New York’s creative community has struggled to react properly to Occupy Wall Street, the Zuccotti Park encampment-cum-movement that was raided by police Tuesday. Prior to the camp’s dismantling, musicians performed there. The production crew behind the new “Batman” film reportedly considered using Zuccotti Park as a film location — the idea being that they could then pay protesters as extras — but then discarded the idea as exploitative. Some New York writers donated books — often signed copies of their own work.
What good were these actions? In their raid Tuesday, police officers responded with their own strategies. In lieu of musicians, the protesters were threatened with sonic weapons: The NYPD displayed, but did not employ, a long-range acoustic device, or LRAD. Television cameras and reporters were barred from witnessing the proceedings. And officers dismantled Occupy Wall Street’s 5,000-volume reading library, consigning the books to the indifferent care of the sanitation department. As of yesterday, most of the books remain missing.
Salman Rushdie, among others, gave voice to what many in the city and across the country were feeling: “Nazis destroyed books to ‘purify’ German culture,” he tweeted. “Bigots do it in the name of God, or Allah. What’s Bloomberg’s excuse? ‘Hygiene’?” It’s a shared frustration. When the very mediums people use to communicate about what they see and hear are weaponized, confiscated or prohibited, what’s an artist to do?
Most of the popular art that has so far been made about the economic downturn of the past four years has failed not just commercially but also culturally and artistically. Films like “Too Big to Fail” and “Margin Call” have focused on the minutiae of the boardroom and the plight of the CEO; “Horrible Bosses,” “Tower Heist,” “South Park” and the CBS sitcom “2 Broke Girls” have used the recession as a backdrop, topical window dressing for politically neutral (or, as in the case of “Tower Heist,” borderline conservative) comedy scripts. MTV’s “True Life: I’m Occupying Wall Street” posited protesting against corporate greed as a path to personal discovery for college-age kids.
The closest the music industry has come to weighing in on the present economic moment has been “Watch the Throne,” the Jay-Z and Kayne West collaboration, which came out on the same day as one of the summer’s many stock market crashes. Its release was accompanied by a promotional video in which the two rappers chop up a Maybach sedan worth close to $400,000. Though the excess of the album galvanized debate about the role and responsibility of creative people at a moment of deprivation, it ultimately failed to focus the conversation on anything but the rappers themselves.
Ironically, it was Kanye’s and Jay-Z’s awkward and much-criticized overtures to the Occupy Wall Street movement that seemed to do more good. West was ridiculed for an October trip to Zuccotti Park during which he stood next to fellow millionaire Russell Simmons in mute silence, sunlight glinting off his gold grill and Givenchy shirt. Jay-Z was photographed backstage at his concert wearing a shirt that read “Occupy All Streets,” a play on the movement’s slogan; later, the garment turned up for sale in his Rocawear stores, retailing for $22. The artists both became lightning rods for debate over who was profiting from the movement. But at least those debates were, ultimately, about Occupy Wall Street and how those sympathetic to the cause might best serve it.
In the two months that Occupy Wall Street held Zuccotti Park, David Crosby and Graham Nash, Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine, Neutral Milk Hotel’s Jeff Mangum, Joan Baez and Pete Seeger all performed for protesters. The very hint of a Radiohead performance at Zuccotti Park was enough to prompt a day’s worth of excited national conversation about the protests there. (Radiohead’s subsequent decision not to perform was itself arguably a gift to the movement, considering that a free outdoor Radiohead show in downtown Manhattan would likely have sparked a riot, or at least a public disturbance worth suppressing.) All the while, writers, filmmakers and actors kept stopping by — Jonathan Lethem, Michael Moore, Russell Brand, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Noam Chomsky, Cornel West.
None of these people, though, has provided a more relevant image than a sound cannon lurking in the bed of an NYPD truck, or the shots of that library in haphazard disposal. The Ferrari that is dangled out of a high-rise window in “Tower Heist”; the laid-off employees boxing up their belongings in “Margin Call” — these pictures quickly fade next to blurry photographs of New York police officers in riot gear preventing citizens from reoccupying the park.
Artists in 2011 have largely been overtaken by events more dramatic and improbable than anything they could conjure on a movie lot or in a studio. But for every awkward Kanye West visit, cynical Jay-Z sales gambit or abortive Radiohead concert, attention to the movement — however passing or incidental — has grown. A recent article on Politico noted that a cursory search of the news last week yielded almost 500 instances of the phrase “income inequality,” up from fewer than 91 instances the week before the occupation began.
