Published! Seattle Times Article

I was honored when the Seattle Times chose to publish my op-ed titled "We have too much information. We need more art." I wrote it in response to this article about layoffs at arts organizations. I'm grateful for the conversations it has sparked. Here's the link to the Seattle Times article: https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/we-have-too-much-information-we-need-more-art/#comments I'm also sharing it below for those who are unable to view it. The information age has largely eliminated the problem of boredom. In its place, most of us feel overwhelmed by the tsunami of information coming at us. Paired with rising expectations, ever-increasing workloads, decision fatigue, and AI that accelerates that pace, we are saturated. We arrive everywhere full, suffering a kind of “information obesity” with real consequences. This overwhelm shows up in a thousand ways: the mental health crisis, burnout, and the sense that life is moving faster than we can make meaning from it. So when we are invited to take in more, even beautiful, masterfully crafted art, something in us resists.

This is the real story beneath the financial strain hitting major performing arts institutions in Seattle and across the country. They are not struggling because they are doing their work poorly. They are struggling because the world their audiences are living in has fundamentally changed, and organizations built for a different era of human need have not yet caught up. The arts aren't competing with Netflix. The couch wins because it asks nothing of a person who has nothing left to give.

In the postwar decades when the model of modern arts institutions took shape, audiences arrived hungry. Stimulation was scarce. Community was part of daily life, and the arts were part of that fabric. People had friends in the same seats every season and argued about the soprano on the drive home. Those conversations were doing invisible work, requiring them to actually process what they had experienced. Social media looks like it fills that function, but it does not. When the operative question shifts from "what did this mean to me" to "what does attending this say about me," interior work is replaced by impression management. The processing window collapses before meaning has a chance to form. Meaning-making requires conditions, and those conditions no longer arrive pre-assembled.

The hunger for something different is showing up in unexpected places: in community choirs, immersive experiences, and informal art-making groups. When people seek out experiences where they contribute rather than simply observe, they are, in effect, self-medicating, reaching instinctively toward a remedy for the isolation and overwhelm that define modern life. In 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General declared loneliness a public health epidemic. The arts, experienced in community and processed together, are one of the most powerful antidotes we have.

But participatory arts are only half the answer. The other half is rebuilding the conditions for processing. Those conversations were not incidental. They were the mechanism by which art became meaning. They cannot be rebuilt through a single add-on at the end. Organizations that design their entire experience for reflection, response, and real conversation are doing something quietly radical. Not just presenting art, but shaping the conditions that allow it to actually change us.

Art can quiet the noise, restore our capacity for discernment, and remind us that we are not just consumers of whatever comes at us, but makers of meaning. But that potential is only realized when the conditions exist to receive it. If we arrive depleted and leave without processing what we have experienced, even a transcendent performance becomes just another gigabyte of data. The art does not fail. The conditions fail.

Those conditions are worth rebuilding. That means organizations willing to ask not just "how do we fill seats" but "what does an overwhelmed person actually need tonight, and how do we deliver it." It means audiences willing to linger, to resist the pull of the phone, to find someone to talk to afterward, even a stranger. It means accepting that the conditions for meaning no longer arrive on their own. We have to build them.

The question is not whether the arts matter. In a world moving this fast, they have never been more urgent. The question is whether we are willing to do what it takes, all of us, to let them.