This notion of risk avoidance in our entertainment is very disturbing. It has to potential of completely destroying some forms of performance. You have to take a chance as an audience, or artists won’t ever be able to innovate.
My guess is this probably stems from the depressed state of America’s modern middle class. Going out for a night of entertainment is a pretty expensive proposition for today’s “in-debt-up-to-our-ears” middle class professionals. We’re also burnt out from working 80-hour weeks for no overtime pay. So when we do go out to escape, we want something safe and familiar. We want guarantees. And the more the entertainment industry tries to give us that safe and familiar guarantee, the more we are robbed of any truly new experiences. All art gets watered down to the least common denominator. The safe and familiar gets to be a smaller and smaller range of options over time.
This is how Reality TV happened.
Artists and venues and entertainment executives should be FIGHTING this entitlement of the incurious, but instead many seem to be capitulating, betraying each other to gain our favor. And that’s definitely not a good thing. When the general audience gets to rule over which art is worthy or not worthy, that’s the beginning of the end.
