Hawking the Seasons

...The sports metaphor applies equally well to the graphic arts...

...Some veteran local players have been grumbling that the Transylvanian never experienced the trench warfare gone through by a "real" painter-player —such as last year's sensation, Rau-schenberg...

...Actors who fail to get the nod, on the other hand, generally stay in the bull pen forever after, calling themselves performers while complaining about the 90-per-cent unemployment rate in "their" profession...

...In all, the mounting number of seasons is enough to shame God, who in the poverty of his imagination could come up with just four...

...Some scribes feel that because it lacks the color and movement of dance, or the easy comprehensibili-ty of Broadway, serious concert music will never surpass the Class A or International League level...

...For where performing or witnessing a truly creative act is demanding and at times shattering, consumption is natural, habitual, easy, and unsatisfying except for a single moment...

...The selling of the Pop and Op movements are only the most blatant examples of the huck-sterism that goes on all the time: The succession of new genres of art since World War II and the series of new cars, usually named after animals, are litanies of the same way of thinking...

...And by the same token, advertising people by and large fail to fulfill our expectations—they are sincere, not cynical...

...Country singers, movie stars, sporting events, TV shows, and appliances must be properly merchandised as they fight for shelf space and for what is conceived Richard Biel, a new contributor to these pages, is assistant professor of sociology at Midland College...

...The New Leader to be their proper share of the market...

...But for the most part, unexceptional actors and directors eagerly, sometimes rapaciously, fight for the rewards, the bare bones of conventional victory, caring little that they do no work of significance...

...From the market point of view, such minor leagues are highly efficient mechanisms for testing and creating tomorrow's superstars...

...Cultural handicap-pers, they tend to ignore the distinction between art as a product manufactured for an entertainment season and art as something serving a purpose not exclusively related to economics—although they give the false impression of being solely concerned with the latter...

...But whatever the particular assessment, almost every commentator shares a number of assumptions and expectations that work against an adequate appraisal of things artistic...

...Ideology always disguises and glosses, as is obvious from the cases of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union...

...They introduce new models of automobiles, new styles of clothing that dominate our fashions, and new sports spectaculars to take over weekend television...

...Some of the seers and critics participating in this autumnal ritual forecast exciting, gala, and above all unique events to come...

...Greek art supported the self and state, the whole intricate culture it exemplified and contained...

...In a very few months, moreover, the same people who persuaded the buyer he was getting the ultimate in personalized transportation will be telling him that his piece of junk has been surpassed by an unbelievable model...

...Unlike the round of nature, the commercial affairs are pretty run-of-the-mill: repeatable and predictable, with no more than marginal alteration from previous outings...

...like auto dealers, too, they somehow remain solvent through boom and bust...

...They will gladly refinance the "new" bucket of bolts for him, and smilingly drive him deeper into the cellars of consumer debt—seemingly the one economic indicator that rises as phenomenally as the price of paintings...

...As a relative recluse without flamboyant habits, a press agent, powerful friends, or a marketing strategy, he would have gone un-mentioned in the annual cultural survey, and no one would have wanted his stuff...

...Unfortunately, in both baseball and theater, many are called but few are chosen...

...Whatever the case, it seems clear that the tout sheets put out by the prognosticators of the cultural season—their denials notwithstanding—traffic in essentially the same techniques and outlook as bank advertising or environmental spiels by oil companies...

...If they are not convinced and contracts are not signed soon, it will probably be necessary to go with an underfinanced foundation circuit again this season...

...And now that Hoving and others have amply shown that creativity can sell, the nature of art itself has changed...

...as a result we tend to view them as shifty and certainly less than honest...

...Admittedly, it is not difficult to come up with evidence suggesting that the two categories are no longer separable in any meaningful way...

...A presumably serious artist who starts out as a member of a nearly 10,000-year-old tradition ends up hacking it in the entertainment market of immediacy, looking for his piece of the action and trying to muscle in on the media exposure that can make him quite wealthy before he turns 30...

...It will reach small audiences in small stadiums, they say, and the pop record companies will continue to walk away with the bulk of the money to be made from making noise...

...Activities must be neatly divided into individual segments, each with its own allotted space...

...In much the same way, art merchandisers peddle each year's model of cultural hip...

...The daily and weekly critics, for their part, feed the process...

...How they must make it is the crux, and those who are merchandised inevitably become merchandise...

...We are amazed that the ideologues of these and similar systems fail to notice the gulf between reality and their own hype...

...The cultural handicappers probably believe in the artistic dope sheets they issue each season, too...

...Renaissance art, far from existing strictly for its own sake, praised God in all His glory, and serviced the slightly tarnished needs of earthly organizational edifices and administrators...

...The thrill of victory (a long-running Broadway production with sold-out theater parties or a smashing blockbuster of an art show) and the agony of defeat (a turkey that mercifully closes on opening night or an exhibition that gets panned) come to be considered natural selections of the invisible art marketplace as one promoter after another tries to chart the infinitely elastic demands of the great middle-class consumer...

...Prior to finalizing organizational details and schedules, it remains to be proven to network execs that a wider market does in fact exist...

...Ironically, sports, until relatively recently highly ordered, appear to be in mild rebellion: The hockey playoffs are going strong when the temperature is more conducive to swimming than ice skating, the World Series comes along later and later in October, and the Super Bowl takes place when the ski slopes are already full...

...With fans flocking to Brooklyn and the West Side, the gate has reached unprecedented proportions, and a two-conference league of moderns and classical is shaping up for the near future...

...Probably the most important contemporary seasons, if only because they are followed by the largest number of people, are the ones created by network television—lately split to include second seasons and minisea-sons, not to mention the summer calm into which at least an intimation of life must be injected...

