Marc Scorca is charming, a personable man, a man with a way of maintaining eye contact at all times that makes you feel guilty for glancing away occasionally to check out your fettucine Alfredo. He’s just as charming at 9:15 at night, interrupted in the midst of washing his dog for a followup question, as he is on company time, and he’s just as ready with a speedy, educated answer to virtually any question about the arts and their funding.
MS: Like all things in life, there are two answers to that question. I am delighted that, with the hard work I’m putting into my very business-based job, the end product is something I love. I don’t know what it would be like in my life to have no relationship with the product around which I was working. If I were in advertising, and I had to come up with an ad campaign for something I would never buy, how would I make myself be creative in that instance? How would I make myself work an 80-hour week if I had no personal identification with the product I was trying to sell?
I don’t believe than an arts administrator can be someone who doesn’t love the art. I think an MBA or a businessman can run a business in a generic sense. And in many instances, the product is incidental to the running of the business . . . . While I would love to have on my staff as my director of finance someone who is passionless about the art, so I [can] have reliable systems analyses and reliable budgets and projections, I think that to be the chief administrator, you have to be very passionate about the art form.
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Cable–do you have cable at home? Did you have cable six years ago? How about a VCR? Did you have your VCR six years ago? Recently, when I asked the [COT] board how many people had VCRs six years ago, there were a few hands. When I asked how many people have VCRs today, every hand went up. The same with cable. So that in terms of the live-performance market, it’s become more complex and more competitive; in terms of the electronic market, it’s become a lot more competitive, because people have all these alternative ways of enjoying the arts.
MS: I think the answer is to put the best possible work on stage. You know, one of the reasons that electronic media (records, compact discs, or videotapes) of operas are so successful–in addition to the fact that there’s a comfort level in being at home while you’re enjoying this–is the fact that, in a recording session, they can have singer Smith approach the third act after three days off and a good rest. They can do a retake if soprano Jane Doe gets some phlegm on that high note. There is a “perfection,” albeit perhaps an unexciting perfection, but a perfection nonetheless, to these recordings that we’re getting these days. In terms of what productions are being videotaped and marketed, they’re the international, star-studded productions of the best companies in the world, so that in a certain way the quality of what is out there electronically is really high.
