Who Do You Applaud?

By Daniel Rosenberg | 12/1/23

Fran Lebowitz, who knew the New York City art scene before the devastating AIDS Crisis, is one of the last cultural remnants of a once thriving, sexually active, and culturally aware community of fairies. Fran was a frequent guest of her gay friends who attended performances at the New York City Ballet in the 1980s. After the crisis which Reagan never named, she frequently says in interviews that the audience, which was once full of an educated queer class, is now replete with heterosexual goys.

This hall was once awash with a community of queer men. Overnight their bodies were gone, interred in overflowing cemeteries around the New York metropolitan area, their belongings returned to blood relatives who discarded the photo albums of concert programs, photographs, and memorabilia. In the vein of Bjørneboe, who once calculated the total human compost created as a result of the Second World War, I can only imagine how much biomass the T-cell-killing disease produced in fields just outside our inferno. 

Fran says the audiences are gone: they were made of gay men. Those men knew the choreography step by step. They knew the slight variations and contemporary versions of the classic ballets. They knew the ballerinas’ names by heart like a Catholic knows every prayerful word of the Nicene Creed. And they knew when their favorite ballerinas weren’t at 110% ––for anything less, they booed, threw shoes (reportedly), and shouted outrageous things. They knew the very best, and they knew they deserved the best because above all else, above being a community of displaced people, they had taste, and they had the Ballet. 

Fran will say when she attends now and sees the geriatric goys and tourists applaud lavishly at half-sold semi-productions of familiar shows––when she sees them stand up and hand out standing ovations to every and any mediocre buffoon on a major stage despite the quality, with their ignorant gaping mouths, ready to make self-important remarks––Fran will say, “who are they applauding? themselves.” And she’s right.

Take this to heart, applause is not obligatory. 

I understand. Leaving your hands at your side at a recital or the philharmonic may be a challenge––in our times, great social pressure fills our halls with the compulsion to applaud. Refraining from the tiresome slapping of hands together (a humiliating action if you think about it too much), and even more so, refraining from standing, might be a challenge with the pressures that dominate these spaces. In a way it’s beautiful. In the same way, the advertisements on the subway are beautiful when they’ve been torn away and all that is left hanging are scraps of paper and glue––an incidental work of horror, a Rauschenberg painting, beautiful, in that our halls are replicating the Milgram experiment. 

Despite this dark beauty, I beg of you, for the sake of taste and the graves on which we stand, don’t stand up unless you mean it. Don’t be fooled, the geriatrics are out of their seats predominantly so they can beat each other to the toilets. In our contemporary audiences, everyone is standing. Everyone is clapping. So an honest response, particularly if the music is just fine, feels like a protest of sorts in comparison to the raving crowd. Don’t be convinced by this guilt. Know it’s a disservice to the performers, to the music, and to yourself to fake a reaction. It is a more solemn dishonesty than faking climax––one of the mortal sins Dante forgot to include. 

After the last few years, during which great efforts of art were put on hold, it seems that audiences are just happy to be hearing live music again; appreciative that rehearsals can take place, that people can be paid for making art, that audiences can assemble. But this habit has become exhausting. 

At this rate, we’re rewarding mediocrity, and it’s sad. So much of the contemporary music that big institutions are producing––made palatable for their ignorant, self-aggrandizing audiences, the buzzy melodic, cinematic “saccharin,” music, as Zack Woolfe has said––is so mediocre and uninspiring that the standing ovations are depressing. And they’re not even camp, like the ovations of Florence Foster Jenkins––it would be something if they were bad. Hand to god, if an orangutan took a shit on one of these stages, and the audience gave an ovation, I would smile ear to ear and eat the shit with a spoon. At least there’s some form of irony there. But we’re essentially settling for TV Dinners, in our David Geffen Hall redesigned to replicate a Hilton Inn and Suites. I know for a fact the fairies of Fran’s time would have staged walkouts over that choice in convention center carpet and airport terrazzo. 

This is to say the excess of the standing ovation is a serious cultural problem. It’s a sickness––a sign of decay, that causes me distress. It exemplifies depravity in cultural awareness and societal health, which is a symptom of queer absence and of the multi-decade trend of arts administrators having to cater to ignorant, self-important audiences rather than well-educated people of substantial taste. The greatest sign of cultural health is an audience that is indignant, unsatiable, and that shows up for every performance of the season. 

The only hope I can offer is that a new generation of young queer people with disposable income is slowly replacing those we lost. We mourn the loss of people we never knew, for all of the knowledge lost, and for all of the booing we never heard. 

In honor of your gay ancestors, those genetically pre-selected to not bear children, but bear the arts dating back to Whitman, to Rimbaud, Da Vinci––honor them by standing only when you really mean it.