...A few superstars, mostly defectors from Communist nations, have cracked the television boycott and seem destined to shatter, finally, dance's image as what Oscar Levant called "fairy's football...

...That prospect raises the disastrous specter of the World Football League...

...Dance's long-term campaign to achieve major-league status, reminiscent of the struggle waged by tennis, looks to insiders as if it will soon pay off...

...Rumors in some quarters predict that a nascent labor dispute may spoil the opening of next season...

...Word has it that the 57th-Street League has drafted a number of promising rookies from SoHo...

...The "parent club" in virtually every case has no obligation to pick up expenses until the play or performer is a proven quantity...

...While handicappers of the cultural season use loftier language than sports writers, the mental set is identical whether sports or the arts are being packaged...

...Theater is enmeshed with real estate and promotion, competition and success, with the need to find what the people want and give it to them...

...Willing accomplices in all this are the cultural newsmen, who could as easily put over the newest shower massage as the newest wrinkle in painting or Broadway show...

...Perhaps today a Madison Avenue approach can be applied to any area of life, and all problems can be solved by marketing programs of sufficient scope and effectiveness...

...Still, the hope persists that a promoter's vision may come true, that a little adroit manipulation, a stroke of blind luck, an unexpected fad or craze, some unlooked-for publicity, or the vagaries of public enthusiasm will change an average entry into a winner...

...Music bigwigs appear willing to coast along for the time being with semipro status and the prestige accrued from international association, as in polo...

...A cultural season can easily be viewed in terms of farm systems, player drafts, spring training, regular season contests, playoffs, championships, even network contracts...

...Cultural entrepreneurs and handicappers have a carefully constructed ideology that screens them from these realities...

...More than any other individual, he transformed painting from a creative to a performing act, and turned the normally staid world of the art museum on its head...

...Certainly no such frivolous formula survives from the great ages of art in the West...

...Not the least of these is the concept of a season itself, suggesting that art arrives at preordained times...

...So seasons have become ubiquitous in the current social cosmos...

...Proper merchandising of any product makes it seem some-something it is not...

...Possibly the greatest affinity, though, is with sports...

...His mastery of the Veeck-Finley school of front-office creativity, combined with the on-the-field talent he has bought (as the Yankees did), has made his squads unbeatable...

...Believers in the products they sell, they have been taken in by their own not-too-subtle campaigns...

...In all primitive societies we have records of, the situation is roughly the same...

...Yet they are worse sinners than the ad men, for they are dealing with material whose historical links with centuries of genuine art has raised it far above the level of a bar of soap...

...Upon advice from moma, it red-shirted an almost certain superstar, feeling that he needed another year of work in the publicity-mill weight room before he could be unveiled to the best advantage...

...Of course, the seasoning of high culture is by no means an isolated phenomenon: One of the byproducts of modernization has been the increasing organization of the whole spectrum of life...

...One difference between the two is that ballplayers who do not make the majors go on to other jobs...

...But when the latest quirk in painterly fashion is hyped in the same way by a well-known 57th Street art gallery, we enter what is at least a gray area...

...The seasonal merchandising of creativity has doomed art to serve little purpose other than decoration...

...Not that there is any reason why painters, actors or dancers shouldn't make money, even a lot of money...

...others mourn that the masterpiece we've been waiting for won't turn up until the next season, or the one after that...

...The Broadway farm system of regional theaters and Off-Off-Broadway lofts would make Branch Rickey proud, or envious...

...Thus the shift in emphasis from the one to the other has made variety, quantity and newness the highest values in contemporary culture...

...The kids—actors, writers, dancers, and others— work their way up from the Class D leagues of provincial, university and community theaters, or minuscule stages hidden away in odd corners of Manhattan...

...now they participate in local Little Leagues and compete for world championships...

...The cultural hucksters do everything they can to give the impression of retaining these almost sacred associations, but their real work is on a depressingly secular level...

...If such were the atmosphere a hundred years ago, Cezanne would have forever wandered the streets of provincial French towns trying to sell his poor efforts...

...This, plus the tendency to speak of "events"—a term better applied to, say, a college homecoming weekend than to the creative act—results in the transformation of all art into performing art—that is, into entertainment...

...Nineteenth-century artists and estheticians put forth the idea of art for art's sake, and it could be argued that this creed gained full acceptance with the rise of the bourgeois art cosumer who needed a few little prestige knickknacks to put on the shelves of the mansion...

...As everyone knows, Hoving, the Vince Lombardi of big-league museumology, took art out of the bush leagues...

...Nonetheless, it will plummet in value by about $1,000 the moment it is driven out of the showroom...

...A man can fairly easily be convinced that his new car will endure, that it is a thing of beauty and the end point of skilled engineering and design traditions...

...Production-consumption-profit chains of being are perfectly appropriate concerns when considering such seasonal sequences...

...Pursuits once thought of as timeless are only slightly less susceptible to scheduling than an assembly line turning out TV sets...

...Former Metropolitan Museum director Thomas Hoving, while on vacation, spotted and reportedly signed an abstractionist in a small Transylvanian town...

...Another item also has the senior circuit buzzing...

...Kids used to play pickup baseball games in cow pastures...

...Occasionally an artist of genius—someone like Joseph Chaikin—can rise above these extraneous complications...

...The packagers, owners and sellers who put together seasons naturally have a less lofty motivation than God's: They want to make a killing in the Great American Supermarket...

...They put in long hours for little or no pay, each motivated by the belief that he/she will be the one to get drafted by a big-league Broadway producer...

...They ascribe the ritual characteristics of a corporate culture to current art products, thus enhancing their own status and transforming their business into "priestly" work...