Culture and Life

by Rob Gowland

"Profitable"

Ten years ago, the Atlanta Ballet, in the US state of Georgia, found 
itself in what the US Musicians' Union describes discretely as "a financial 
bind". To help the Ballet out of its difficulties, the musicians of its 
orchestra took a cut in wages. As the Musician's representative Mark 
McConnell says today, "the musicians of the ballet have been playing for 
sub-standard wages for the last ten years".

This year, during an industrial dispute with the Ballet's management, the 
members of the orchestra learnt just how much that display of dedication 
and sacrifice meant to the Atlanta Ballet's management and the corporate 
bigwigs and socialites who make up its Board. Bugger all.

On August 14, Orchestra members attended a meeting called by a Federal 
Mediator expecting to begin negotiations with the Ballet management to 
resolve the dispute and end their strike. But the Atlanta Ballet's 
management wasn't there to negotiate.

Instead, they told the musicians that they were all fired. In future, the 
Atlanta Ballet would outsource its orchestra.

Music is integral to ballet. You cannot dance without it. The music is so 
significant that it can, and regularly does, stand alone, without the 
dance.

Undeterred, the Atlanta Ballet would outsource its "orchestra services" 
just the way it outsources its candy-bar or refreshment services.

As the Ballet's attorney put it: the Atlanta Ballet had decided to 
"eliminate the musician class of employees and move to a complete outsource 
of orchestra services". In fact, it would hire scabs as needed from the 
Czech Republic.

The Ballet had signed a contract a few days earlier with a Czech 
corporation in Prague called Poksound to provide up to 46 musicians for 
specific ballets.

Musicians supplied by Poksound will work under the Atlanta Ballet's 
direction, but will not be considered AB employees, and the Atlanta Ballet 
will not pay any required insurance, workers' compensation, or federal or 
state taxes on their behalf.

The AB orchestra has played for ballet in Georgia's capital for 20 years. 
All its members are natives of the city and typically enrich its cultural 
life outside the bounds of ballet performances.

Developing culture in Georgia, however, is not apparently the concern of 
the Atlanta Ballet's board and management. Some number cruncher has no 
doubt shown them that the Ballet can make more money using poverty stricken 
Czech musicians — for whom the number of orchestra jobs would have shrunk 
considerably since the overthrow of socialism in the Czech and Slovak 
republics.

How long will it be before they are trying to "outsource" the ballet 
company itself, I wonder? The Atlanta Ballet is state supported, but it 
must be under same pressure as other arts organisations to be "profitable".

And what better way to be profitable than by ceasing to train and maintain 
a company of soloists and corps de ballet when you can hire them in job 
lots from abroad ballet by ballet?

There must be lots of under-employed dancers in the former USSR and eastern 
Europe.

The possibilities are boundless.

* * *

Art and capitalism


The problems of the Atlanta Ballet's employees highlight once again the 
approach that now underlies so much of arts policy in capitalist countries: 
why should ballet and opera be "profitable", anyway?

The same question applies to chamber music, choirs, symphony orchestras, 
public libraries, museums, art galleries and historic buildings. Because 
they can — and frequently do — charge admission does not make them 
businesses.

Capitalism, for all its pretensions to culture, in fact has no interest in 
the arts other than as a means to increase profit.

Works of art are bought and sold as investments, a hedge against inflation 
and a sordid flaunting of wealth the "investor" never worked for.

Capitalism has long since ceased to be concerned with the promotion of 
culture. When it needed an educated, skilled mass workforce capitalism 
promoted education and culture for the people. But it is many years since 
capitalism could use all the workforce available to it.

Today, capitalism has as little interest in the widespread promotion of 
culture as it has in universal education.

Its essential philistinism is revealed in the way capitalist governments 
are cutting back on support for the arts, even those — like opera and 
ballet — that capitalists themselves like to think of as their own 
privileged domain.

The essential capitalist, we should remember, is as cultured as Kerry 
Packer, ostentatiously dropping $34 million at the casino, Rene Rivkin with 
his 67 cars, or Rupert Murdoch and his one-man crusade to dumb-down the 
world's media.