Reply #120: I couldn't have said it better. [View All]

[cassandra uprising]

I don't bother with television, let alone AI. I don't say this to try to sound like I'm better then the people who do, I say it as an artist who gives a fuck about her craft.

I have been saying for years that 'reality television' is adversely effecting the American theater. The mass appeal of these shows cannot be denied and it's effect on theater may be subtle, but no less profound. Not only is it, as you say cheaper to pay for software then it is to pay for the artist, but it's also the voyeuristic manufactured packaging of it all that can and will become an aesthetic that effects other art forms. It's not just an issue of 'Why pay a trained professional artist when you can pay some kid with a good set of pipes?' It's also about how as an audience, people would rather watch someone fall apart at the seems or witness the same stupid Cinderella story over and over again then to watch something original and thought provoking. This guilty pleasure will become an aesthetic and an expectation of what everyday folks consider entertainment. It makes me sick.


I have a love/hate relationship with the current state of the American Theater. I think the 100 year model of 'physiological based realism' has run it's course and it's time to move on. All this 'Reality' crap can and will pull the expectation of theater (rarely referred to as the fine art that it is because of all this) further into it's endless ditch of narcissism and voyeurism.

That being said, thank GAAAWD for playwrights who give a fuck and the artists in their fields that are trying to throw pearls out there into the ether.