Tynan's Anger

Today I broke protocol from my normal decisions with what to post on this blog by writing a polemical post, somewhat off-topic, but on an issue that I find incredibly important. I had been formulating this post for a week, but I decided to post it today, in part, because tonight I will be seeing Mike Daisey perform the opening night Keynote at the SoloNOVA festival.

With the traditional medium for arts criticism declining across the board, the two main new avenues for criticism have been online criticism and the work of the artists themselves. I dabble in online criticism for indie rock, film, and theater, theater, and in case of the latter two, the art is overwhelmed with artists doing what critics normally did. Bands like LCD Soundsystem, Art Brut, have worked crafted much finer assessments of fellow bands and the general indie rock culture than most critics, including myself.

In film, we have filmmakers like James Toback, Michael Haenecke, Kirby Dick, and even Ron Howard, who have taken to artistically brilliant critical commentary on mass media even when their medium, film, is so commercial that the most basic form of criticism, satire, has been corrupted by commercial interests.

Theater, as one of the more defiantly archaic modern media, has had something of a slow transition to contemporary art-as-commentary. The longer-term perspective of theater is its greatest artistic strength as well as it's greatest financial liability. For theater, however, the main new voice of art-as-criticism has been Mike Daisey. Debuting just over a year ago, How Theater Failed America took square aim at the flaws inherent in today's economic and cultural model of theater. Daisey took discussions normally left for dry conferences, interviews, and panel discussions, and launched into an invective that no one would dare use in those conferences. It was incredibly cathartic, incredibly provocative, and also incredibly entertaining. Daisey is a polemicist in the best kind, the one who lives and breathes what he is saying, and uses the artistic medium to get away with things he would have more difficulty doing in everyday conversation.

The major criticism of traditional media, one which blogs, at their best, are able to expose, is that their need to actively engage with their sources, maintain personal friendships, and submit to political and economic pressures overwhelms the need for journalistic independence. Daisey's art, then, has the mindset of a blogger, and it is no surprise that he is one of the most controversial theater bloggers in the country. Daisey has gotten into trouble with his art almost as frequently as he has in the blogosphere, and recently, his feuding with Todd Olsen of the American Stage Theater Company in Florida has been the talk of the theater blogosphere (Chris Wilkinson provides an recap at the Guardian). For Daisey, art and commentary are no different, and he is following in the tradition of Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw in living in both the art and art criticism world. Unlike Shaw and Wilde however, Daisey is combining his art and art criticism, making the two virtually indistinguishable, either on his blog or on the stage.

In both cases, that can turn the discourse into an invective not usually seen in a Man of Letters. Hence, the rhetorical fury on both sides of the Daisey/Olsen debate seems more based on the kind of rhetoric seen in theater, which has the ability to invoke "poetic license." Whether that is the right kind of rhetoric to use in discussion is another story, but it seems to be the one taking place on the Internet right now. It's also taking place wherever Mike Daisey is performing.