Occupy Wall Street has changed the conversation. In that shift, artists have largely failed to lead. But the best of them have not hesitated to play the part of the people’s microphone, however awkwardly, and while the message may not originally have been theirs, they have repeated it loudly.
What good were these actions? In their raid Tuesday, police officers responded with their own strategies. In lieu of musicians, the protesters were threatened with sonic weapons: The NYPD displayed, but did not employ, a long-range acoustic device, or LRAD. Television cameras and reporters were barred from witnessing the proceedings. And officers dismantled Occupy Wall Street’s 5,000-volume reading library, consigning the books to the indifferent care of the sanitation department. As of yesterday, most of the books remain missing.
Salman Rushdie, among others, gave voice to what many in the city and across the country were feeling: “Nazis destroyed books to ‘purify’ German culture,” he tweeted. “Bigots do it in the name of God, or Allah. What’s Bloomberg’s excuse? ‘Hygiene’?” It’s a shared frustration. When the very mediums people use to communicate about what they see and hear are weaponized, confiscated or prohibited, what’s an artist to do?
Most of the popular art that has so far been made about the economic downturn of the past four years has failed not just commercially but also culturally and artistically. Films like “Too Big to Fail” and “Margin Call” have focused on the minutiae of the boardroom and the plight of the CEO; “Horrible Bosses,” “Tower Heist,” “South Park” and the CBS sitcom “2 Broke Girls” have used the recession as a backdrop, topical window dressing for politically neutral (or, as in the case of “Tower Heist,” borderline conservative) comedy scripts. MTV’s “True Life: I’m Occupying Wall Street” posited protesting against corporate greed as a path to personal discovery for college-age kids.
The closest the music industry has come to weighing in on the present economic moment has been “Watch the Throne,” the Jay-Z and Kayne West collaboration, which came out on the same day as one of the summer’s many stock market crashes. Its release was accompanied by a promotional video in which the two rappers chop up a Maybach sedan worth close to $400,000. Though the excess of the album galvanized debate about the role and responsibility of creative people at a moment of deprivation, it ultimately failed to focus the conversation on anything but the rappers themselves.
Ironically, it was Kanye’s and Jay-Z’s awkward and much-criticized overtures to the Occupy Wall Street movement that seemed to do more good. West was ridiculed for an October trip to Zuccotti Park during which he stood next to fellow millionaire Russell Simmons in mute silence, sunlight glinting off his gold grill and Givenchy shirt. Jay-Z was photographed backstage at his concert wearing a shirt that read “Occupy All Streets,” a play on the movement’s slogan; later, the garment turned up for sale in his Rocawear stores, retailing for $22. The artists both became lightning rods for debate over who was profiting from the movement. But at least those debates were, ultimately, about Occupy Wall Street and how those sympathetic to the cause might best serve it.
In the two months that Occupy Wall Street held Zuccotti Park, David Crosby and Graham Nash, Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine, Neutral Milk Hotel’s Jeff Mangum, Joan Baez and Pete Seeger all performed for protesters. The very hint of a Radiohead performance at Zuccotti Park was enough to prompt a day’s worth of excited national conversation about the protests there. (Radiohead’s subsequent decision not to perform was itself arguably a gift to the movement, considering that a free outdoor Radiohead show in downtown Manhattan would likely have sparked a riot, or at least a public disturbance worth suppressing.) All the while, writers, filmmakers and actors kept stopping by — Jonathan Lethem, Michael Moore, Russell Brand, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Noam Chomsky, Cornel West.
None of these people, though, has provided a more relevant image than a sound cannon lurking in the bed of an NYPD truck, or the shots of that library in haphazard disposal. The Ferrari that is dangled out of a high-rise window in “Tower Heist”; the laid-off employees boxing up their belongings in “Margin Call” — these pictures quickly fade next to blurry photographs of New York police officers in riot gear preventing citizens from reoccupying the park.
Artists in 2011 have largely been overtaken by events more dramatic and improbable than anything they could conjure on a movie lot or in a studio. But for every awkward Kanye West visit, cynical Jay-Z sales gambit or abortive Radiohead concert, attention to the movement — however passing or incidental — has grown. A recent article on Politico noted that a cursory search of the news last week yielded almost 500 instances of the phrase “income inequality,” up from fewer than 91 instances the week before the occupation began.
Occupy Wall Street has changed the conversation. In that shift, artists have largely failed to lead. But the best of them have not hesitated to play the part of the people’s microphone, however awkwardly, and while the message may not originally have been theirs, they have repeated it loudly.
PHOTO: Stan Honda/AFP/Getty Images
The 5,000-volume "People's Library" at Zuccotti Park has been dismantled by the NYPD.
