There’s an uproar in certain quarters over Time Warner Cable’s plan to drop Ovation TV from its line-up at year-end. With Ovation currently in some 55 million households, the loss of Time Warner’s approximately 12 million national subscribers is going to be a big hit – in viewers, in carriage revenues and subsequently in advertising revenue. As the only current cable channel dedicated to the arts, this would seem to be a significant blow.

Personally, I can’t say, because I’m a Manhattanite who doesn’t get my cable service from Time Warner, and I’ve never been able to see Ovation’s programming as a result (my cable company, RCN, doesn’t carry it). In theory, I support Ovation’s mission, but Ovation losing some 20% of its viewer base isn’t going to affect me at all. And since I’ve never had a conversation with anyone, in person or online, who has cited a great show they saw on Ovation, I’m not sure it’s going to have much effect on anyone I know. And I know a lot of folks who like, and like to talk about, the arts.

While Alec Baldwin is on Twitter urging people to petition against this heinous assault on American arts, it is no doubt too little too late. There doesn’t appear to be a negotiation going on; Time Warner has simply notified Ovation that they’ll be dropped at the end of their contract, on December 31. And we all know how much work is going to get done in the next 10 days, so a reprieve seems unlikely.

Ovation has taken the position that this is a battle between sports, which they say Time Warner wants to emphasize even more, and arts. Time Warner has retorted that in a review of Ovation’s programming, they don’t actually see much in the way of legitimate arts programming. Time Warner is also not a charity.

I took a look at the Ovation schedule this morning, for the first time in a while, and while the holiday season doesn’t always represent a true picture of any channel’s usual fare, Ovation does seem to be a veritable festival of a handful of Nutcracker performances, a marathon of the Colin Firth Pride and Prejudice, and reruns of a couple of their original shows, with which I’m unfamiliar, for obvious reasons. The available schedule does seem to support, in part, the Time Warner “slur.”

Much as I had hopes for Ovation when it was announced, I was hugely skeptical. I had watched Bravo, once an arts network, convert into all-reality TV all the time, while A&E has retained its letters but jettisoned its original commitment to arts AND entertainment, opting for the latter alone. Of course, in an era where a science channel has a series about Finding Bigfoot, names don’t seem to matter much in the cable universe. If you want truth in advertising, you can find veracity at The Food Network.

During its launch, I do recall seeing ads for Ovation, but can’t remember any of late; in this era of targeted online come-ons, where I am bombarded with ads to buy tickets to Broadway shows, Ovation is scarce (though perhaps the algorithms know I can’t see the programming, and bypass me). But if the online schedule is any indication, even if I had Ovation TV, I wouldn’t be watching.

As this has been playing out for a few days, I suddenly hit on an inspiration: what if there was a not-for-profit cable channel dedicated to the arts? I was very proud of my innovative solution, until I recalled that we have one, at least in part: PBS. While it is hardly exclusive to the arts, PBS certainly has high quality programming: look to Live at Lincoln Center and Great Performances as examples; the marketing people, fearing stigma perhaps, have dropped the word “Theatre” from Masterpiece after decades.

I must admit, my PBS watching has narrowed to Downton Abbey and Sherlock; long gone are the days of American Playhouse (1980s) and Theatre in America (1970s), which really appealed to me. And while I do enjoy the occasional James Taylor concert or Doo-Wop reunion, there’s been a drift from arts to entertainment there as well, though thankfully of a caliber vastly higher than The Jersey Shore or Honey Boo Boo. Strangely, some of PBS’ programming competes now not with other material on TV, but movie theatre screenings of the Met Opera, NT Live and the like, proving that people will even leave the comfort of their home for the arts on a screen, and even pay for the right to do so. There does seem to be an arts market.

Whether the loss of the Time Warner audience is a death blow to Ovation remains to be seen, but it’s sure going to hurt, and if the channel fades, or metamorphoses into something unrecognizable like its predecessors, I don’t think it’s going to be a major gap in America’s cultural life, sad to say. While they did air a BBC docudrama about Monty Python I would have liked to have seen, I can probably find Dolly Parton specials and Johnny Cash at Folsom through other means.

