Excerpt from Chapter 2: "The People v. the Arts"

Taking a poll is no way to judge whether a work of art should survive. --Claes Oldenburg

In March of 2006, an award-winning theater production that had enjoyed a successful run in London was scheduled to open in New York. My Name is Rachel Corrie is a one-woman play based on the diaries and emails of a young American activist who attempted to save a Palestinian home from destruction by Israeli soldiers. She was bulldozed to death in the process. Seen by some as pro-Palestinian propaganda and by others as a brave and truthful account of an individual woman’s experiences, the play sparked intense debate well before its New York debut. So passionate was the dispute, in fact, that after consulting with an array of unnamed groups, the New York Theater Workshop abruptly decided to postpone the show.The most immediate cause of this controversy was the intensity of the conflict over Israeli-Palestinian relations, and the vexed role played by an art work that commented on those politics in a powerful way. But there was another question at stake here. Katherine Viner, one of the play’s co-editors, accused the theater company of consulting certain community groups and overlooking the opinions of others: “I think that for example some Jewish groups were polled and some Arab-American groups weren’t. It’s very confusing who was polled and who wasn’t.” The New York Theater Workshop asserted that they did no “polling” at all: what they conducted was rather a standard “process of research” to “understand the depth of the cultural and political issues surrounding the play.” Viner claimed that even this kind of community research was peculiar to the US: “in Britain … when we do plays, political plays … we don’t really believe in consultation. We think the plays are works of art and stand on their own feet.” Whether or not the NYTW was guilty of conducting covert opinion polls, the very anxiety this provoked is intriguing. Why did the question of polling come up at all in a debate about a theater production? What Viner objected to was very specific indeed: the notion that art might not be autonomous enough to stand on its “own feet,” but might find itself answerable to opinion polls, backroom lobbying, and community approval – answerable, in other words, to democracy....