Category: issues

New NEA chief Dana Gioia has been making the rounds of the nation’s newspapers and magazines this week, playing up the idea of a newly invigorated NEA, and stressing that he intends to return the endowment to the days when it was a real power on the national arts scene. But for all Gioia’s enthusiasm, his seeming devotion to ‘safe’ art that doesn’t bother anyone probably means that the NEA won’t be on the cutting edge anytime soon. But of course, being on the cutting edge of modern art isn’t Gioia’s goal. His job is to keep the NEA from the cutting edge of the Congressional budget knife.

Three high-profile Boston arts organizations have recently come under new management, and while that’s the type of upheaval that can potentially lead to a downgrade in quality, at least in the short term, the opposite has been the case, according to Ed Siegel. The new Boston arts leaders “have responded to the challenge by seizing the moment. The Boston Symphony Orchestra, the American Repertory Theatre, and the Boston Ballet are all in the midst of seasons that are energetic, daring, and smartly crafted.”

In the latest of a series of interviews this week, new National Endowment for the Arts chairman Daniel Gioia says: “The worst thing I could do is come to Washington and pontificate on things artistic and political. I plan to serve by building a huge new consensus to support the arts. I am not going to do that by dividing people, by polarizing people. Arts education – by which he means broad-based proselytizing for the arts – is not a left or right issue, a Democratic or Republican issue. It’s good civic common sense.”

“He is a graduate of Stanford and Harvard who dislikes elitism, a newly minted member of a Republican administration who speaks a Whitmanesque language of populism and free expression. Gioia is also a poet who dresses like the successful businessman he once was (before retiring to be a full-time writer), and his poetry is as immaculate as his suit. Yet there is a strange dissonance between a man in a tie and a mind capable of imaginative excursions into the head of a young killer or the heart of a lonely woman. It’s glib, however, to say he’s a man of contradictions.”

As lottery funding for the arts declines in the UK, “architects and planners are anxious that the fall in this source of funding could reimpose conformity and ‘cheapest option’ building which marked many big public projects in pre-lottery days.”

“Anecdotal evidence and a slumping box office indicate many Americans are feeling conflicted about the luxury of leisure. After two weeks of war, many are torn between an obligation to be informed and the need to take a break from it. Observers say that, people’s short-term reactions will probably center on a desire to be entertained, rather than creating high art. They add that it will take years – even decades – before the fine arts respond either to the war or to cultural shifts brought on by it and, even more profoundly, by Sept. 11.”

“L.A.’s notoriously fragmented underground nightlife is coagulating more often lately, producing a new category, an über-category, if you will, of event where everyone – the Punks, the Desert People, the Anthropologists, the Beat Junkies and the Hip-Hop Kids and Artists – can find something.”

Sales of tickets for Colorado Ballet are down so much since the war began that the company has cancelled fiver performances. Elsewhere in Denver the impact is mixed…

New NEA chairman Dana Gioia is out talking about how he intends to strengthen the National Endowment for the Arts. “I go back to the original vision, which was to foster excellence in the arts and to bring art to all Americans. This doesn’t seem to me a controversial mission. The average American wants art in their communities and their schools. It’s not a program of the left or the right. It’s mainstream American opinion. One of the major needs is to build a public consensus for the support of art and arts education, and we’re going to do that by building a kind of inclusive coalition, by refusing to polarize.”

The Australian has concluded a review of its arts spending, and will likely make funding cuts for the country’s major arts institutions. “The 15 institutions reviewed receive $75 million a year for depreciation of their buildings, equipment and collections. The institutions include the National Gallery of Australia, the National Library, the Australian Film Commission and the National Portrait Gallery, and all have been apprehensive since late last year when the Government confirmed a review of funding had started.”