Saturday, June 13, 2009

Artistic Leadership - when no one cares

For a long time I assumed that our artistic leaders in music worked towards a goal creating policy. That is projecting their view of musical art like it or not. Here is the thing, lately I have come to suspect that their goal is not to project the art at all but to maintain their positions of leadership.

In that case protecting a musical style is not an issue at all. Rather the point is to advance insiders who would have advanced anyway without their help. In this way they can associated themselves with success in the industry, rather than take risks and perhaps marginalize themselves. Since no one cares about the results, outside of professional, interested, circles it all boils down to a matter of perception.


Most important: it makes it look as if they have an influence they don't have. They can pretend to be democratic, and interested in the "best" rather than just the old school tie. I for one, unlike the NYT, don't see anything out of the ordinary when academics from Princeton pay homage to academics from Yale.

Rather than build the rink-they merely skate on top of it.
Staying at the top one must make some strange bedfellows.
How does promoting insiders constitute anything other than projecting the status quo?

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