6 ms·

I think the difference is that football is a money making endeavor for the team owner. Opera isn't making money for anyone and needs help if it is to exist. Gi

I think the difference is that football is a money making endeavor for the team owner. Opera isn't making money for anyone and needs help if it is to exist. Giving money to football teams is not much of a step removed from putting it directly in the pockets of the already rich owners of the teams.

mbg721 5y ago
Actual opera fans are frothing at the mouth right now at the suggestion that Cats is opera. But this idea that opera is stuffy high culture is the same mistake people make with Shakespeare--it's pop culture, just removed from its context. Imagine upper-class twits a century from now screening an Adam Sandler movie.
- User23 5y ago
  That’s why Opera has so many long boring bits. Attendees weren’t expected to pay attention as if it were a High Mass. It was a social event, a place to see and be seen, as well as trade gossip and so on. The performance itself was somewhat analogous to the TV on in the background at a bar.
  - whatshisface 5y ago
    How would that work with the arrangement of having rows of seats all facing the show? At a modern theater there's hardly any way to talk to anybody.
    - ghaff 5y ago
      Sure, going to either an opera or the latest Marvel blockbuster is often a social event to some degree. But the idea that the entertainment itself is just background noise like a few musicians at a cocktail party is just bizarre.
  - passerby1 5y ago
    When did it become trendy to parade one's illiteracy and narrow-mindedness?
    - CRConrad 5y ago
      Was it ever not?
- rory 5y ago
  > But this idea that opera is stuffy high culture is the same mistake people make with Shakespeare These things ARE high culture today. Whether or not they were high culture when they were first produced doesn't change that in the slightest.
  - mbg721 5y ago
    That's true, but it just highlights how bizarre and arbitrary high-culture is. I don't know how to say "Hey everybody, we're all going to get laid!" in Italian while preserving Rodney Dangerfield's voice.
    - rory 5y ago
      Absolutely. The arbitrariness doesn't only apply to performance, either. Fancy people like old stuff. Jackson Pollock. Dubliners.
- tombert 5y ago
  Isn't what makes Shakespeare "high culture" is its ability to stand the test of time? I'm sure there were plenty of mediocre or terrible plays from other writers at the time that no one cares about now, and are thus not "high culture". Shakespeare's stuff has been consistently read/performed for centuries, indicating that there might be something a bit more to it than the average play. Pop culture doesn't necessarily imply not high culture. I could be wrong obviously, but I would be extremely surprised if Adam Sandler movies have centuries of longevity to them; I think even people who like his movies will acknowledge that they're not spectacular films. Of course the "test of time" test isn't always an indicator of quality. There are plenty of old books that I had to read that I thought were terrible, and moreover there are plenty of modern music that I think is fantastic that no one else will really care about.
  - JackFr 5y ago
    > Of course the "test of time" test isn't always an indicator of quality. Today's superhero movies = yesterday's westerns. "I can't believe they made so many of these and just how bad most of them are."
  - jancsika 5y ago
    > I'm sure there were plenty of mediocre or terrible plays from other writers at the time that no one cares about now, and are thus not "high culture". I don't think that is historically accurate. From what I've read "high" vs. "low" culture changes over time, very often based on aesthetics. Brahms wrote both high and low art by the late 19th-century audience's standards. Today it's all just Brahms, who is a "classical composer", hence all "high art." Most importantly, there is no reason at all to believe that it cannot change again in the future. E.g., Brahms goes viral and gets treated as some kind of KPop sensation. Then we get some young punk doing cosplay as a steampunk Musikwissenschaftler claiming that Hungarian Dance No. 5 no longer slaps as high as it used to.
- zeruch 5y ago
