There, Bread and Puppet, there's my contribution to your Cheap Art Manifesto. But I might be willing to go further than that. I might be willing to go out on a limb, to go so far as to say that
Cheap Art Can Change The World In A Way That Expensive Art Can't.
Expensive Art, by definition, requires financial resources. Those resources can come from many sources: individual or corporate donors who believe in your art enough to back up that belief with checks, subscribers who believe your art (or your taste in art) will be "successful" or "good" or of interest to them on a consistent enough basis to invest in several of your endeavors up front (which requires that you acquire or maintain the resources to create or curate said art on a regular basis...that you create a satisfactory supply stream), grant-making institutions who buy in to your mission, your message and/or your track record. Expensive art usually requires you to make choices to "earn back" your investment, be that in the form of ticket sales, positive publicity, the attraction of more wealthy donors.
So what does that mean? It means that, as a rule, you're asking for the buy-in of the people who control financial resources in order to make your art -- whatever your art. May I suggest that if you're asking for money with your right hand, and making art with your left, YOU are the medium, and have, at least in the long term, at least from a macro-perspective, some seriously limiting factors on your message?
All of this seems patently obvious, but it's worth remembering when you hear an artistic director's musings on "creative risks." Because there are CREATIVE risks (ooh, a raining elevator onstage! ooh, DEVISED! ooh, we're sitting on CUSHIONS instead of SEATS!) and there are social/cultural/political risks -- risks like queering the stories you put on your main stage, risks like telling "women's stories" in more than one of your five plays in a season, risks like taking "icky" issues like abortion head-on, risks like pointing out the deeply flawed, and even dangerous, practices of a faith community with which your theater has a relationship, risks like drawing connections or parallels between the business practices of your biggest corporate sponsor and human rights violations half a world away, risks like telling stories from perspectives that might not sit well with the dominant political views of your subscriber base. And you can tell me that directors/writers/artistic staff are brave enough and committed enough to do these things anyway, but they're doing them "anyway" -- they're hitting the pause button and deliberating the consequences (for their community, sure, but crucially for their institution) before they give a particular project or choice the green light.
And the more expensive the art, the more resources required by "outside" parties, the more power those outside voices will likely have. And the more money is on the table (especially the more money/resources/power any one outside party has), the more likely that voice has some vested interest in the status quo, because it is through the social and economic status quo that you have accrued the power to invest in the first place.
So. There are limitations, significant if surmountable, to the "change agency" of "Expensive" art, whether it's a Broadway musical, a Blockbuster Film, Shakespeare in the Park, or hell, even the Lincoln Memorial (which, after all, was intended, like his most famous speech, to dedicate, to consecrate, and to hallow). Even if tons of people see it for free, it's still Expensive Art -- art that required Investment.
That's one of the reasons I like Cheap Art.
Cheap art, and I'm talking VERY cheap art, isn't bound by those constraints. Does it have other constraints, significant ones? Absolutely. Cheap art, like expensive art, must consider its audience, must consider time and place and impact on its audience, needs to think about creative and artistic integrity and quality. But Cheap Art's ability to put on the next show, the ability of the "cheap art" institution to put on the next show, isn't bound by its ability to pay for the current one. Because where Expensive Art combines money and imagination, Cheap Art gets by on imagination. Cheap art, in my experience, might reach a smaller audience...but it's also more likely to reach a less traditional audience...the teenagers wandering through the park who are distracted by, and then drawn into, a live music performance, instead of the teenagers who have been loaded into a bus and driven downtown to sit in a "real" music venue. The hung-over executive who wanders into his local coffee shop for a quick morning fix, only to be confronted by, possibly moved by, a painting or photograph by a local artist co-opting the coffee shop walls as her "gallery." The inner-city kids who see their park transformed into a stage for a one-night-only free performance by a bunch of college kids.
One of the things I like about Cheap Art is that is that you find it in the damnedest places. You turn a corner -- and there's a beautiful piece of graffiti. You go for your morning coffee...and are confronted by a figure study that makes you pause. You go to the park to throw a frisbee around...and find a drum circle, 50-people strong, and you stop to dance, or listen, or gawk.
Cheap Art is defined, in other words, by its accessibility. By that, of course, I don't mean that you can necessarily "understand" it (in fact, given that much cheap art is significantly less vetted/developed than its expensive counterpart, odds are higher that it'll be less digestible), but that it's easier to GET TO IT. You don't gotta pay Twenty Bucks to go look at it, $75 to go listen to it, $125 plus the cost of the subway to go watch it. And the "you" in question is, ideally, more broadly defined -- it's the homeless vet who knows he'll get snacks along with the show, the harried parents who can't afford a babysitter but CAN afford to haul the stroller to the park.
Cheap Art Is Less Contained.
Cheap Art is Harder to Control (admittedly, this can be good and bad).
What (the best) Cheap Art Lacks In Production Value, it Makes Up For In Creative Solutions.
Cheap Art has a different Risk/Reward ratio.
Cheap Art is More Abundant.
Cheap Art Is (usually) Personal.
Cheap Art Doesn't Wait for You To Find It -- It Finds You.
Cheap Art Transforms the Ordinary World, The World We Live In.
Of course, much expensive art has the
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