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INTRODUCTION The
primary bases of support of the creative artist are commerce and pedagogy.
Patronage, which in past eras might have been a separate category, has
generally disappeared within commerce and pedagogy. In commerce, bluntly,
the artist must sell; in pedagogy he must teach or "research". Patronage,
public and private, once had some sense of freewheeling benevolence about
it. Private patronage today tends to be an investment in the increased
future value of an artist's present work. Foundation patronage today
is largely under the administration of the universities, and thus is often
directed as an investment in the future teaching potential of the artist. The
idea of patronage in past "golden eras" of art was more far-reaching
than mere investment in an individual artist. It was investment
in a whole "scene", in an community of artistic and social endeavor.
Today many artists receive foundation or institutional patronage
on an individual basis, often to enable them precisely to escape that
community in which they otherwise work. Travel is broadening, and unquestionably
there are occasions in which this escape saves the creative artist from
complete atrophy. But consider whether the premise for this escape-oriented
support might be misplaced. Consider the possibility that the creative
artist might be better off if the financial support of individual escape
were invested instead in nourishment of the "scene". The
historical example in which creative artists were maintained to enhance,
even glorify, the reputation of their supporting patrons was an extremely
viable basis for artistic patronage. It was certainly responsible
for those golden eras which still elicit nostalgia from many critics.
Further, the best attributes of this historical example are also
the healthiest aspects of the present-day commercial and pedagogical bases
of artistic endeavor. What I consider healthy and unhealthy about these various bases of cultural support, as well as an outline of a specific example of community artistic endeavor outside these bases, is the reason for this article on the ONCE FESTIVAL and how it happened. HISTORY The
necessity for working outside the established ways was inherent in the
situation. The artists involved were of different disciplines: composers,
painters, filmmakers, writers, sculptors, and architects. Their
common ground was that they all lived in Ann Arbor. Being hundreds
of miles from New York City, the avenue of commerce was basically inaccessible.
Though a few were employed in teaching at the University of Michigan,
virtually all efforts at enlisting support from this institution precipitated
resistance and animosity to the project. Applications and contacts
with numerous foundations, continuously for more than six years, produced
no responses beyond a growing file of polite, through sometimes enthusiastic,
fine-bond, raised-letterhead replies. The
initial group of artists included composers Robert Ashley, George Cacioppo,
Gordon Mumma, Roger Reynolds, Donald Scavarda, and Bruce Wise; architects
Harold Borkin and Joseph Wehrer; filmmaker George Manupelli; and painter-sculptors
Mary Ashley and Milton Cohen. These artists had worked, independently
and together, on various projects in Ann Arbor from early 1957, including
Milton Cohen's "Space Theatre", the Cooperative Studio for Electronic
Music, and the production of several films. In
1960, at the suggestion of poet Keith Waldrop, the group decided to produce
a festival of concerts of new music. Concerts require an audience
and performers, thus the festival needed financial backing for publicity
and the hiring of musicians. Robert Ashley and Roger Reynolds approached
a local organization, the Dramatic Arts Center. Though of modest financial
means, the Dramatic Arts Center, under the directorship of the mathematician
Wilfrid Kaplan, had provided the auspices for several years of repertory
theatre and experimental film programs in Ann Arbor. They were immediately
interested in the festival proposal, and approved the concerts for February
of their 1960-1961 season. The
festival consisted of four concerts on two consecutive weekends. The
opening concert featured members of the Domaine Musical Ensemble of Paris
with Luciano Berio and Cathy Berberian. The second concert was chamber
music by members of the ONCE group. The third concert presented
Paul Jacobs in a recital of "classical" piano music of the serial
era, and the final concert consisted of large ensemble pieces by ONCE
composers. All four concerts were recorded for broadcast by educational
FM radio. The audiences were near capacity, a result we attributed
to intensive pre-festival publicity as much as to the inherent glamour
of the festival itself. The cost of the festival was $1,200. The
ticket sales amounted to $1,100. The Dramatic arts Center, whose sole
financial resources depended on memberships for each yearly season, made
up the difference. Financial
considerations aside, the festival was certainly an artistic success.
Even before the final concert was completed the audience was asking
about the likelihood of another such festival, making it an annual event.
