Art for Free

Every morning I put my name in the lottery of people who would like tickets to the free performance of HAIR in Central Park, and every afternoon I am rejected. I line up each morning in the “virtual line”, because I cannot imagine joining those who arrive in Central Park at 6 AM and wait until 1 PM to get their two tickets. Even if I could pay the $165 per ticket that it would cost to avoid both lines I suspect I will only love the performance if I am experiencing it as public art – as it is intended, for free.

I am despondent, I know I won’t be picked and I am curiously insulted every afternoon when I am rejected. My good friend came to dinner Sunday night and revealed that she’d been on the same daily emotional HAIR roller coaster. Scores of New Yorkers have stopped feeling hopeful and encouraged by free theatre, and instead have a daily dose of humility. We try to think of some way to beat the system (should we log on at midnight and be the first ones in the virtual line? Does a more artistic email moniker matter?). I know corporate sponsors get free tickets but I suspect they distribute them in the executive corners of their high-rises. Freddie Mac donated more than $50,000 and one can only hope they are giving their free tickets to public servants as a thank you for their inevitable bail out.

The treacherous lining up is a part of the mission of the Central Park endeavor, which seeks to “develop an American theatre that is accessible and relevant to all people”. I too am a supporter of the arts because I believe that if we fostered more creativity we would be better at all sorts of things, like making sure that Hurricane Katrina victims could be housed again years after the storm.

Last year I tried my hand at arts patronage when I volunteered to write a grant so that my daughter’s middle school could expand their arts program. I knew my proposal would prevail in the hotly contested process because I had typed it, prompting several people to blurt out “wow!” even before they had read any of the proposed ideas.

My star status as a parent volunteer was short-lived, however, when the person who had planned to actually do the proposed work was forced, by personal circumstance, to bow out. I thought, how hard could it be to plan a few art programs? So I assured the principal that I’d just do the work myself.

My first task was to take a group of middle school kids and their parents to meet the curator of a gallery. We gathered at a very trendy gallery in the meatpacking district. You could see the parents beaming – not at the art – but because they finally had a structured way to spend some quality time with otherwise moody pre-teens. The kids mostly tried not to make eye contact with each other so that later in school they could all pretend it had never happened.

The curator became increasingly delighted at exposing the underbelly of the gallery world to the public school crowd. He decided on the spot to take us to the secret back room where only the most well heeled patrons are invited. It is in these hidden gallery rooms where six and seven figure art hangs for sale. There in the middle of the room, suspended from the ceiling with a meat hook, was a massive sculpture made with wax flowers. The kids suddenly became intrigued and made a large circle around the figure.

At first glance it looked somewhat like a honeycomb hanging from the ceiling. But after studying the sculpture from all sides, it looked more like a giant flowered pita pocket, with flowers dripping out of its pocket and strewn carelessly on the floor below. A child finally said, “What is it?” The parents in the room shifted their weight and, like the kids previously, tried not to make eye contact with other adults. It really looked just like a giant vagina.

The people who gave me the funding to escort the middle school group to the very upscale vagina sculpture are trying to motivate an arts movement. Same as the people who inform me, every afternoon, that I do not have tickets to the free theatre in Central Park.

The curator exposed the opposite of what an arts movement aspires to create: he unveiled a hidden labyrinth of art that is for and about the elite. In the arts the movement has always been simultaneously about the practical need to create patronage and freeing society from the confines of patronage. That is why tonight someone like the CEO from Target will be sitting beside the person who has spent his or her day camped in line on a lawn in Central Park, watching a brilliant production of HAIR. Equalizing the power of the two – the CEO and the line sitter – is the struggle of movement leaders.

My Tata was a public arts pioneer. On many Sundays he would walk his gaggle of grandchildren to Armory Park, where he met up with his elderly friends to play a mariachi-style concert for anyone who happened to be sitting on the park benches. My Tata played the trumpet. I remember that Armory Park was viciously hot with too few trees and a large concrete square where my brothers and sisters and I sometimes played shuffleboard with the retirees. When my Tata died and the cemetery service ended and the mourners began to drift away from the gravesite, his Armory Park musician friends gathered next to the lowered casket and began their concert, only in a slower, deliberate tempo that paid tribute to the missing notes of a trumpet.

I would have liked to be chosen to see theatre in Central Park this summer. Though maybe all that I am seeking is that calm abandon that art inspires when some right part of the brain gets stimulated. Maybe all I really need is art unleashed from its complicated roots. Something, perhaps, like sitting on the park bench and hoping for a group of elderly trumpet players to gather in friendship and harmony.