Douglas McLennan, The Middleware Manifesto: A Proposal for Rebuilding American Culture, Diacritical, 15
In my last post, Why the Death of American Leadership may run through your Local Orchestra, I argued that the struggles of institutions like orchestras and newspapers aren’t a series of isolated but mounting failures but a systemic breakdown in the civic middle, the connective tissue that holds communities together.
It’s happening not only across the arts but across our political, civic and business landscape. How can you be a financially successful orchestra when the system that surrounds it is no longer set up to let it be so? You can’t tweak an organization into working when the model has failed. I worry that in attempting to diagnose the issue, the thinking is not big enough to meet the scale of the problem.
Many who read the post told me they found it depressing.