Laurie Anderson is one of the artists who helped to shape and define New York’s so-called “Downtown” scene in the 1970s and early '80s, when musicians, poets, film makers, visual artists, and writers made lower Manhattan into an unparalleled period of creativity. Anderson is a composer, a violinist, a vocalist. She is also a filmmaker, a pioneering creator of virtual reality art, and above all, a storyteller. Long known for her sly wit and wry delivery, she has also created a series of works in recent years that invite Americans to look more deeply at the state of our union.
Laurie Anderson: At first, I was like, "I hate those questions." Like, "What kind of thing will this look like later?" Who knows? But then, as I was thinking about it, I thought that, I do really think that there should... I don't know how we would implement this, but that... First of all, music education has to come back and has to be supported federally for everyone. That's just too much of a... I mean, we're talking about a perfect world, right?
John Schaefer: Right. And more specifically about New York, but I understand where you're going with that.
Laurie Anderson: Okay. A federal program. No one seems to be focusing on, as much as we should maybe, the statistic of 99% of the wealth being in 1% of the hands of people, of Americans. I hope that's the right statistic. It just seems so insane that it can't be true. There has to be a cap on income, just period, because this now has too many repercussions. And at that point, you will be required to give it back to the federal government.
This is never going to work. As I'm saying it, I'm like, "Okay, forget that this is in any way realistic." But in places that I've been, particularly in, I'm thinking of Holland, state stipends for visual artists in particular, it works very well. Start with a fund that comes from the trillionaires and billionaires that reinstates music education in schools, because I think that one of the most tragic things about the riots has been the realization that a lot of people have not gotten a chance to go to school. But everything's been so decimated and taken away from them.
So the first thing is to... Probably the most important thing in this equation for me is music education in schools, to put that back. And then to basically use this tremendous amount of money to sponsor every single music event in the United States, and who knows? I'm not going to solve the administrative problems of this. Every symphony, every orchestra, every opera, every avant-garde festival, every everything will be free and will be federally sponsored.
When I've worked in Germany and it's been state-supported stuff, I've been disappointed in some of the things that seemed not very adventurous, and I've been also really impressed with the ways that they managed to do things that were adventurous. So in the end, I felt it was really happy balance. And of course, it's not all state-sponsored, but that's the engine going on.
I played at the Kennedy Center on his 99th birthday. So that must've been 2016. And after the concert, they gave each of us a book called Quotations of John F. Kennedy. And it had the most amazing sentences about art and poetry, being the engines of America. The first line was, "I look forward to an America not afraid of grace and beauty." And I thought, why the hell not put that first? Grace and beauty, and art and poetry. And so that, to me, is enough of a mandate of state-sponsored music, and that it should be free for everyone, and everyone should be able to pick up an instrument and play one, like in Iceland, and everyone should be in a band. It's like a language. So it should be considered your foreign language, in addition to a couple of other ones, which we should learn to speak and stop being so provincial. And if we didn't spend this money on tanks, we'd have a ton of money to throw around. We really would. We'd have a lot of money. We're rich.
John Schaefer: The interesting thing is, you use the term "economic engine," but that's the thing about New York. The arts have been one of the main... I mean, yes, there's Wall Street. But the other, it seems to me, the other main piston is the arts...
Laurie Anderson: Cultural engine. Yeah.
If you want to use that as an argument, which you probably should in this case, because we're going to try to make some kind of recovery, then that should be the number one thing that comes back, is culture. Music, art, shows, Broadway, all of that. That's where it is. And the potential for it not coming back is there. It certainly won't come back in the way that it was... I mean, everybody I knew, and myself included, it was always unsustainable. And you realize that it was.
So whatever comes back, I think, needs to be so, in the world that you're asking me to visualize, would be so radically, unrecognizably different, but a place where there would still be amazing music, and it would be free for everyone. And they would be musically educated, so that they kind of get it, like it. I realize this is never going to happen, but you didn't ask me if it was feasible.
John Schaefer: No, we want idealism. I mean, you've been around. You were on the scene when New York was affordable for artists who were not yet established, and those days seem to be long gone, and-
Laurie Anderson: Yeah. They are.
John Schaefer: But I mean, can that ever come back? And if so, how? That's an interesting question.
Laurie Anderson: Well, I think it's really hard for that to come back, because the people who will probably survive this are the big corporate entities, and they have zero interest in that kind of scene. Zero. Because it doesn't involve real estate.
So when we come back, there's so much energy towards making it a more open situation, and by open, I mean available to everyone who wants it, and same with education, and that there will be resources for that. And there'll be an interest in giving that to people.
John Schaefer: And when you say music and art would be free for all, does that include like rock concerts at Madison Square Garden? Things that people-
Laurie Anderson: Totally. Totally does. The whole thing. Oh yeah, absolutely. Absolutely, totally 100% free. And also, then of course, the musicians aren't getting paid much, and the people who rent out their spaces are... They might get a pretty good price, if it's the feds.
John Schaefer: But that scene requires artists to be able to make their art, to be able to live in the city and do what they do. Even if they're being-
Laurie Anderson: I don't know about living in the city. I think one of the things we're learning a lot about through the pandemic is that you don't necessarily have to do the real estate. So that's the troubling thing, of how many corporations will realize, "I don't need my 110-story, high-rise thing. Everyone can work at home and I'm going to save money. I'm not going to go for a brick and mortar..."
Everyone, reasonably well, supervises themselves at home, and a lot of people prefer it, actually. And they prefer shopping at home, too, and getting things delivered. And that could very well be the new model, too. So then what happens to those high-rises? Well, artist studios? I don't know. When the market falls out of real estate, artists move in. So I'm just thinking of the studios in the World Trade Center, which were... Nobody wanted to be up there, but artists did, so they became available for musicians to work in those places. And because people were leery about it, so they just... and they had some kind of city thing that said a certain amount, a tiny, tiny, tiny percent of your thing has to be good for the community. So they did that, gave out free studios.
So if that bottom drops out of real estate, and I've always been someone who believes that the scene is basically about real estate, because every time I've been involved in a scene, it's been like that. It started in SoHo because it was cheap real estate, and that created a whole scene. And then the cheap real estate moved elsewhere, and the whole art world just kind of rolled over to another neighborhood, all because of real estate. So if this real estate situation is radically different, it could very well be very good for artists to suddenly have three floors. You'd have to walk up. The escalators probably wouldn't work. But it could be very interesting.
But I don't think any of us can predict what 40 million people out of work might mean, or what a second surge might mean. So any time I try to draw any sort of picture of the future, my pencil runs out of lead, and I just don't know what I'm talking about. But that's my dream of, and I know that bureaucrats can move into state-sponsored art, and make just schlocky stuff, and that would absolutely happen, but that's happening now anyway. There's plenty of schlock. It's like market-driven schlock.
But I'm like everybody, or most people I know anyway, so suddenly conscious that we're in this loop again of outrageous murders. Most people I know just ... and it was really apparent this weekend, how many people just said, "I can't just sit here anymore. Got to go out the door. I cannot sit here and watch this bullshit stuff going on." So I don't know if that amounts to a view of the future of music, but that's my two cents. State-sponsored free-for-all.