  High culture vs low culture has always been at least partly arbitrary. I'm not an Opera fan in general, but used to love that there was a cafe in town that once a month hosted 'opera' night, where amateur and pro opera singers (some from the SJ and SF opera camps) to sing whatever they want. Sometimes you'd get someone singing pop tunes as arias, sometimes you'd see legit arias sung in full costume, sometimes just the local belting out of Carmen in sweatpants. It felt delightfully local, accessible, and devoid of highbrow/lowbrow nonsense.
ericmay 5y ago
The owner is making money, but so are the players, the referees, the concession staff, parking attendants, stores and shops that sell licensed apparel, and the bars, restaurants, and other adjacent businesses. Not to mention the marketing team, strength and conditioning coaches, web developers, and others who work for the team. And although temporary, it does create new construction jobs. This is true for football, soccer, baseball, basketball, and other sports. But this is less true when the stadium is built and then surrounded with parking lots that you have to drive to to go park your car. It's more true when the stadium is built in a neighborhood or at least a walkable area. Recently Columbus was going to lose the much beloved Columbus Crew soccer team. We had a stadium off of I-71 that was, you guessed it, surrounded by parking lots and not much else. You couldn't grab a beer before or after the game. People couldn't go camp out at a nearby bar and while you're not in the stadium you're close by and part of the atmosphere. Fortunately the state and local business leaders rallied together to #SavetheCrew and we were able to keep the team and we're building a new stadium next to Nationwide Arena in downtown Columbus where you can walk to the stadium. Hell, you can actually bike there from the suburbs using an existing bike trail and check-in your bike. Similarly, Ohio Stadium on the campus of Ohio State University is very walkable. People go and grab brunch before the noon game, they buy apparel, etc. So I think that yea, a football team is likely to make money for the team owner and cities and governments should be weary of this. And I also haven't read the article so maybe the benefits I mentioned are washed away somehow, but I can't imagine Columbus without Ohio State football, Bluejackets hockey, or Crew soccer. I think it makes the city a better place, even if the owner (of the latter two) makes money.
- alistairSH 5y ago
  And I also haven't read the article so maybe the benefits I mentioned are washed away somehow The financial benefits are rarely worth the initial expense for professional sports stadiums. Th article didn't claim governments shouldn't kick in any money, only that funding it wholly (or nearly so) via public funds is a bad use of tax revenue. DC has two recent examples. Nationals Stadium (baseball) and Audi Field (soccer). Both in the same neighborhood downtown (southwest waterfront). The baseballs stadium cost ~$1 billion. It was financed with bonds sold by the city and remains owned by the city. Rent to the baseball team and a portion of ticket/concession/etc are being used to pay back the bonds. As of a few years ago, it looked like the cost was basically a wash. But, that ignores opportunity costs of doing other things with that money (assuming it could be borrowed for other projects), so it's hard to say for sure if the stadium was better than other options.[1] Audi Field's financing was quite a bit more complicated, with multiple land trades with 3rd parties, and mixed financing (the team paid a significant amount of construction costs). The team leases thee stadium for a nominal $1/year, so I have no idea how the city recoups it's investment. Part of that deal also pulled $30 million from public school funding, which seems like a big miss to me.[2] All that said, the neighborhood where the stadiums are located was a derelict slum and industrial site before. It's massively revitalized. Does that development offset the costs of buildings/maintaining the stadiums? That's not clear. And both stadiums seem to have had a better mix of public/private financing than some of the NFL stadium deals of past decades (which are usually more expensive to start as well). 1 - https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/local/dc/nats-park-billion-dollar-gamble/65-70abe9a1-32f6-48f2-853e-9ce61fe63932 https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/local/dc/nats-park-billio... 2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audi_Field https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audi_Field
