An Appetite for Risk?
Christopher Fox

A paradox of contemporary life for those of us who live in prosperous European democracies is that most of the risks that confront us are beyond our democratic control. I might decide to reduce my carbon footprint by abandoning air travel, but AI data-processing burns through my annual carbon savings in a second. I might lament the proliferation of armed conflicts promoted by the current US president, but I am not a US voter and even if I write an opera lampooning his stupidity, I won’t influence his supporters. As an economically literate and politically active UK voter I know that the way to make Britain a better place is to reduce inequality, improve health and social care, extend educational provision and so on; but all these require reforms of the taxation system that would guarantee electoral disaster for any political party that chose to promote them. 

Confronted by the existential risks of climate catastrophe, wars and social inequity, any risks that face me as an artist are relatively inconsequential. But at least I have agency in the way I respond to them, so it seems important to understand the nature of those risks and to decide which ones I want to address. Risks for artists lie both in what we do and in how we do it and, because I like taking risks and dealing with the consequences of taking them, I am more interested in the “how” than the “what”. I choose to engage more with the risks that lie in the wider social dimensions of the work I do, rather than those intrinsic to a particular project.

An example: if I make a work whose manner is intended to surprise people – perhaps because it is very long or very loud, or involves challenging subject matter (although this would probably be more effective if I was a novelist or a theatre- or film-maker) – it only becomes risky if I choose to present it to an audience for whom these things are unusual. My usual audience is made up of people who are interested in new music, who expect innovation; this is, consequently, a more or less risk-free environment in which to make work. It’s comfortable and reassuring, but risky? No. 

A problem with writing about risk is that it is such a slippery concept. When does danger become risk? Perhaps when you choose to confront it. When does a threat turn into a risk? Perhaps when you decide to ignore it. And often when risks first appear they present themselves not as dangers or threats, but as apparent opportunities. The invention of sound recording offered musicians the opportunity to share their work with people who would never have been able to hear them play live. Later it would offer them, and the companies who released their recordings, a rich new revenue stream. But it also created a new mode of passive, even disengaged, listening that has, in turn, transformed live music-making into a spectacle within which listening is a relatively small component. “I enjoyed your new piece,” I am told at the end of concerts by people who want to show me a photo they took during the performance. “Is there a recording?” 

The technologies of the digital revolution were opportunities once; now they seem both dangerous and threatening. For ease of transmission I write this text on my laptop, but I know that I like writing more – probably do it better too – when I do it by hand. Once the text is published, it becomes yet more data for AI to plagiarise and distort. Losing control of one’s work has always been a danger for artists, but which risk should we take in response to AI? Do we play along until we are overwhelmed by its capacity for imitation, or do we resist and test its capacity to survive without our support? 

Beyond these very present risks lies the domain of the past. As artists, we work in media and genres that have long histories. Lens-based media may be relatively young, the novel and the orchestra a bit older, but theatre, architecture, singing and iconography are ancient. We surround ourselves with work from these long histories, in museums, the built environment, concert halls, theatres. We create institutions and festivals to celebrate it. We teach it to our students, although we often pick a very selective path through the past that, conveniently, enables us to reveal our work today as the inevitable, progressive outcome of what has gone before.

It seems to me that our relationship with this multiplicity of histories is fraught with risk. If we forget them, we run the risk of making work that lacks any significant anchor in the past and is thus irrelevant to the present. If we ignore the past we risk being the only exhibit in a museum full of mirrors, the only sound source in an infinite echo chamber. If we make histories that are too selective, we simply consolidate our own position; make them too wide-ranging and we drown in the ocean of past human activity. 

The institutions that we develop around art histories are part of the process through which we understand who we are and from where we have come, but their very existence is also a risk. We build art houses that show some sorts of work much more readily than others, theatres that prescribe a particular relationship to the audience, opera houses that require their artists to use particular instruments in particular hierarchical formations. Each of them poses a risk to the very media and genres they are intended to promote, because each of them is, by design and necessity, conservative. Human beings are social creatures, and we like to associate with one another around things that we enjoy, so a world without art institutions is unlikely. But perhaps we need to embrace a different sort of risk, the risk that comes when we make these institutions dynamic and open, capable of challenging the status quo and embracing new possibilities. 

These institutions lead directly into the political domain. As artists, we need to help politicians to understand that the eras in which they govern are defined as much by art as by social reform or the peaks and troughs of global economic cycles. When I want to feel optimistic about the US, for example, I listen to the electronic music of Pauline Oliveros or the solo and ensemble playing of Cecil Taylor and am confronted by the traces of a society that was energetic, hopeful. Art tells us what it was like to be alive then and now, indeed what it was like to be alive at every point in the history of our species. Art has always depended on the support of rich and powerful people, and we should make time to remind them that our work is their legacy. Everything is at risk when they ignore us.

But if we ignore the political domain, choosing instead to sit tight in the reassuring comfort of our artistic silos, matching our work solely to the discourse within our peer group, we take another risk. Instead we should, following Antonio Gramsci, continually question the senso comune of the world around us. Sometimes I sense a resistance to critique, a feeling that it is more important to praise than to find fault. But art and its makers should be challenged, at every level. Why is the work like this? Why these aesthetic choices? Why these decisions about distribution, about financial, human and material resources? And the people who ask these questions should be not only fellow artists but also the people who see, read, hear our work, the organisations that fund it. If we are to avoid the risk of stagnation, we need to encourage educational systems to generate informed, challenging critique. We need our schools, colleges, universities to produce listeners, viewers, readers who understand that criticism is an indispensable part of the artistic process. 

One more example, perhaps even a provisional conclusion: publicly funded arts organisations in the UK have to keep risk registers. These list things that might go wrong, the likelihood of that happening and ways in which the risk might be “mitigated”. A few years ago I complained to a concert promoter about hearing damage that I suffered in one of their events, and because of my complaint, this has been added, so they tell me, to their risk register. Now they mitigate the risk by giving advance warning when an event is likely to be very loud. This doesn’t repair my hearing, of course, nor does it repair the reputational damage I suffered when my complaints were said to have “upset” some of the people involved in the event. But those weren’t on my risk register either.

That may be the most important aspect of risk: that it is often unexpected, and risky. 

Christopher Fox, a composer, has been a member of the Music Section of the Akademie der Künste since 2021.