I certainly understand why people are talking about this. If you hadn't heard the bombshell from Timothée Chalamet and his off-the-cuff conversation with "aggressively centrist" Matthew McConaughey, you have now. The quote:

I don't want to be working in ballet, or opera, or things where it's like, "Hey, keep this thing alive, even though like no one cares about this anymore."

To this I would say, oh look – a young acting talent who find himself in the center of a publicity wave, over-enamored with his own fame, making the mistake that I talk about often, which is that of assuming the whole world thinks like you do. It's not enough that we have a media and entertainment landscape that, with a few notable exceptions, is AI-driven, context-starved, and impossibly average. No, we need to export the kind of artistic disdain that can only extend from ignorance to the rest of the media markets around the globe. The truth of the matter is, that most of the rest of the world is diverging in very important ways from the trajectory of the United States. When Timothée Chalamet says that 'no one cares about this anymore,' in reference to the fine arts like ballet and opera – it is true, perhaps, in a limited sense here in the USA. But more than being some sort of gotcha moment for an industry that has persevered for hundreds of years, this unfortunate event really only serves to culturally isolate us even more here in the United States.

Depending on who you ask, there are certainly demographics within this country that would agree with the statement like that. But it does not take much in the way of investigation to push back on this sentiment, which is why I place much of the blame for this on McConaughey, who has the experience and the fame and the personal history to know better. He gives Chalamet immediate cover by agreeing with him, even though I know he's been to Paris to see the ballet. I know he's been to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles to see an opera. It's possible that modern acting schools no longer give adequate deference to the creators, composers, and performers that we can thank for the industry as it is. If you have a reverence for Charlie Chaplin, then by extension, you have to show some respect to Fred Karno, who, in turn, found his own power as a British student of theater in the late 19th century. If you think, as Timothy obviously does, that somehow the modern movie business sprung up in the post World War II era from whole cloth, then you might want to check back in to art school. In art, as in science, largely we are standing on the shoulders of giants. So let's not worry too much about a flavor-of-the-month whippersnapper like Chalamet. Either one of two things will happen: he will fade back into the soulless abyss that he emerged from, or he will finally begin to understand that the fine arts are an inextricable component of the larger modern media landscape.

To me, the biggest takeaway is this: we over-emphasize the importance of money to our own detriment. When Chalamet says he 'just lost $0.14 in viewership,' that's the tell. As if short-term financial gain was ever a worthy benchmark for the arts. He's wrong, of course. I think he lost a lot more viewership than that. For someone who has been on record as saying he wants to be one of the greats, I'm sorry, my guy. You are not going to do it alone.

Seeing as Timothée got most of his acting chops in high school, I guarantee that one day he will push up against the limits of his 'natural' acting ability. It is then that he will understand what the rest of us already know: the fine arts – most importantly the written word, the art of dance, and the art of musical composition and performance, as well as the visual arts – represent the very thread that ties together the entirety of modern human expression. It's the only path forward. Opera and ballet matter all the more now, simply by virtue of the insane work ethic that they require. Timothée wouldn't know anything about that, because he didn't have enough patience to even get through a year of university. Also, on a final note, I would imagine his entire French heritage has disowned him by now. In France, them's fighting words. The very structure of French entertainment across many regions of the country is comprised almost exclusively of classical music performance, opera, and ballet. And that's why it's the tourism capital of the world.

How are the tourism dollars doing stateside at the moment? You can get back to me on that.

It's a bad look, it's painfully myopic, and McConaughey should've known better than affirming such an ignorant position.