ghiculescu 5y ago
If people who actually like opera won’t fund it then then why should I, not an opera fan, fund it? I like tennis but I would not force you to subsidize its existence.
- IMTDb 5y ago
  The same argument can be made about anything subsidised: sport, art, research, healthcare, ... . Yet, a significant portion of what you experience has been indirectly affected by these subsidies. I am willing to bet that opera has had a tremendous impact on the music you listen to, to keep a direct example. Just arguing that "I don't immediately benefit from it, so I should not be paying for it" is probably a bit extreme.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    Yep. I sort of agree with the point about stadiums and certainly about the Olympic games. (I was very opposed to Boston thinking about bidding on some Olympics or other.) But cities/states subsidize a lot of things from public transit to parks to parades to cultural venues to say nothing of schools out of taxes. To say all that should be completely privatized is, yes, an extreme position.
    - II2II 5y ago
      I suppose I am going to sort-of go against my stated opinion of funding for professional vs. amateur sport here, since I am going to claim that the Olympics aren't entirely bad. At least the lower profile winter games aren't entirely bad. (Yes, I classify the Olympics as professional sport. Even when professional athletes were denied, it it hard to deny that the training many countries offered to their athletes would qualify as professional.) I was growing up in Calgary during the '88 Winter Games. As a child, it was pure excitement even though I wasn't particularly into sports. Somewhere in my parent's archive of my childhood are a couple of scrapbooks containing news clippings of what excited me from day to day, as well as the school's map to track the day-to-day progress of the torch relay. I don't know how I managed to snag that when a couple of hundred other kids and adults could have, but I did. But this isn't to suggest that the excitement of the day is important. Roughly a decade later, I secured an IT job with a human performance lab at the University of Calgary. As much as I believe that professionalism in sport is contradictory to societal benefit, research related to improving physical performance is important. That was a legacy of the '88 Olympics. Sometimes outcomes are beneficial even though they are difficult to tally up. As far as I can tell, the Vancouver games were beneficial as well. One of the outcomes was a mass transit line that reached capacity decades before anticipated. While that may sound like a negative, it does prove there is an underlying demand for reliable public transit. A more tangible benefit came from the conversion of Olympic facilities into community facilities. My recollections are of the a new False Creek community centre being used to host events to celebrate First Nations (North American Indian, for the Americans) culture and the dated Riley Park Community Centre being replaced with a modern facility. (I forget if the new facility included a pool, but the new rink was better than the old one.) Overall, I would say that we should be funding facilities and programs that address the needs of society as a whole from a social perspective. That being said, properly planned funding of professional facilities can still serve that goal. While my example involved the Olympic Games, something similar could be said of facilities built for private interests. Provided the rent was in proportion to what is being offered and the facilities served the needs of other clients.
rory 5y ago
I'm replying to a post about high school sports fields. Not known for their profitability. And at least kids can go run around there when a formal practice or game isn't happening.
- brewdad 5y ago
  Not necessarily. Most of the school stadiums near me are closed during school hours. After school they are used by various teams until well after dark. Then, on weekends, they are usually rented out to local athletic leagues (youth and adult) unless the school teams need them. They are largely unavailable to the general public unless they are willing to pay for exclusive use.

