WMV Music Web Log

This upcoming studio event has certainly captured the imagination of this married artist couple - we share nightmares about it. In our dreams we are fighting with someone for a parking place or a table at a restaurant, or being stalked by a previously friendly male artist turned psychopath. Or, dreams which I won't describe, that suggest an embarrassing superfluity of suppressed rage. She wakes up shaking, and I report the mirror image of her dream, each of us having been screaming at someone who prevents us from getting what we want.

My interpretation is that this seemingly small and innocuous gathering around a few artists and a scholarly study represents more to us than we had anticipated. It is on the one hand a thumb in the eye of the status quo - none of the participants are establishment folks, yet we have "set ourselves up" to pronounce on the "state of the arts" for Washington artists. In fact, Mike's study demonstrates how artists here are systematically oppressed by the very cultural institutions that purport to cultivate them.

But as artists, such knowledge compels us to wake up to the fact that we have options: to speak up about the reality of our lives, to engage in meaningful ways, claiming our rightful place in the general society, and to actually do something to make a difference.

I think we may be dreaming the nightmares of every artist in Washington.

Labels: state of the arts