.
Even in a slightly more privileged public school environment where the high school at least had a drama club, the lack of music education is telling. I once attended a performance of the musical “Grease,” performed by high school students. Although the roles were filled by energetic and engaging actors, nobody could sing, not even the leads.
Not that they weren’t loud enough or that they had some holes in their range. They actually couldn’t sing on key at all, because they had never learned to hear themselves, and modulate and match their vocal pitch to the backing music. That doesn’t mean they’re defective people. It means they were deliberately and systematically excluded from the art and craft of singing by a society that claims to value fine art.
The school administrators and taxpayers of America agree that most people don’t need to know music. Even in the public magnet middle school where I taught, music education was reserved for a select group of children. A single band teacher taught five sections of band, and one of those was the sixth grade wheel, meaning it was only a single nine weeks, like a tasting course. Out of six hundred students, fewer than two hundred had a chance to be in band in a public middle school.
So when I read the comments by Tester, Leonard, and Johnny, I ran to Wikipedia to look at their bios, to see what made them think opera and ballet had such enduring universal relevance.
Tester, of Drogheda, Republic of Ireland and Johnny, of the Sultanate of Oman and Canada, have no Wikipedia bios at all, which generally means one of two things: either you are rich enough to pay someone to keep you out of Wikipedia, or else that your cultural relevance is such that nobody has yet bothered to make you a Wikipedia bio.
Leonard does have a very brief Wikipedia page, which notes that she is the granddaughter of an Argentinian chess grandmaster, so we know that her family meets the minimum qualifications to learn about music.
Chalamet’s bio is long and richly detailed. He was born in Manhattan, has dual citizenship with France, and speaks both French and English. His level of education and culture, from his (at least!) upper middle class monetary wealth to his highly select schooling and international travel and living experience, put him in or near the top cohort of elite people worldwide. He has extensive exposure to fine art, but also, through his film career, to energetic and interesting people with no such exposure. Apparently he finds the latter group curious and invigorating, and the culture of the former to be insular and calcified.
Maybe the angry opera singers are just being defensive because someone who’s in a similar social position to them just said something aloud that every serious artist hates to think about: that the reason we face such indifference to our art is that most of our potential audience has to work too much and never received the education to get what we’re doing in the first place.
Irrelevance is the consequence to acceding to rich people’s gatekeeping of culture.
Jenna McKenna dot com 