“Elitism.” Pounding on the elite, and on a presumed “ism” of eliteness, in whatever area of endeavor, is by now so exhausted an activity that it must be hard to pick up the cudgel. Yet “anti-elitism” is the raison d’être of Sharon’s postoperatic vision. Money and class are inevitably involved, but it’s snobbery, in the form of a proclaimed superiority of taste or closely held knowledge, that rankles Sharon most mightily. To judge from his own account, his hatred of “elitism” was born of the early operagoing experiences already described, and with the feeling that the initiated were accounting him a fool. But now that he has penetrated the ranks of the initiated and won their approval for his creative destruction of their benighted practices, the money and class considerations of the grown-up world are on the front line in his anti-elitism campaign. In the public perception money, in the form of ticket prices, is a major exclusionary force. But this is specious. As Sharon points out, even at the cultural-capitol international-level opera houses, the price range won’t shock anyone who attends sporting events, rock concerts, hit Broadway musicals, or any of a number of other for-profit entertainments that have no trouble drawing sellout crowds.The difference in drawing power is in sheer popularity, and there, I’m afraid, the measure of cultural comfort, determined by specialized knowledge and a cultivated taste associated with the High Culture, is key.
In view of the whittled-down audience base, we can’t say there’s no money problem on the demand side. There is. But even if it were solved to its practical limit, with every seat sold at full price, the larger issue would remain. That’s at the supply end, particularly here in America but increasingly so in Europe and the UK, and that’s what Sharon grapples with at the Detroit Opera and with his Los Angeles adventures. The contradiction inherent in his effort is that to arrive at his anti-elite postopera he must work through the mechanism of the non-profit corporation, reliant on grants and donations from—the elite. For Sharon, this requirement is made double repugnant by his conviction that the non-profit concept is nothing but a “classic capitalist move, where a contrasting perspective is co-opted to strengthen hegemony.” Allow enough steam to be let off, and the kettle can be kept at a controlled, even boil. I don’t exactly disagree with this insight. The non-profit mechanism does function that way, among others, the difficulty always lying with what else the complainant has to suggest that might work, not in the abstract, but in reality. Sharon recounts a trip he made to Las Vegas to pitch Hopscotch to the president of a tech company in a position to be of help, only to quickly encounter the non-comprehension of a man who could not conceive of undertaking a project that could neither be of practical use nor turn a profit. Anyone who has so much as dabbled in arts development and fundraising has had such moments many times over, though to be fair to the gentleman, Hopscotch was a little bit out there.