The problem, of course, is that each effort at an arts network has required vastly more capital than has been allocated. As a result, instead of creating original programming that becomes must-see cultural TV, a lot of their airtime is filled with acquisitions, much of which is either dated or available through other means (perhaps you’re familiar with TCM, IFC and the Sundance Channel, as well as the intermittently rewarding PBS); it is also repeated ad nauseum in different dayparts. Warmed-over culture is not much of a benefit.

I’m being harsh to Ovation based solely on looking at their schedule, and nothing here should be construed as wishing for their demise. Indeed, I’d like to see some philanthropic media baron decide to make an unwise investment in the channel and ratchet up its original programming, to see once and for all whether the arts can compete in the video marketplace, which seems to be ever-multiplying in its opportunities, and narrow-casting potential.

If we’re going to ever have a viable and successful dedicated arts channel on television, it can’t survive on leftovers from other channels, even if they’re from other countries. It needs new programming, significant financial resources, and genuine originality. The cable universe is a very ugly place. After all, if Oprah Winfrey has had to struggle, just think of the uphill battle for the arts.

Yes, Mr. Survey looks innocent enough, but does he belong in artistic programming?

“We choose our season largely in response to what our patrons tell us. Lately they are interested in seeing shows that they already know.”

The quote above, from the producing artistic director of a large not-for-profit theatre, appeared recently in a perfectly innocuous “season preview” round-up, the kind found in newspapers and online resources around the country at this time of year. Some of you may well be surprised by the sentiment, though it is one with which I’m familiar. My only surprise is to see it stated so baldly. I’m not naming the theatre, or the publication, because I have no desire to castigate or demonize the specific organization, since this practice is hardly unique. It is the issue that’s worth discussing.

For those who traffic in the language of grants, or for that matter the universe of arts blogs concerned with mission and marketing, it is quite common to read about the necessity of serving one’s community, one’s audience. I certainly support that sentiment, but serving does not mean servant. Not-for-profit arts organizations exist to serve by leading, offering work which connects with a community, local, regional or national, by finding the correct balance between being able to sell tickets and raise money on the one hand, and, on the other, advancing genuine artistic goals that support artists, craftspeople and technicians dedicated to creating good work.

In the recent economic climate, there has been a flight to safety in so many areas of society, making it harder for organizations to be progressive in their work. Some have been unable to negotiate the enormously difficult economic waters, and we daily read of the fallout, be it the diminution of New York’s City Opera, the suspension of production by Minneapolis’ Penumbra Theatre, or the labor struggles in orchestras just chronicled by Diane Ragsdale.

It would be glib to say that theatres which produce according to the express wishes of their patrons become de facto commercial producers, because that’s not fair to the commercial sector. While many decry the rise in Broadway musicals based on well-known movies, they are at least new works for the stage, and they do not represent the entirety of commercial product. Even commercial revivals don’t always play it safe, since many seek to reinvent material, even if they attempt to insure their venture with famous actors. And new work does still debut under commercial aegis, even if the majority of new work is now created in not-for-profit companies.

As I mentioned, the idea of doing what one’s audience requests is not new. Since I began in this business, I’ve heard about companies that survey their audiences and point blank ask them what they’d like to see the next year. I’m pleased to say that I’ve never worked for one. And there’s an essential flaw in this question of what people want to see, since audience members can only name shows which they’ve already seen; you can’t choose something which doesn’t yet exist. “Familiar” work is the inevitable and immutable result.  While a generic box for new play or new musical might appear on such survey, and might get checked now and again, if the risk of producing new work is taken at such a company, it’s very likely that the audience will only respond to work that feels very much like what they’ve seen before, and that experimentation and innovation – especially if it turns out to be unsuccessful artistically – will only reinforce the flight to the safety of the known.

Don’t let me give you the impression that I’m opposed to companies that specialize in classics, or revivals. Those are absolutely valid missions – so long as the productions are not trapped in amber, trooped out every five years because of their proven box office appeal. If the text is always approached as new, so long as there is a creative rather than replicative spark, I say go for it.

Once upon a time in theatre in America, there’s no question that the known dominated. Think of Eugene O’Neill’s father touring for decades as The Count of Monte Cristo or William Gillette’s sinecure as Sherlock Holmes; that was the norm.

