Something Stinks, and it's not Tchaikovsky

Well, it's not just Tchaikovsky.

For reasons that are unknown to me (although I strongly suspect it must have something to do with financial solvency), Alice Tully Hall in Lincoln Center is frequently rented out to groups with little or no connection to music. When I first arrived at Juilliard nearly three years ago, it seemed as though there was a red-carpet movie premiere nearly every week during the warmer months, complete with outdoor canopy and press area (which effectively blocks traffic on 65th st.). A few that stick in my memory are The Last Airbender, which included a massive stage erected literally in the middle of the street, and Michael Moore's Capitalism, a Love Story which, despite its ostensibly anti-establishment message, was presented with as much fanfare and extravagance as any other Hollywood blockbuster. More recently, the premiere of the 8th Harry Potter movie filled the street with so many slack-jawed gawkers that Juilliard students had to exit the building onto Amsterdam Ave. The movie premieres are a nuisance, but one could at least argue that cinema, however degraded its popular incarnations may be, is still a legitimate art form and not totally out of place in a performing arts center. It might be best to not cite The Last Airbender in that argument.

This past week, however, Alice Tully hosted the FiFi awards, an event billed as "the Oscars of the fragrance industry." It was certainly a star-studded event -- Nicole Richie, Chaka Khan, Martha Stewart, not to mention the inexplicably popular Jane Lynch, who hosted the festivities. As usual, pedestrians were diverted across the street by glaring security guards and traffic was backed up all the way to the Hudson. A few people stood on the grassy area next to Avery Fischer attempting to catch a glimpse of this or that B-lister.

Now, I'm not even sure why the fragrance industry needs or deserves an awards show, but that's not really the point. They needed a venue, and Lincoln Center apparently needs money, so what's the problem? The problem is that this was intended to be a place for the arts, where the various performing groups that were previously scattered throughout the city would come together to create an atmosphere of mutual support, creativity, and vitality. That's why Juilliard moved here -- it was intended to be the artistic nerve center not just of the city but of the entire country where students could learn from and observe the best of the best. To see one of its primary venues pimped out for such an orgiastic, unapologetic display of superficiality is something that should make artists, and anybody who has any respect for the arts, cringe. In this cynical and post-modern age it sounds hopelessly anachronistic to suggest that the arts (whatever that means!) should be given a place of honor and that their spaces should be sacred, but this was exactly the intent of those who donated to, and built, this complex. Less than 50 years later, however, the nerve center of the arts in New York has become a a high-class brothel of event spaces available to any disease-ridden organization that can slip a twenty to the bureaucrats whose enormous salaries necessitate the practice in the first place.

Where now is the messiah who will drive the peddlers of frivolity out of the temple of art?