The name ONCE indicates that this possibility had not been among
our original considerations. Before the summer of 1961 plans were
underway for a second ONCE Festival. Again
the Dramatic Arts Center offered their support. The second festival
was scheduled for February and March of 1962, included six concerts, and
was again recorded in its entirety. The 1962 ONCE Festival cost
more money and lost more money. But both the attendance and the
scope of the programming were greater. The
sum of the controversy, the ever burgeoning audiences, and the creative
momentum which now gripped the ONCE artists, made a third ONCE Festival
imperative. In February and March of 1963 four concerts were presented.
The name ONCE remained. Considerations of changing the name
from ONCE to TWICE to THRICE, or to ONCE AGAIN, had all but ceased. In
quiet moments we collected the puns which were offered: ONCE TOO OFTEN,
ONCE IS ENOUGH, SO WHO ONCE IT, and so forth. The
fourth ONCE Festival was the most grandiose. Eight concerts were
presented in six days of February 1964. The guest ensembles were
the Judson Dance Theatre, the Brandeis University Chamber Chorus, and
the Bob James Trio with Eric Dolphy (his last American performance). The
ONCE Chamber Ensemble was expanded to 30 performers and presented three
concerts of their own. The entire budget for the 1964 ONCE Festival
was less than $4,000, and the loss, this time of $2,400, was again assumed
by the Dramatic Arts Center. The
appearance of this flyer created a small hysteria, and the Dramatic Arts
Center called an emergency meeting. Suggestions that the flyer be
withdrawn were overcome: the ultimate problem was obtaining further funds
for reprinting it to meet the demand for souvenir copies. The extent
of this flyer's success was indicated to me dramatically in New York City
the following April. At the seminar following one of Max Polikoff's
"Music in our Time" concerts, on which Ashley and I had just
performed, the first question from the audience concerned the availability
of autographed copies of the purple ONCE flyer. The
fifth ONCE Festival consisted of four concerts, in February 1965, that
included Lucas Foss and an ensemble of Creative Associates from the State
University of New York at Buffalo; an ensemble of New York musicians David
Behrman, Philip Corner, Malcolm Goldstein, and Max Neuhaus; a lecture
by critic and author Peter Yates, and the ONCE ensemble. This was
the last ONCE Festival presented during February and March of each year. This
sixth festival signaled important changes in certain aspects of the ONCE
activities in Ann Arbor. Because the parking-structure roof was
much larger than the indoor concert spaces used for the previous ONCE
Festivals, and because the local audience had not yet felt the pressure
of cultural activities which saturate Ann Arbor in the Spring, ONCE AGAIN
drew enormous standing-room crowds. In fact, audiences were more than
twice the size of any previous entire ONCE Festival. For the first
time ONCE was able to return money to the Dramatic Arts Center. Further,
the pressure of ONCE Group engagements elsewhere during the Spring concert
season began to make the organization of a festival in Ann Arbor at that
time increasingly difficult. Thus, it was clear that future festivals
would be more feasible in the Fall than in the Spring. In summary, 29 concerts of new music were presented during six ONCE Festivals, including 67 premiere performances out of a total of 215 works by 88 contemporary composers. I have used the words "music" and "composers" here since music was the predominant aspect of the ONCE Festivals. Experimental films, modern dance, theatre, and intermedia productions were also part of the programming. Because of the intensive activity in new cinema during the past decade, the annual Ann Arbor Film Festival was organized in 1962, and films then only occurred on the ONCE Festival in intermedia contexts. Theatre and modern dance became increasingly prominent with each ONCE Festival. HINDSIGHTS
1 But
the ONCE Festival had to happen IN SPITE of the university. The
university community was neglecting certain responsibilities. The
problem, simply, was that in spite of considerable effort within the university
for years previous to the ONCE Festival, it had been impossible to establish
the precedent of performing contemporary music as routine activity of
the community. There was no lack of attention to the classics: Ann
Arbor is noted in this respect. But posing the rhetorical question
"whose music did the classical composers perform?" brought only
silent embarrassment for an answer. In
retrospect it is difficult for me to understand why it had not occurred
to us, previous to Keith Waldrop's suggestion, to produce our own concerts.
We had assumed that only two avenues to this accomplishment were
possible: by means of academic support, or by braving the hassle in New
York. We were not an institution, but merely a diverse group of
artists, and thus foundation patronage was out of the question. Part
of the preamble to the Dramatic Arts Center reads "...to encourage
important but little-known developments in the arts, including experimental
creation in drama, music, films and other media...". Because
this was so similar to the stated purposes of the many foundations from
which we had received polite rejections, we missed an essential difference.