But that’s not what not-for-profit arts organizations were created to do. It’s important to note that the old actor-manager model, in which a company was built around a singular star has given way to companies where artistic directors are charged with understanding, serving and leading the artistic appetites of her or his audience and supporting artists by creating homes for their work. If an artistic director opts to produce by survey, then they are certainly a producer, but they may have well abandoned the right to claim artistry. If they don’t explore work beyond the most standard repertoire, if they don’t bring exciting artists to bear, if they don’t feel strongly enough to decide for themselves what they believe should be on stage, then perhaps ‘artist’ shouldn’t be in their title.

Am I being harsh, judgmental, inflexible? Perhaps, and I know that reality is an endless series of gradations, of balances. But so long as organizations slavishly serve, rather than creatively embrace and advance, we run the risk that success in the former model will create ever greater pressure on the latter.  We have seen how opera companies and orchestras in particular struggle to incorporate modern work in their repertoire, risking creative stagnation. If we are not constantly creating opportunities and appetites for the new in every art form, then each will, at some point, collapse in on itself, like a TV channel that plays nothing but reruns. However much fun that may seem initially, at a certain point, the nostalgia burns out and if there’s nothing new, the form dies.

It is the responsibility of a not-for-profit artistic director to serve and lead and audience, a board, a staff, while at the same time serving and advancing the art form; I like to believe that most do. But if they outsource their most important responsibility to anyone else, even their audience; if they abdicate initiative in order to minimize risk; if that’s the only way an organization can survive, then they’re just staving off the inevitable and their audience, ultimately, will lose.

Unless you have been isolated from all news sources for the past few hours, you are likely aware that actor George Clooney was arrested this morning for his participation in a protest outside the Sudanese Embassy in Washington DC. I doubt you’ve missed it and, even if you have, you’re going to hear more about it, because it’s a story that unites a significant humanitarian crisis that has been relatively underreported with one of the true movie stars of our generation. This makes it catnip to everyone from TMZ to The News Hour, and it does what Clooney no doubt intended: shines a stunningly bright light on a vital story that hasn’t managed to get a foothold in the American consciousness (or conscience) to a significant degree.

A massive human tragedy cannot legitimately be equated with the issue of arts funding and arts education, and please don’t misunderstand my intention here. But I can’t help look to Clooney’s action today, and the media response. I wonder what effect such an action might have on declining arts support if someone of his stature were arrested at a rowdy protest against arts funding cuts.

After all, there are plenty of articles written weekly about the proven value of the arts, not simply as a quality of life issue, but as a tool in students’ development and creative thinking, as a magnet for economic development, and so on. These articles may fly about the internet among the faithful, but they don’t seem to be getting much broad-based traction at a time when political candidates campaign by declaring their intention to gut or eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts (among many other essential, and infinitesimally small parts of the Federal budget).

Some of us have, in varying degrees, been watching or fighting this fight for several decades, and it remains a worthy battle. There are certainly celebrities who have gone before Congressional hearings to make the case, and that manages to generate a bit of video or a few inches of print. But jailing someone famous (and I mean legitimately famously, worthily famous, not some reality TV freak of the week), that’s a game-changer, lifting the issue to whole other level.

Do I have suggestions? While he may well be willing, I have previously written about why Alec Baldwin doesn’t suit my purpose. There are stars who willingly leap into public fray, like Martin Sheen, who was regularly arrested at nuclear protests even before he became one of this country’s favorite fictional Presidents; unfortunately being a regular presence diminishes the impact. I believe we need someone who hasn’t staked out a position on another divisive political issue, and whose appeal cuts across racial, political and social lines.

We need to pick our moment, our place, our specific flash point – making sure we’re in a major media market – and marshal as large a group of artists, arts staffs, and arts supporters so that we’re not asking someone to front a bedraggled few dozen malcontents. Then we have to push Tom Hanks, or Julia Roberts, or Denzel Washington, or Beyonce, or Neil Patrick Harris, or Ellen Degeneres, or Jeremy Lin, or Sofia Vergara, or Justin Timberlake, to the front of the crowd with the express goal of having those plastic handcuffs tightened around their wrists and their heads protected as they’re thrust into a police conveyance.  My god, if they were up for it, imagine the press if Angela Lansbury or James Earl Jones led the civil disobedience on this topic.

