What Is a Growth Art?

A growth art is an art or sport which is new or has been stagnant for a long period and is positioned to explosively grow.

Arts can be charted, roughly, as one would a commodity, an industry, or a stock. The cycles tend to be long term, analogous to a commodity like gold.

SPORTS
Sports in America first exploded in the 1920's, because of the appearance of charismatic athletes like Babe Ruth and Jack Dempsey, but also because the times were ready for them.

As pointed out by Roger Kahn in his 1999 book, A Flame of Pure Fire, boxing led the way, when after the Great War many of the prohibitions on the sport were lifted. The Dempsey-Willard crowd in Toledo, Ohio in 1919 of 20,000 was the largest ever. Within ten years crowds for major fights exceeded 100,000.

Golf's first surge occurred in 1960 with the rise of Arnold Palmer, soon accompanied by golfers Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player as talented as he was. A second bounce came ten years ago with the arrival of Tiger Woods. Because comparable golfers have yet to follow, the sport now, for all its success, looks to be a "sell."

ARTS
Arts behave in the same fashion. Popular music became an unstoppable force with the onset of rock n' roll in 1955. It peaked artistically in the late 1960's; in business terms, and its position in society, somewhat after. The periods of innovation are over. (A sure sign that Rock is Dead is that every music critic alive is stuck in the past.) One sees across the landscape thousands and thousands of bands, singers, acts-- a relentless bombardment of recycled sounds and poses.

The field I've been promoting is the essential art of oral and written language known as literature, whose role in the culture has been declining for eight decades, since the Golden Age-- Hemingway Fitzgerald Sinclair Lewis Dreiser Dos Passos Dorothy Parker et.al.-- of the 1920's. It's due for a rebound. One has started. I've positioned myself to be at the forefront of that move. (No one-- NO ONE-- stages and promotes more exciting literary shows than myself.)

Whereas, because of the era, in the 1960's Jim Morrison was persuaded to change from poet to rock star, I advocate the reverse, recognizing that the talent and charisma which will rescue literature will be found not in sterile college writing programs but among young creators of rock n' roll, whose current art is at a dead end and who need to pick up paper and pen instead. Musicians, put down your guitars!

Exciting days are ahead.