Art Here and There

Not too long ago, I saw a play here in Budapest. The show was in Hungarian. It was an adaptation of the Danish film, The Celebration. Going in, I was unsure if I would be able to enjoy the show, considering my very limited Hungarian. I was pleasantly surprised though. Aside from a few monologues that I needed Dora to explain, overall the play came together for me. The show was stunningly powerful, but that’s not what I want to address here.

It was a Tuesday night in a city of just two over million people (about the size of Houston). The show was a challenging piece about an upper-class family confronting the father’s history of sexually and mentally abusing his children. The theater was packed. There were chairs set up in the aisle for overflow, and all of those chairs held audience members. Not everybody loved the show. The shocking conclusion was a bit too much for Andras, but he and I still managed to have a nice talk about the effect the scene had on the show as a whole.

A few days later Dora, Andras, Agnes, and I visited the National Museum for a retrospective on Hungarian painters. The exhibit was impressive, but once again, what struck me was the amount of visitors. We waited in line for tickets, and once inside, every room was full of museum goers. Meanwhile, across town there was a Van Gogh exhibit that had shoulder-to-shoulder crowds no matter the time of day you visited.

The Opera is always full – or close to it. The city has a new national theater with an auditorium, an orchestra hall and a studio space. What I’m getting at here is Budapest’s fine arts are thriving in a way that surprises me. I’m not surprised that the people here are art lovers; I’m surprised at how much fine art such a small nation can support.

It is particularly impressive when you consider how new the concepts of philanthropy and patronage are in post-Soviet Hungary. Seventeen years after the regime change, and people are still weary about “giving to the community.” The retrospective at the National Museum was filled with paintings on loan from the collection of a man named Kovács Gábor. The Hungarians at the exhibit kept commenting about that, like it was odd that a man would lend his paintings to a museum just like that.

So, how do the Hungarians do it? Well, I think the answer is a lot of government funding, which may be at risk. The economy is not exactly tip-top right now, and painful budget cuts are already being made. The interesting thing so far has been the way cuts have been implemented. Aside from healthcare, no one area has been targeted. Most cuts have been across the board. This raises howls from everybody, because everybody losses a little, and they’d rather lose nothing at all. However, what I’m used to as an American is targeted cuts – schools losing their music programs, museums losing funding, and grants being reduced.

I can’t be sure, but I think it says something about the difference in the way Hungarians and Americans see the fine arts. The Hungarian middle class can, and does attend theater events, largely because the state keeps tickets affordable. Young families are able to take their kids to the Opera. The Hungarians seem to understand fine art as something that belongs to all Hungarians. Whereas Americans deem fine art as something the wealthy allow the middle class to enjoy. I’m not saying the US system doesn’t work. There are many generous people who fund the arts in the States, but the system does have its drawbacks. Especially when you consider labor-intensive art forms – like ballet, musicals, theater, cinema, and so on – these productions have to become businesses even when they do enjoy patronage. Broadway’s new method of scaling the house is a sign of this.

The result of business-minded art not only prices out some of the middle class, it also discourages producers from taking on projects that push the threshold of their respective arts forms. I can’t help but wonder how Stephen Sondheim’s work would fair on today’s Broadway of “Mary Poppins” and “Legally Blonde.” And it’s already been made clear that edgy dramas like “The Celebration” don’t stand much of a chance. That show ran for just two-weeks on Broadway before they had to strike the set. If the outrageous rent on the theaters were subsidized, and the savings were passed on to the public I think we’d see American writers and composers producing more ambitious and interesting work.