When these famous and even beloved offenders are released, which they will surely quickly be, they have to be ready with the right speech – the perfect speech – to give to the phalanx of journalists who will be waiting eagerly for their emergence. Then maybe the arts agenda will rise in the public consciousness, then we can work from a higher plateau of awareness.

When people can’t get attention they desire, we hear them mutter, “I can’t even get arrested in this town.” Maybe the arts need to get arrested now and again, and must do whatever it takes for that to happen.

And of course, if Mr. Clooney wants to join us, we’ll take him too.

If a 49-year-old person suddenly announced one day that they were terminally ill and committed suicide the following day, you’d be stunned.  And that seems to be the prevailing sentiment in press coverage about the sudden closure this past weekend of the Vancouver Playhouse in British Columbia, Canada, just one year shy of its own half-century mark. That said, the press coverage that’s emerging notes that the financial problems of the theatre were not unknown, so this is more akin to someone who knew they were sicker than most may have been willing to believe, and that their self-directed passing was driven by a desire to neither take on, or impose, any further burden. In a sad irony, it had one production left this season: God of Carnage.

From the vantage point of New York, why should I care about what has happened in Vancouver? Because it is neither the first regional theatre to close in recent years and it will not be the last. I cannot pass judgment on the decision of the company’s board to close, I cannot effectively analyze the factors that led to the company’s significant financial distress. I can only marvel at what was by all accounts a sudden endgame, even if there had been portents for some time. The closing of the Vancouver Playhouse evokes other examples here in the U.S. – The Intiman in Seattle and Theatre de la Jeune Lune in Minneapolis are two that spring to mind – but the fact is that there are theatres closing constantly these days, and while the world economic downturn is surely a major factor, it cannot be the sole reason.

As Michael Crichton wrote in his thriller Airframe, no single mishap brings about a plane crash; it is instead a series of events stemming (often) from a single fault, snowballing into an “event cascade.” If you prefer a human metaphor, I’ll give you a simpler one courtesy of Dr. Sherwin Nuland in How We Die: we die when we stop taking in oxygen, everything else leads up to that point, and in business, commercial or not-for-profit, money is oxygen. When it runs out, time is up.

As companies large and small close, there is often an enormous amount of hindsight: about the cultural loss, about the decisions that led to the closing, about whether different steps could have or should have been taken, even whether the company can be revived. Certainly organizations that announce a death watch – “We need $1 million by June 30 or we’ll have to close” – put a very specific goal and timetable on their distress, in hope of driving a campaign or surfacing a heretofore unknown benefactor. Other companies slash staff and productions, but in many cases that diminishment only serves to lessen the work that might draw audience or donors. We hear of victories and life goes on – witness Pasadena Playhouse – while others fail to succeed and pass into memory, preserved in the minds of their audiences and artists for a generation or two. Perhaps their existence is recorded in annals like Theatre World or local newspaper archives, but the reveries are quickly overtaken by more current events, by companies that emerge as viable entertainment alternatives, by the pharmacy that sets up shop in the building that was once home to great art.

I have lost friends and family to illness with shockingly little notice and I regret that I did not have the time for closure with them. Whatever has taken place in Vancouver this past weekend, it afforded audiences in general and the arts community in particular no time to prepare for the hole that was to be left so suddenly, which is why crowds gathered outside the theatre on its closing night on Saturday and why others gather as I write to read plays at the site of the now shuttered company. Would more alarm have helped save the company, or would it simply have given time for everyone to prepare both professionally and emotionally for the inevitable? I can’t say.

But maybe, just maybe, we need to know if our institutions are in death throes, maybe a stoic, silent walk to the gallows or hope against hope for divine intervention benefits no one. I once literally had to appeal to the state’s governor to save a venue I ran, and I wasn’t shy about saying that the company would close if promised funding wasn’t forthcoming; the proverbial death chamber stay of execution did come and that company survives more than a decade later. Yes, it’s embarrassing to admit failings, but isn’t the best time to own up to them before it’s too late for any possible salvation? Maybe the arts – their staffs, their creative artists and their boards of directors, as well as the media that cover them – have to start keening as loudly as possible before there’s a death, not after, however unseemly it might be. It doesn’t always work, to be sure, but will it hurt?