The Dramatic Arts Center was part of our immediate community rather
than an impersonal monolith from elsewhere. This is extremely important
for creative artists who wish to accomplish something of their own without
going into exile, or submitting to excessive depersonalization. After
enlisting the support of the Dramatic Arts Center we set to work at programming
the first ONCE Festival. Almost intuitively we sensed that if the
scope of this programming was broad enough we might avoid some of the
harassment of our detractors. We discovered that the broader we made the
spectrum of programming the greater the controversy that followed. However,
by maintaining a broad spectrum we could take greater risks with individual
works and performers, and at the same time avoid trivial arguments about
what was proper and pertinent. Everything became a risk worth taking. When
so much music is presented in so short a time, the audience can't attend
everything. So it was still necessary to reassure the person who
attended a ONCE Festival concert of relatively conservative new music
and thereafter complained that ONCE was reactionary. It was necessary
to argue with the person who attended a single concert of extreme innovation
thereafter to complain that ONCE was too radical. When such extremes
were combined on a single concert the complaint was that ONCE was too
eclectic, or worse, disorganized. The
audiences continued to grow, in size as well as diversity. Performance
and rehearsals space became a problem. For the first two ONCE Festivals
the small auditorium of the First Unitarian Church was rented. The
combination of rehearsals and concerts eventually became an imposition
on the church activities, so the third ONCE Festival was presented in
the meeting hall of the Ann Arbor Community Center. A still larger
space became necessary, and for the fourth and fifth festivals the local
VFW Hall was engaged. For a cultural oasis it is curious that, except
for the Community Center meeting room, Ann Arbor had no civic auditorium
or performance space. The university and public school systems have
too little space even to accommodate their own activities. Thus,
for the sixth festival, ONCE AGAIN, the city council was petitioned for
use of a municipal parking garage. As trivial as it may seem, suitable
space was the second most complicated problem of the ONCE Festival. The
most complicated problem was money. I mentioned that the entire
budget for the 1964 festival was less than $4,000. This was the
largest budget for any of the six festivals. Remember that the 1964
festival was eight concerts, and included four guest ensembles. Those
guest ensembles totaled more than fifty performers who traveled better
than 500 miles to perform on the festival. Obviously
it cost more than $4,000 to produce the 1964 ONCE Festival. The
two guest university ensembles subsidized a substantial portion of their
own costs. The remaining guest performers agreed to participate
for their travel and accommodations costs. Local union musicians
were paid basic scale, and nearly everyone else contributed their services.
The remaining costs were publicity, rental of space and equipment,
and publisher's fees. All
six festivals were run on this "cost" basis. It is no
longer a sufficient basis to continue the festival. Everyone who
contributed time and effort to ONCE considered it as a cause, the good
cause of establishing a viable contemporary performance arts activity.
After six years the ONCE Festival came to the point where it's viability
required a more professional financial basis. If for no other reason
it became quite impractical and rather embarrassing to ask performers
to choose between playing on ONCE for "cost" or elsewhere for
more adequate remuneration. But the ONCE Festival did establish
the precedent of paying for the performance of new music in Ann Arbor. Efforts
were also applied to the propagation of the festival beyond the immediate
community. All of the concerts were recorded on tape for educational
FM broadcasting and distribution overseas. The tapes of the festivals
still enjoy an active re-broadcast schedule. The concerts received
a fair measure of attention in the press, considering that journalistic
attention to unusual cultural activities outside of New York City is minimal.
It is curious that more press attention was given to ONCE internationally
than locally, perhaps an indication of some remaining apathetic provincialism. For
at least two of the festivals the absence of the local press was an outright
avoidance of "controversy". It was a multi-issued controversy
that extended beyond the music itself, and at times effected the morale
of the festival participants. Part of the problem was small-town
professional jealousy, an issue of little concern except to the easily
paranoid. A
distinct feeling of resistance developed from the University School of
Music community, to some extent because following the first ONCE Festival
a contemporary music series was finally organized under university auspices.
