So an actor said a thing. You may have heard about it, and if not, you definitely heard the “backlash”.

The assertion was made that “no one cares about opera and ballet”, and then a lot of cultural elites clutched their pearls and the claws came out. Now, the actor said some other stuff, and I won’t get into that, but it was clear he was coming from a place of flippancy and hurt and posturing.

What I realize though is, for a lot of people, he’s completely right.

I had more access than most to ballet growing up, mainly because I took part in an after-school arts program and we did plays and ballet and drew and tried to stay on beat together with random instruments. I can do a plié (still!) and while my flexibility is crap right now, I still know what to do with barre exercises. I remember when Misty Copeland was making her meteoric rise to the top of the game, and how ballet was taught to us as foundational for dance in general, even as we did The Running Man or the Stanky Leg or the Dougie.

Opera was something we saw in Merrie Melodie cartoons. Opera was pretentious and Italian and while the LA art scene was full to the seams with venues that had opera, none were in or around my hood at all. And I think that’s important to note.

Someone I read recently mentioned that they had brought up opera and ballet to kids from the hood, and they mimicked high society; drinking imaginary tea with pinkies up and looking over the rims of glasses. That doesn’t speak to an art form being culturally relevant; that’s younger members of society knowing that it’s not for them and they aren’t welcome in those spaces. It speaks to high culture not being for everyone, just gatekeepers and the rich.

And how can an art form survive when it looks to exclude? I talk a lot about modern art, especially the more abstract stuff, and how young people are pushed to the “classics” because it makes sense, not because of artistry. “You don’t get it” they’re told, without any talk about what exactly there is to get. They see paint splattered, go “I coulda done that” and move on. Then, when confronted with Impressionist paintings, of still life and religious art, they look and say “I can tell that took a while to do; must have been really hard.” And they respect the process, if not the work itself.

I’m sure there will continue to be young people singing opera in their shower, if only to hear how they sound when they hit a high note, but who’s trying to connect with them? We were all kids once; how would we react to someone saying “THIS IS ART” or “THIS IS IMPORTANT”? We’d go into all the ways we hated it; that’s what kids do. Unless they found some piece of it that resonated, and as long as those arts stay away from where those young people are, that resonance will cease and we’ll have more people saying that they have no connection to those art forms. And then what?