I saw a comment on Twitter this morning which reminded me that Alec Baldwin will be delivering the annual Nancy Hanks Lecture on Arts and Public Policy at the Kennedy Center in April. This is not breaking news; it was announced in November, although a just-issued press release has reinforced awareness of the upcoming event. But the reminder coincided with an article I saw this morning as well: that the upstate New York supermarket chain, Wegman’s, had curtailed its holiday advertising campaign featuring Baldwin because of the attention surrounding his highly-publicized ejection from an American Airlines flight late in 2011. [Note: Shortly after I posted this, I learned that Wegman’s reinstated the Baldwin ads, but that in no way mitigates what follows here.]

Now let me say that I think Baldwin is a terrific performer, especially since he has discovered his greatest effect comes as a character actor, not as the leading man he was once promoted to be. Whether in dramatic roles or comic, he’s brilliant, with both a dark edge and a mischievous glint that serves most every part he plays these days.

He has also put himself forward as a spokesman and participant in many arts causes. Offhand, I can think of his advocacy for Lincoln Center (even getting it worked into one of his commercial gigs), radio host for the New York Philharmonic, interviewer for a WNYC podcast, major donor to the Hamptons Film Festival, and fundraiser for a variety of arts causes (even doing an event for the small but feisty Two River Theatre Company in New Jersey). I have no doubt I’ve missed many things.

Yet I have to express my concern over the “optics” of Mr. Baldwin as one of the leading national spokespeople on behalf of the arts. The American Airlines incident, whatever the truth of it, wasn’t pretty, nor was Mr. Baldwin’s use of his celebrity status to go on Saturday Night Live days later to bolster his image and further reduce that of the airline (which has its own issues to be sure). There was the public flirtation with a New York mayoral run, which garnered headlines because of his celebrity (though seemingly far more for his declared interest than for his ultimate decision to drop the idea), yet had a dilettantish air about it, as if public service is something to be toyed with. Let’s not forget the publicity years back surrounding his promise to move to Canada if George W. Bush was elected president; we know what happened to the residency of both Mr. Bush and Mr. Baldwin, and only one moved anywhere. The divorce and custody battle with Kim Basinger was as ugly a public split as I can recall.

I don’t doubt Mr. Baldwin’s commitment to the arts and I know that when it comes to celebrity coverage, there are far too many sides to, and versions of, the same story, be it professional or personal. I also don’t want to in any way suggest that Mr. Baldwin doesn’t have every right to say whatever he wants about his politics, his ideals, and his beliefs – and I accept that as a talented actor who has achieved real celebrity, his comments will reach vastly more people than, say, this blog. Only days ago, Nicholas Kristof wrote in The New York Times about celebrities whose commitment to and knowledge of social causes must be taken seriously.

But I worry that in employing Mr. Baldwin as a national spokesman at a prestigious policy event, the messenger obscures the message. As someone who believes that the arts should not be a political plaything, I fear that Mr. Baldwin will be unable to preach to anyone but the converted, and that whatever the value of his words may be, they will be overshadowed by his public persona. Of course the irony is that it is his fame (coupled with his evident commitment to the arts) which resulted in his invitation in the first place. Just as I cannot bear to listen to anything the belligerent political pretender Donald Trump has to say about government policy (as recently as this morning on his subservient enabler, NBC), I don’t think any conservative, and perhaps many moderate, individuals will place much stock in Mr. Baldwin’s speech for the arts. He is, to my regret, a flawed vessel for an essential message.

I don’t advocate the replacement of Mr. Baldwin for the Hanks Lecture and I am eager to both hear his speech and see the resultant attention to it; disinviting him would only bring more attention to the ideological rift in this country over the value of the arts, in both policy and practice. But as we continue to fight for the value of the arts both in education and in American life, we need a genuinely bi-partisan approach and I hope that more celebrities committed to the arts and arts education – those with perhaps less baggage than Mr. Baldwin – with join the fight as publicly and frequently as he has, so we can grab the essential and elusive media attention, but then focus the country on what is being said, not on the speaker.