mbg721 5y ago

Actual opera fans are frothing at the mouth right now at the suggestion that Cats is opera. But this idea that opera is stuffy high culture is the same mistake people make with Shakespeare--it's pop culture, just removed from its context. Imagine upper-class twits a century from now screening an Adam Sandler movie.

User23 5y ago
That’s why Opera has so many long boring bits. Attendees weren’t expected to pay attention as if it were a High Mass. It was a social event, a place to see and be seen, as well as trade gossip and so on. The performance itself was somewhat analogous to the TV on in the background at a bar.
- whatshisface 5y ago
  How would that work with the arrangement of having rows of seats all facing the show? At a modern theater there's hardly any way to talk to anybody.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    Sure, going to either an opera or the latest Marvel blockbuster is often a social event to some degree. But the idea that the entertainment itself is just background noise like a few musicians at a cocktail party is just bizarre.
- passerby1 5y ago
  When did it become trendy to parade one's illiteracy and narrow-mindedness?
  - CRConrad 5y ago
    Was it ever not?
rory 5y ago
> But this idea that opera is stuffy high culture is the same mistake people make with Shakespeare These things ARE high culture today. Whether or not they were high culture when they were first produced doesn't change that in the slightest.
- mbg721 5y ago
  That's true, but it just highlights how bizarre and arbitrary high-culture is. I don't know how to say "Hey everybody, we're all going to get laid!" in Italian while preserving Rodney Dangerfield's voice.
  - rory 5y ago
    Absolutely. The arbitrariness doesn't only apply to performance, either. Fancy people like old stuff. Jackson Pollock. Dubliners.
tombert 5y ago
Isn't what makes Shakespeare "high culture" is its ability to stand the test of time? I'm sure there were plenty of mediocre or terrible plays from other writers at the time that no one cares about now, and are thus not "high culture". Shakespeare's stuff has been consistently read/performed for centuries, indicating that there might be something a bit more to it than the average play. Pop culture doesn't necessarily imply not high culture. I could be wrong obviously, but I would be extremely surprised if Adam Sandler movies have centuries of longevity to them; I think even people who like his movies will acknowledge that they're not spectacular films. Of course the "test of time" test isn't always an indicator of quality. There are plenty of old books that I had to read that I thought were terrible, and moreover there are plenty of modern music that I think is fantastic that no one else will really care about.
- JackFr 5y ago
  > Of course the "test of time" test isn't always an indicator of quality. Today's superhero movies = yesterday's westerns. "I can't believe they made so many of these and just how bad most of them are."
- jancsika 5y ago
  > I'm sure there were plenty of mediocre or terrible plays from other writers at the time that no one cares about now, and are thus not "high culture". I don't think that is historically accurate. From what I've read "high" vs. "low" culture changes over time, very often based on aesthetics. Brahms wrote both high and low art by the late 19th-century audience's standards. Today it's all just Brahms, who is a "classical composer", hence all "high art." Most importantly, there is no reason at all to believe that it cannot change again in the future. E.g., Brahms goes viral and gets treated as some kind of KPop sensation. Then we get some young punk doing cosplay as a steampunk Musikwissenschaftler claiming that Hungarian Dance No. 5 no longer slaps as high as it used to.
zeruch 5y ago
High culture vs low culture has always been at least partly arbitrary. I'm not an Opera fan in general, but used to love that there was a cafe in town that once a month hosted 'opera' night, where amateur and pro opera singers (some from the SJ and SF opera camps) to sing whatever they want. Sometimes you'd get someone singing pop tunes as arias, sometimes you'd see legit arias sung in full costume, sometimes just the local belting out of Carmen in sweatpants. It felt delightfully local, accessible, and devoid of highbrow/lowbrow nonsense.

ericmay 5y ago

The owner is making money, but so are the players, the referees, the concession staff, parking attendants, stores and shops that sell licensed apparel, and the bars, restaurants, and other adjacent businesses. Not to mention the marketing team, strength and conditioning coaches, web developers, and others who work for the team. And although temporary, it does create new construction jobs. This is true for football, soccer, baseball, basketball, and other sports. But this is less true when the stadium is built and then surrounded with parking lots that you have to drive to to go park your car. It's more true when the stadium is built in a neighborhood or at least a walkable area. Recently Columbus was going to lose the much beloved Columbus Crew soccer team. We had a stadium off of I-71 that was, you guessed it, surrounded by parking lots and not much else. You couldn't grab a beer before or after the game. People couldn't go camp out at a nearby bar and while you're not in the stadium you're close by and part of the atmosphere. Fortunately the state and local business leaders rallied together to #SavetheCrew and we were able to keep the team and we're building a new stadium next to Nationwide Arena in downtown Columbus where you can walk to the stadium. Hell, you can actually bike there from the suburbs using an existing bike trail and check-in your bike. Similarly, Ohio Stadium on the campus of Ohio State University is very walkable. People go and grab brunch before the noon game, they buy apparel, etc. So I think that yea, a football team is likely to make money for the team owner and cities and governments should be weary of this. And I also haven't read the article so maybe the benefits I mentioned are washed away somehow, but I can't imagine Columbus without Ohio State football, Bluejackets hockey, or Crew soccer. I think it makes the city a better place, even if the owner (of the latter two) makes money.

