I love shortform versus longform arguments – they usually fall down along these lines: shortform is popular, but shallow and hokey, and longform is more complex, but elitist and condescending. My friend has a great analogy that I'm going to invoke here, which is that shortform is like Lady Gaga, and longform is like Miles Davis. Now Lady Gaga (or really any large-scale, arena rock, top 40 artist) is “quick, fun, and the masses love it”. Lady Gaga is a far-out character in her own right, she has, it can be argued, built a majority of her following on her ostentatious and outrageous approach to fashion and self. (Fine, complain about the inherent chauvinism in that sentence if you must, but Gaga has built an empire on being a strange weirdo as much as Katy Perry has on being the bubble-gum girl next door, or any rapper in history has on being a from-the-hood “gangsta”.) Gaga's music (like Perry or Kings of Leon, et al) is not complex – it is fairly derivative and repetitive, but damn if it isn't catchy (I spent the better part of a week in a waiting room for a court case the summer that “California Girls” hit big, and damned if I didn't hear Perry crooning about melting Popsicles once an hour, and still enjoyed it.)
Now, the converse is that longform is more like Miles; its “complex, difficult, and there are a lot of people that can't appreciate it.” Miles probably never wanted (or intended) to create art that stood on the shoulders of his own persona, and probably just wanted the music to stand on its own. But his (very valid) point is that longform has (at the very least) the perception of being kind of art for art's sake. In another word: masturbatory. I've spent a number of nights in longform shows where I'd wager somewhere between 25-50% of the audience was other improvisers, or improv students. (At some shows, it may be even higher.) I've also spent nights in shortform shows that were completely occupied by people who weren't just non-improvisers, but had never been to any improv show before. Miles Davis' Kind of Blue (the best selling jazz album of all time) has only sold 4 million copies, whereas Gaga's The Fame has sold over 12 million, Kings of Leon's Only by the Night has sold 6.2 million, and Katy Perry's Teenage Dream has sold 5.5 million, in addition to 30 million copies just for the singles (outside of album sales), and is only the second artist in history to have an album spawn five singles (behind Michael Jackson).
Now the argument of Gaga v Davis is a (unfortunately) very manifest one, which is that longform tends to be a little self-obsessed. Self-important, even. Some of the more well-known longforms are very artistic, can be very “modal jazz”, obtuse, and self-aggrandizing, such as the Harold, which is such a dense form, that it is surprising that anyone ever does it well. But to make the assumption that all longform is weird and onanistic is to miss the point of longform – it is not impenetrable by nature, but by nurture. Longform is more complex than shortform, both for players and audience, and can be quite difficult, but can also be very deep, meaningful, and painfully entertaining. I have seen countless shortform shows that are just as self-important, self-aggrandizing, boring, and dense as I have longform shows – it's not the form that makes the show, it is always the improviser that makes the show. If you have elitist, vapid, and over-wrought players, you're going to have an elitist, vapid, and over-wrought show, regardless of whether you're doing “Freeze Tag” or the “Three Mad Rituals”.
Now, let's go back to music briefly. Fine, Gaga outsold Davis by 8 million copies, even with Blue having a 50 year head start. But let's compare: remember those numbers above for a bunch of the current big artists? Well, they don't even score on the list of the best selling albums – Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon is considered one of the best albums ever made, and has sold a whopping 50 million copies world wide, and is the second best selling album of all time (behind MJ's Thriller). And Moon is no Fame – it is very artistic, groundbreaking in sound design as well as songwriting, uses interview clips to break up songs, and is a dense (and also entertaining) album, yet still outsold Gaga more than 4 times over.
This tells me that audience's don't care about art/entertainment so much; “I may not know much about art, but I know what I like”. Sure, you may get some people who'd prefer to watch a few games than invest in a whole involved piece, but the fact remains that well-executed trumps for-the-masses every time. Look at movies like Kazaam to see something that was intended to be easily accessible, lowest common denominator popcorn fare, and is universally reviled. (As a fun project, go look at the lowest scored films on Metacritic, and, sure, you'll see Date Movie, but you'll also see Adventures of Pluto Nash (with Eddie freakin' Murphy), which also has the dishonor of being one the biggest flops in movie history. That list is a veritable rouge's gallery of cinematic failure in commercial film-making aspirations.) It is not by virtue of the medium, but the artist that makes the art impossible to watch.
