Managing Artists

We found this post while poking around the internets. It's a short video about working with artists in a church context. We debated whether we should respond or not, because we don't want to point fingers and all...But maybe chiming in and being a provocative is good thing. Let us know if you think our comments make sense or let us know if you think we're off base. Stir the pot. Add to the discussion. We're all trying to learn from each other. Watch the the clip and then consider our thoughts below...

Shawn Wood Q&A for Echo from Collide Magazine on Vimeo.

We really appreciate Shawn Wood's advocating for artists. It's such an important thing and needed. We love how he values artists being different and also appreciate the idea that artists aren't to be coddled. We firmly believe if you release artists into their identity and calling you won't ever have to coddle them.

We do wonder, though, if "managing" artists is the way to go. Not that we know anything, but it's concerns us. So, we'll throw this up here and hopefully it spurs some healthy backing and forthing.

It seems to us our culture is rife with metaphors of commerce, commodity and exchange. It presumes the smooth flow of producing and consuming. Producing and consuming requires managing. In a culture of producing and consuming managerial language tends to become the language of value. Managerial language tends to become the standard by which human interaction is measured.

A producing and consuming culture is prone to disconnected busy-ness. Maybe the church is as prone to busy-ness and disconnection as anyone.

Maybe the church has bought into those managerial metaphors in a way we don't see and those metaphors seems so normal to us they shape how we interact with each other in ways we don't see.

If that is the case, rather than managing artists into the structure, maybe we should be listening to what artists have to say about the structure.

Maybe artists in our culture are part of the body of Christ to help the body of Christ see its busy-ness and disconnection.

Thoughts?

-Steve Frost/TWOTP

Len Sweet Clip - Wack-A-Mole

We were recently in Kansas at the National Worship Leader conference and did some filming with Len Sweet on arts in the church...Here's an outtake from those upcoming short films...

Len Sweet: Wack-A-Mole from The Work Of The People on Vimeo.

Silence

We've posted a video on Vimeo with John Goldingay. It is at first difficult truth. It then becomes vulnerable honesty. It ends with a difficult silence.

The difficult silence reminded me of a recent absence of any such silence. The absence of silence occurred during television coverage of a recent televised memorial service. It was a media event about a media event. Media events—and especially twice removed media events about media events—are very uncomfortable with actual grief. Grief is inarticulate and unpredicatable. It needs space and often, silence. Media events cannot harbour silence, because in silence media events cease to exist.

At the core of this particular media event about a media event is an inalterably human story, a person who once walked this earth is no longer with us. Regardless of what this person did do and didn't do; regardless of who this person actually was to us, or who we needed this person to be for us; regardless of what we thought or didn't think of him, he was a son, a brother, a husband and a father. He was a human being and on that alone had dignity and value. Now he is gone. The proper human response is grief.

Whatever your opinions of the man regarded in memoriam, watching his 11 year old daughter experience visceral public grief at the loss of her Daddy had to pierce even the hardest of hearts.

So yes, human hearts were pierced. But the media event itself does not have time to be pierced. It cannot broach silence. It must move on. Its predictable banality, the essence of its assuring comfort, compels it forward. It's jittery attention twanging at the slightest rustle of some fresh hubbub. Its hyperbolic gullet gobbling up unadorned grief in a single swallow. It is voracious and never satisfied. There aren't enough images of sufficient simplistic intensity. So it must vomit up its commodified chunks to be used again and again.

In this instance when the little girl grieved the loss of her Daddy, images of her were captured during the media event. The only human response was silence. At the memorial itself there was silence. During the initial media event recording the memorial there was a modicum of silence. But in the ensuing media event about a media event, the Great Miasma about which our children will reminisce, there can be no silence.

This is what I witnessed. The images of the little girl grieving were shown. When the images ended there was not silence. Literally one second after the images stopped the void was filled with an announcer's gravitas inflicted visage, "That was a difficult moment." One second after that stunningly infantile observation the announcer turned to a pundit and began asking for the pundit's analysis of the media event.

