DAVID MARCUS: Timothée Chalamet's right, the Left ruined ballet and opera
Timothée Chalamet is under fire this week and losing traction in the best actor Oscar race for saying just about the most obvious thing in the world: Nobody cares about ballet or opera in 2026.
Here is the exact quote from the "Dune" and "Marty Supreme" star during a recent CNN town hall: "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.' All respect to all the ballet and opera people out there."
The backlash was swift and severe. According to the BBC, Canadian mezzo-soprano Deepa Johnny described Chalamet's comments as a "disappointing take" while, American artist Franz Szony wrote, "Two classical art forms that have been around for hundreds of years, both of which take a massive amount of talent and discipline this man will never possess."
But to today’s pretty boy of Hollywood’s point, who the hell are these people?
When I was 10 years old, the greatest ballet dancer in the world was Mikhail Baryshnikov. He was as famous as Larry Bird or Doc Gooden, as was the greatest opera singer of the time, Luciano Pavarotti. That is gone today.
Today, almost no American has the slightest idea who the greatest ballet dancer or opera singer alive is, because it's not for them any more. The fine performing arts have become a bubble of progressive intolerance. They don’t even want us unwashed non-believers involved.
The fine performing arts are the last trench that the sad wokesters are hunkered down in.
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In the 1950s, there were published collections of the great works of the West. You may have seen some of these leather-bound volumes in your grandparents' houses. They were very expensive, but publishers couldn’t print them fast enough.
The middle class ate it up.
On any given night in those 1950s and 1960s on television, one could see a Shakespeare play, or Leonard Bernstein describing symphonies or great philosophers of the day lecturing. But by the 1970s, it was decided that this was a bit much for the masses.
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The Pavarottis and Baryshnikovs would linger through the 1990s, but by the turn of the millennium, that was over. The leftist elites had rendered opera and ballet their own private dominions, a dwindling and now dying domain that Chalamet rightfully calls out.
The problem for opera and ballet, and indeed for straight theater and musicals as well, is that they stopped looking for audiences and started looking for grants. A bunch of woke, rich White people can give you money to produce the first Inuit opera but it doesn’t mean anybody wants to see it.
That includes Inuits.
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Part of what Chalamet is realizing here is that opera and ballet have spent 50 years being protected. But protected from whom?
The drive to diversify and move away from the standard repertoire that everyone loves -- for a reason -- made these art forms a delicate flower for the elites among us, not a strong crop that feeds the soul of the masses.
Now, the same people who refuse to attend their supposedly beloved opera and ballet won’t grace the door of the Trump Kennedy Center performances as their own performance protest, the upshot of which is that now there is no audience for these forms.
Sad to say, opera and ballet may truly be dead. There may be nobody left in those art forms who can breathe life back into their morose, woke corpses, but Chamamet knows that maybe movies can avoid this fate. Maybe.
I suspect that Hollywood’s new non-offensive "it guy" will walk this all back, making me long for the days of movie makers like John Cassavettes who know how to tell the industry and elites to stick it where the sun don’t shine.
But his point stands. It's absurd to even argue. Ballet and opera have rendered themselves irrelevant by placating the shibboleths of wokeness and obeying its rules. Until that stops, they will remain dying forms.
I think Chalamet has probably learned his lesson here, and his chastisement may well stick. But they can’t chastise us, and when they want to invite us back into the fine arts, we will be here.
But the makers and shakers of opera, ballet, theater, painting and sculpture should be warned that while you fritter away your legacy of centuries, we might just be starting our own.