Arts & International Affairs: Volume 2, Number 2 | Page 45

Low Brow to High Brow and the Entertainment Industry Kevin Doyle Kevin Doyle [US/IE] is a writer and director of interdisciplinary theatre and film working between the United States and European Union. A graduate of the Drama Studies program at Purchase College (SUNY), he serves as artistic director of Sponsored By Nobody, an international theatre company based in Brooklyn, NY. He has won several honors in the United States and abroad, including a USArtists International Award, a Saari Fellowship Award (Finland), Artist in Residence at the Watermill Center, and grants from the Asian Cultural Council, CEC ArtsLink (New York), and the Svenska Instituet (Stockholm). He conceived and directed the interdisciplinary theatre project W.M.D. (just the low points), which premiered at The Game Is Up! Festival in Vooruit (Gent). He is developing THE AЯTS, a theatrical deconstruction on the history of arts funding, as recipient of the 2017 IMPACT Residency Award from the Drama League of New York and LaGuardia Performing Arts Center (http://www.sponsoredbynobody.com). During the closing days of October ����, Americans from all across the United States assembled in Washington, D.C. to offer testimony before the Special Subcommittee on the Arts. Senators and Representatives from both major political parties heard arguments and justifications for establishing the public funding of the arts in the United States. Investment in science served as one recurring comparison. The arts deserved funding because the government had placed so much emphasis on material support for math and science in the post-WWII period that American culture was lacking. A second common argument was one of equality; citizens living in Minnesota or Kentucky deserved the same access to the best of the arts and culture that citizens living in New York City. Other arguments arose during the hearings over the course of that week, but the tenuous distinction made then between “high art” and “low art”, or highbrow and lowbrow, has been overlooked and misunderstood. Most historians and critics have interpreted these issues as a debate between which art forms deserved federal funding. Indeed, there was a tension between “high art”—classical music, theatre, opera, dance, and independent cinema—and “low art”— folk arts, crafts, popular music, and urban/street 44 doi: ��.�����/aia.�.�.