Hector Aguilar replies to me:

>>Because Broadway is above all a business, rather than an art.
>
>Okay, I got stuck on this first sentence.  On the one hand, your
>implication seems to be there there is no necessary correlation between
>artistic merit and financial success.  Yes, some artists make me wonder
>how they possibly ever managed to have a successful career in music, but
>by and large I think I have seen a relation between artistic merit and
>success, assuming that other factors such as marketing have been the
>same for everyone (yes, I know that's a big assumption and requires a
>lot of imagination).

To me, the connection is a lot more capricious.  I know, for example,
of wonderful pianists - I would say far better than, say, Kissin (who's
of course very good) - who basically play for themselves and their
friends.  I know fantastic pop and jazz singers who work at other jobs
to eat when they should be giving us lessons in the great song repertoire,
while (fill in the name of the latest hot phenom), with far less
musicianship or even individuality, makes millions.  Prof.  Longhair,
one of the seminal influences on r&b piano, worked as a janitor.  For
my money, Antje Weithaas is a far better violinist than Mutter.  Has
anyone here heard of Weithaas, let alone heard her?  I realize that good
people as well as bad get thrown to the top, but good people as well as
bad also stay at the bottom or beyond the Pale of recognition.  I simply
don't see a real correlation.  To me, it's a large matter of luck.

>On the other hand, what is CM here and now, if not a business?

What indeed?  My question is what do critics know about business?  I'd
also add what do business people know about business?  It seems to me a
crap shoot in any case.  Running CM as a business - which is essentially
what the mega-mergered companies have been doing for the last twenty
years or so - hasn't really helped CM either as an art OR as a business.

>>Because you're assuming that the judgment of critics means more than it
>>does and that it lowers the risk of financial failure.  I don't understand
>>why this would be true.
>
>The overall judgment of critics means something to me, certainly.

It's certainly something to pay attention to, but I'm such an egotist
that the only opinion that really counts for me is my own.  I'm subject
to persuasion, of course.  After all, I'm the guy who thought Brahms a
bore and Mozart wildly overrated.  My opinion changed, not because of
critics, but because *I* changed.

>For instance, there is a website I have come to rely on more and more
>to help me decide if I want to see a movie (www.metacritic.com).  For a
>given movie the site lists the reviews of at least 10 different critics,
>and assigns a number to that review which tries to give a numerical value
>judgement of what that critic thought.  Furthermore, the critics themselves
>don't all carry the same weight, as should be the case.  So all the
>numbers for a given movie are collected, appropriately weighed, and then
>averaged, and that average number gives you a pretty good idea of whether
>or not a movie is worth seeing, and it generally gives you a pretty good
>idea of whether or not a movie is going to have a good run or not.

No, it gives *you* an idea, because your taste corresponds roughly
to the weighted average.  I myself prefer to read a couple of critics
regularly and look at trailers.  I want to be persuaded, not by a consensus
(which is after all only the vox populi fallacy thinly disguised), but
by a forceful argument.  For example, I have no desire at all to see The
Hours, not even on video.  From what I've read, it's a Literary Movie,
a genre I pretty much despise.  On the other hand, I will probably see
Elf (on video), just because I enjoyed the movie Old School (also seen
on video).  So I'm a slob.

>I know nothing about Broadway focus groups-- if you tell me they have
>the value of animal entrails I'll take your word for it-- but I had been
>given the impression that they had some value.  Statistical sampling has
>become a cornerstone of capitalism, and seems to have been used with
>some success

This puzzles me.  What success?  How do you know if you don't roll the
dice?

Steve Schwartz