But I suspect the problem was due more to a real sense of alienation,
from the academic musical scene, which enveloped the students who participated
in or attended the ONCE Festival. Discussion
and argument between the students and their teachers disrupted classroom
schedules for weeks surrounding each ONCE Festival. For some of
the student performers ONCE became an extra-curricular activity which
almost completely usurped their attention to academic endeavor. At
the time of the 1964 ONCE Festival there was a nearly unanimous boycott
of the festival concerts by the School of Music faculty, and pressure
applied to the music students to do likewise, on grounds that such activities
were everything from immoral to academically and culturally disreputable.
This student-faculty alienation was increased to absurdity by the participation
of two ensembles from rival academic institutions on this very ONCE Festival. The
"official" resistance which developed was hardly more than a
minor problem. I mention it for its sociological significance -- it courses
parallel to the social and political alienation from their time which
affects many students in the United States -- and as a reminder that problems
and accomplishments always coexist in experimental ventures. Two
further achievements of the ONCE Festival were not at first among our
motives, but we very quickly recognized and encourage their presence.
The first of these was the example of community-based contemporary
arts activity for other communities. The ONCE Festival supplied
impetus to similar projects which followed in Seattle (the New Dimensions
in Music), Toronto (The Isaacs Gallery series), and Tucson (the New Arts
Workshop), to name just a few. Secondly,
the ONCE Festival assisted in decentralizing the focus of contemporary
performance activities from the excessively strong base which it has held
in New York City. This dominant centralization is one of the most detrimental
aspects of culture in America. The means of communication and propagation
concerning the arts existed almost entirely in New York. The creative
artist outside of New York has been excluded from these means, and isolated
from the healthy feedback he would experience with more diversified communications. ENVIRONMENT One
of those collaborations was the light-sculpture-theatre called, at various
times "Manifestations: Light and Sound" and "Space Theatre".
This project included artist Milton Cohen, architect Harold Borkin,
filmmaker George Manupelli, and the composers Robert Ashley and myself.
Public performances were underway in early 1957 and developed into
the elaborate "Teatro dello Spazio" productions presented by
the group in Italy on the 1966 Venezia Biennale. The
Cooperative Studio for Electronic Music was organized by Robert Ashley
and myself, early in 1958, to provide specially composed music for the
Space Theatre productions, and sound tracks for the films of George Manupelli.
The studio developed in several directions, supplying music for
other independent filmmakers and for commercial films, and designing unique
"cybersonic" equipment for concert electronic music with live
performance. The
Performance Arts Research Laboratory Conference was organized (in 1963)
by Robert Ashley, Harold Borkin and Joseph Wehrer. Presented under
the auspices of the College of Architecture and Design, the conference
brought representatives from all aspects of the performance arts to Ann
Arbor for an intensive exchange of ideas. This exchange was edited into
a large document for the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare. The
Ann Arbor Film Festival was a direct outgrowth of the ONCE Festival. Ultimately
co-sponsored by the Dramatic Arts Center and the Student Cinema Guild,
and under the direction of George Manupelli, festivals of experimental
films have been presented on an annual basis since 1963. The prize-winning
films of this festival are distributed on a collaborative basis to more
than a dozen other American film festivals, and ultimately reach an audience
of nearly 100,000 people within the span of a few months. Contemporary
music concert activity was extended throughout the year by the presentation
and recording of individual ONCE Friends concerts. In response to
many requests from private groups and colleges, several tour ensembles
were organized for concerts and performances outside of Ann Arbor. One
series of 14 concerts was called "New Music for Pianos", another
was a series of lecture- demonstrations in the performance arts and, of
course, the touring performance ensemble of The ONCE Group. The
ONCE Group is an intermedia performance ensemble. Productions include
works of the individual performing artists in the ensemble, from new music
to experimental film. But the predominant activity has been theatrically
oriented. Large-scale intermedia works are both composed and
produced on a collaborative basis. These works exploit the resources of
music, film, television, sculpture, modern dance, electronically manipulated
sound and light projection, theatre and environment. Since 1963
the ONCE Group has given numerous performances on tour in the United States,
with a repertoire of ten original collaborative works, and was invited
as the United States representative to the 1965 Biennale de Sao Paulo
in Brazil. With the exception of three small research grants to the Space Theatre, the Dramatic Arts Center sponsorship of the ONCE Festival and the Ann Arbor Film Festival, and the Performance Arts Research Laboratory, these activities were entirely self-supporting. HINDSIGHTS
2 At
the outset the majority of artists in the ONCE environment were musicians,
specifically composers. Music composition is undisputedly the creative
endeavor that is least likely to enable an artist to survive. In
the United States particularly, the spectacle of isolated and unknown
composers filing their unperformed manuscripts into rarely opened storage
is downright pathetic. The
institutions of musical performance -- the orchestras and instrumental
ensembles, the musical societies, and the academies -- are largely to
blame. These institutions are generally uninterested in composers
of their own time because they are deterred by the risks of performing
contemporary music. Contemporary music is reputed to be bad for
the box-office, which means, presumably, that the public isn't interested
either. Part of the blame belongs with the public, which has lost
sight of why they have any music to enjoy in the first place. And
part of the blame is with the composers themselves, many of whom have
avoided the challenge to explore beyond the established performance opportunities
and create institutions more pertinent to their own time. Under
these conditions the morale of the isolated composer can be very low indeed.