alistairSH 5y ago
And I also haven't read the article so maybe the benefits I mentioned are washed away somehow The financial benefits are rarely worth the initial expense for professional sports stadiums. Th article didn't claim governments shouldn't kick in any money, only that funding it wholly (or nearly so) via public funds is a bad use of tax revenue. DC has two recent examples. Nationals Stadium (baseball) and Audi Field (soccer). Both in the same neighborhood downtown (southwest waterfront). The baseballs stadium cost ~$1 billion. It was financed with bonds sold by the city and remains owned by the city. Rent to the baseball team and a portion of ticket/concession/etc are being used to pay back the bonds. As of a few years ago, it looked like the cost was basically a wash. But, that ignores opportunity costs of doing other things with that money (assuming it could be borrowed for other projects), so it's hard to say for sure if the stadium was better than other options.[1] Audi Field's financing was quite a bit more complicated, with multiple land trades with 3rd parties, and mixed financing (the team paid a significant amount of construction costs). The team leases thee stadium for a nominal $1/year, so I have no idea how the city recoups it's investment. Part of that deal also pulled $30 million from public school funding, which seems like a big miss to me.[2] All that said, the neighborhood where the stadiums are located was a derelict slum and industrial site before. It's massively revitalized. Does that development offset the costs of buildings/maintaining the stadiums? That's not clear. And both stadiums seem to have had a better mix of public/private financing than some of the NFL stadium deals of past decades (which are usually more expensive to start as well). 1 - https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/local/dc/nats-park-billion-dollar-gamble/65-70abe9a1-32f6-48f2-853e-9ce61fe63932 https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/local/dc/nats-park-billio... 2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audi_Field https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audi_Field

ghiculescu 5y ago

If people who actually like opera won’t fund it then then why should I, not an opera fan, fund it? I like tennis but I would not force you to subsidize its existence.

IMTDb 5y ago
The same argument can be made about anything subsidised: sport, art, research, healthcare, ... . Yet, a significant portion of what you experience has been indirectly affected by these subsidies. I am willing to bet that opera has had a tremendous impact on the music you listen to, to keep a direct example. Just arguing that "I don't immediately benefit from it, so I should not be paying for it" is probably a bit extreme.
- ghaff 5y ago
  Yep. I sort of agree with the point about stadiums and certainly about the Olympic games. (I was very opposed to Boston thinking about bidding on some Olympics or other.) But cities/states subsidize a lot of things from public transit to parks to parades to cultural venues to say nothing of schools out of taxes. To say all that should be completely privatized is, yes, an extreme position.
  - II2II 5y ago
    I suppose I am going to sort-of go against my stated opinion of funding for professional vs. amateur sport here, since I am going to claim that the Olympics aren't entirely bad. At least the lower profile winter games aren't entirely bad. (Yes, I classify the Olympics as professional sport. Even when professional athletes were denied, it it hard to deny that the training many countries offered to their athletes would qualify as professional.) I was growing up in Calgary during the '88 Winter Games. As a child, it was pure excitement even though I wasn't particularly into sports. Somewhere in my parent's archive of my childhood are a couple of scrapbooks containing news clippings of what excited me from day to day, as well as the school's map to track the day-to-day progress of the torch relay. I don't know how I managed to snag that when a couple of hundred other kids and adults could have, but I did. But this isn't to suggest that the excitement of the day is important. Roughly a decade later, I secured an IT job with a human performance lab at the University of Calgary. As much as I believe that professionalism in sport is contradictory to societal benefit, research related to improving physical performance is important. That was a legacy of the '88 Olympics. Sometimes outcomes are beneficial even though they are difficult to tally up. As far as I can tell, the Vancouver games were beneficial as well. One of the outcomes was a mass transit line that reached capacity decades before anticipated. While that may sound like a negative, it does prove there is an underlying demand for reliable public transit. A more tangible benefit came from the conversion of Olympic facilities into community facilities. My recollections are of the a new False Creek community centre being used to host events to celebrate First Nations (North American Indian, for the Americans) culture and the dated Riley Park Community Centre being replaced with a modern facility. (I forget if the new facility included a pool, but the new rink was better than the old one.) Overall, I would say that we should be funding facilities and programs that address the needs of society as a whole from a social perspective. That being said, properly planned funding of professional facilities can still serve that goal. While my example involved the Olympic Games, something similar could be said of facilities built for private interests. Provided the rent was in proportion to what is being offered and the facilities served the needs of other clients.

rory 5y ago

I'm replying to a post about high school sports fields. Not known for their profitability. And at least kids can go run around there when a formal practice or game isn't happening.

brewdad 5y ago
Not necessarily. Most of the school stadiums near me are closed during school hours. After school they are used by various teams until well after dark. Then, on weekends, they are usually rented out to local athletic leagues (youth and adult) unless the school teams need them. They are largely unavailable to the general public unless they are willing to pay for exclusive use.