The way this commodified clip was dealt with had nothing to do with the content of the clip, which happend to be a grieving 11 year old girl. It could have been a football game, or a TV awards show, or a presidential speech. The grand and the ridiculous is all one and the same, a commodity. The media event about a media event has no choice but to plod forward in the way it was genetically engineered to plod forward, swallowing and regurgitating its own media vomit.

But a strange thing happen in this instance. The media event about a media event lurched awkwardly forward, and in doing so was in peril of rending itself free of its human symbionts who, in their humanity, were momentarily motionless. The media event feverishly lunged forward, as it always must, and for the briefest of moments it separated itself from the humans caught in the inertia of compassion. For the briefest of moments its voracious need was revealed in all its inhuman grotesqueness as it stood apart from all human sympathies.

Then in the blink of an eye, the symbionts recovered. They took up the pace to jog along side the great galumphing need, they snapped to attention and once again brought succor to the collective obdurate stare.

I think this is why the silence at the end of John's piece is so difficult, because he is vulnerable and human, and then he sits in silence and looks at us. He challenges our passive stare, challenges our complicity in consuming images of grief.

-Steve Frost/TWOTP

HELL IN A HAND BASKET

We recently spent some time with author and professor John Goldingay and his wife Ann. (More films to come). Sadly, Ann died not long after our time together. No words...Anyway, here's a clip with John talking about what breaks his heart...

*Warning, some viewers may find language in this video offensive.

HELL IN A HAND BASKET from The Work Of The People on Vimeo.

Lilly Lalime

13 year old Lilly Lalime had just gotten off the her school bus when she was struck and killed by a drunk driver. (Original story HERE). Lilly was a beautiful soul who who sought out the least of these. She was also an advocate for Advent Conspiracy and Living Water. Here's a small glimpse of her story.

Lilly Lilime from The Work Of The People on Vimeo.

What Are We Missing?

A friend sent me this story last week, maybe you're familiar with it?

On 12 January 2007, morning commuters passing through the L'Enfant Plaza Station of the subway line in Washington, D.C. were, without publicity, treated to a free mini-concert performed by violin virtuoso Joshua Bell, who played for approximately 45 minutes, performing six classical pieces during that span on his handcrafted 1713 Stradivarius violin (for which Bell reportedly paid $3.5 million).

This was an experiment conducted by Washington Post writer Gene Weingarten. (He won a pulitzer for the story). As Weingarten described the crux of the experiment: Each passerby had a quick choice to make, one familiar to commuters in any urban area where the occasional street performer is part of the cityscape: Do you stop and listen? Do you hurry past with a blend of guilt and irritation, aware of your cupidity but annoyed by the unbidden demand on your time and your wallet? Do you throw in a buck, just to be polite? Does your decision change if he's really bad? What if he's really good? Do you have time for beauty? Shouldn't you? What's the moral mathematics of the moment?

Three days earlier, Bell had played to a full house at Boston's Symphony Hall, where fairly good seats went for $100. But on this day he collected just $32.17 for his efforts, contributed by a mere 27 of 1,097 passing travelers. Only seven people stopped to listen, and just one of them recognized the performer.

Beyond the question "Do we recognize beauty in an unexpected context?" It might be fair to ask, "Do we know how to recognize beauty? Period."

We might wonder how much of the oblivious passing by was due to an atrophied ability to listen. Are we so dependent on "experts" who tell us what we should listen to that we've lost the initiative to judge on our own? Is part of the context of a concert hall the assurance that this person has been vetted by experts who know music, the musician has been dubbed "worthy," and we are now permitted to agree with the experts?

We might also wonder if the oblivious passing by had something to do with the fact that the music was Classical? Maybe people view classical music as intrinsically detached from everyday life. They might go to a classical music concert, but not to listen to the music. They go to consume the correct lifestyle experience which in turn makes the desired reflection on them as people. Since they wouldn't listen to classical music for it's won sake in the car on the way to work, they aren't going to stop to listen to a violin piece for it's own sake. This isn't a reflection Classical music per se, just our motivations for listening to music and perhaps our attendant inability to listen on our own terms, or on the terms of beauty.

-Steve Frost/TWOTP