The only economically realistic choices for the composer are to teach
composition in a university, be born wealthy and develop skill in the
stock market, or abandon composition as a means of livelihood. Teaching
composition is not as aesthetically attractive as it might seem: it
has the kiss of creative death about it. It is a remarkable statistic
that practically no one who has attained significance as a composer in
the 20th Century has taught as a steady vocation in an academic institution. But
the fact that there are some serious composers flourishing in this century,
who were not born wealthy, indicates another alternative. The flourishing
20th Century composers share much the same basis as their counterparts
in previous eras. They receive the nourishment of sustained involvement
in an active and artistically challenging cultural-community. For
some of the artists in Ann Arbor the ONCE activities were nothing short
of Renaissance. The stylistic, technical, and artistic growth of
composers George Cacioppo, Robert Ashley, and Donald Scavarda, for instance,
was profound. The opportunities for performance of their music previous
to the ONCE Festival existed only on rare University of Michigan concerts,
or when the composers traveled to distant academies. The infrequency
of performance under these conditions was little enough motivation to
continue. The lack of exposure to a broad public audience, inherent
in the academic atmosphere, was deleterious. I would suggest that
the individuality and maturity of these composer's works would never have
developed without the access to the broader public for which the ONCE-oriented
activities were responsible. Further,
the confrontation of these composers with innovative performance arts
other than music encouraged them to explore not only new and practical
applications for their musical creativity, but to extend their talents
into untried media. Robert Ashley, for instance, now spends a fruitful
portion of his energies in the issues of experimental theatrical production.
Donald Scavarda composes not only with sound, but had developed
specials means of film-composition with visual materials. My own
work has extended to include the development of live-electronic performance
means of music. Whatever
began as fanciful speculation was rapidly put to the test of immediate
application in public performance. On occasion this procedure drew
criticism about the propriety of confronting paying audiences with crackpot
experiments. Yet this simultaneous operation of innovation and pragmatism
proved to be a very sure way to produce valid and dynamic artistic results. The
impact of the creative momentum, which increased from festival to festival,
was sometimes really invigorating. It supercharged the progress
of certain composers in particular. The works which George Cacioppo
composed from 1961 to 1966, for instance, each took greater risks than
their predecessors, yet each was incontrovertibly more successful. One
of Cacioppo's prime achievements was the exploitation of radical sound-
producing procedures within an ensemble context. The faithful performers
of the ONCE Festival musical ensembles, having shared in the composer's
progressive ideas right from the first festival, eagerly awaited each
new Cacioppo composition. Even through each successive work was
more technically difficult, the performers rapidly integrated Cacioppo's
expanding musical vocabulary into their own. As a result, even though
the festivals were often plagued with insufficient rehearsal time, a high
percentage of exemplary performances were obtained. It
is tempting to cite what were for me the most exciting moments of the
ONCE Festivals. I would have to mention the apogee-like sequence of concerts
in the fourth ONCE Festival on which Ashley's symphony IN MEMORIAM CRAZY
HORSE, Cacioppo's orchestral-choral ADVANCE OF THE FUNGII, my own live-electronic-
performance MEGATON FOR WILLIAM BURROUGHS, and Scavarda's chambermusic-cinema
integration LANDSCAPE JOURNEY were premiered. The following festival
was propinquitous with Cacioppo's chamber-ensemble TIME ON TIME IN MIRACLES,
Mary Ashley's theatre-spectacle JELLO MAN, and John Cage's melodrama VARIATIONS
IV. A long-playing recording has been issued which includes several
of these works in their premiere concert performances.* With
the environmental activities the productive momentum also had a telling
effect. Creative endeavors on a collaborative basis by artists of different
disciplines are notoriously fraught with disaster, and rarely survive
but the shortest time. Yet the ONCE Group not only thrived under
this productive momentum, but even bypassed that persistent problem of
morale in assigning a name to the source of the creative responsibility.
Each artist is content to acknowledge that a collaborative
production is by "The ONCE Group". There
is some question in my mind whether the momentum of cultural-community
which developed in the ONCE environment could have occurred with a different
financial and social basis. With ONCE there was always an insufficient
amount of money; important aspects of production were neglected as a result.
But the support of the community itself, as modest as it was, was at least
direct and immediate. Money obtained from large and distant
foundations that have no real and personal commitment within the community
tends to be accompanied by hyper-institutionalization. The ill effects
of this were avoided. There was no delay in obtaining money which,
when finally received, would be dissipated in considerable part to the
"overhead" of institutionalized administration. The
financial assistance which the ONCE Festival received from the Dramatic
Arts Center was available when it was most needed. There are times
in a cultural-community when the situation is ripe for action, when the
coincidence of the right people in the right place at the right time is
at hand. Because of the immediate response of the Dramatic Arts
Center, ONCE was spared the fate of similar project in another part of
the United States which, because of years of delay, had virtually disintegrated
by the time support was finally received from a foundation on the opposite
coast. I
have belabored the subject of financial support not only because money
for artistic purposes is a necessity, but also to establish the critical
nature of where it comes from. Money from academic institutions
is problematical because the nourishment of the contemporary arts too
rarely fits within their concept of pedagogical function. Money from the
large foundations is, presently, encumbered by deleterious inefficiency.
Finally, money from a commerce of art will not happen until
a broad and substantial commerce is established on a decentralized basis
pertinent to our time. The establishment of such a commerce is predicated
on the existence of a viable, widespread cultural-community, and this
responsibility lies mostly with the individual communities. Whatever
the source, money lavished on an artist or two, now and then, is hardly
sufficient to create a cultural-community. Culture-community is
contingent on sustained investment in the entire scene. The examples
of history are so decisive that argument is unnecessary. Golden
eras result from investment in a broad cultural spectrum (this was the
healthiest aspect of the competitive imperial patronage of past centuries).
Hundreds of artists must be nourished without premature question
of their ultimate potential. This is at once the riskiest and most
potent kind of investment. The
production of once-a-year events would not have been sufficient spark
for the creative momentum in Ann Arbor. The requirement of such
a scene is a continuous pressure of diverse and even opposing activities.
In its most mundane terms it may be a sequence of relentless
deadlines which the artist must meet for the production and propagation
of his work. At times in Ann Arbor we scheduled concerts for presentation
with as little as a few weeks notice, for which many of the works to be
introduced were not yet completed, and some had not even been conceived.
The slightest indication that a composer was thinking of making
a new work was enough for us to take action. There were occasions
when the person responsible for the production and publicity of a concert
would simply fabricate a title for another composer's not-yet-conceived
work. Some of the best compositions resulted from this breakneck
scheme. At worst, a composer might have time only to revise and
improve upon a previous work, in order not to have his name eliminated
altogether from the program at the last minute. Very few composers
elsewhere at the time had the blessed opportunity to make revisions and
improvements in a previous piece with an assured second performance. The
continual search for appropriate performance space also contributed to
the dynamism of the scene. Some of the spaces we obtained were far
afield of the traditional concert-hall format. It was necessary
then for the composers to consider implications of the presentation of
their work with which they are not usually confronted. This problem
alone has been one of the most germinal forces in the production of the
ONCE Group, and offers a partial explanation of the architectural auspices
of the Performance Arts Research Laboratory Conference. I
have been liberal in my use of the terms 'artistic nourishment" and
"cultural-community". It is a rare creative artist who
survives, or even attempts to work, in isolation from the world. Artists
require audiences as well as a community of other artists. An artist
has little function or self-justification without the exercise of his
means of expression or communication with an audience. The artist
develops and the audience develops because of this exercise. The greatest nourishment for the artist comes from the cultural-community in which he lives, not only because that community unity is the consumer of his art, but because it reflects back to him much of the basis for his own artistic insights. Likewise, the greatest nourishment for the cultural community comes from the artists who, living within that community, have immediate access to the means of shaping its cultural potential.
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