Introducing the new faith-based Endowment for the Arts or Faherheit 451. Remember Leonard Garment from Watergate?
The 'Bloody Crossroads'
Laura Bush and Dana Gioia remake the National Endowment for the Arts.
BY LEONARD GARMENT
Tuesday, February 3, 2004 12:01 a.m.
We seem finally to have an occasion on which Democrats and Republicans can join in casting their votes for President Bush, enthusiastically or grudgingly. This event is the surprising--nay, startling--recent administration proposal for the largest increase in 20 years in the budget of the National Endowment for the Arts.
Like most people who opine about the arts in America, I was caught off guard. Here is proof of just how off guard: Some months ago I delivered the inaugural lecture of the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy at Vanderbilt University. The lecture's thesis was that the culture wars of the 1980s had flattened government support for the arts for the foreseeable future and that arts organizations should therefore be more enterprising in devising ways to induce the private sector to make up the shortfall.
This view was reasonable: We have indeed been through a nasty period in the government-arts relationship. Yet there stands the fact of this against-the-grain budget proposal by the Bush administration--so against the grain that the proposal's chief critics are the antispending members of the president's own party. Thus it behooves me to re-examine my views and ask why. In retrospect, the correct answer appears to lie in the identity of the person President Bush chose to announce the proposed budget increase--his wife, Laura Bush.
My experience with Mrs. Bush and her influence tells me the choice was not window dressing for a political gesture. In 2002 there transpired--mirabile dictu--the administration's choice of Dana Gioia, a first-rate poet, to head the NEA. Mrs. Bush, a longtime poetry enthusiast, had a hand in naming him. When I first met Mr. Gioia, shortly before he began his calls on the senators who would vote on his confirmation, he handed me a CD recorded by his brother, Ted, an accomplished West Coast jazz pianist and the author of "The History of Jazz," the pre-eminent text on the subject.
Soon afterward, Mrs. Bush, in collaboration with Mr. Gioia, invited a group of poets to a forum at the White House to focus on the role of poets such as Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Langston Hughes in American social history. The meeting was scheduled for February 2003. Some of the invited poets announced that they were going to use the forum to protest the U.S. decision to go to war in Iraq. Mrs. Bush, declining to play a role in the planned political drama, politely canceled the event.
This was precisely the kind of mishap that had plagued the NEA throughout the 1980s. The endowment could well have become, again, a casualty at the "bloody crossroads" where art and politics meet.
But that did not happen. Langston Hughes got a return invitation to the White House later that year when President and Mrs. Bush hosted 160 guests at a production, based on the musical "Harlem Song," of which Hughes's poetry was a significant part. A band organized and conducted by Loren Schoenberg, director of The Jazz Museum in Harlem, provided the music. Perhaps because the event ran counter to the image of the Bush administration as anti-black and anti-arts, it was largely unreported.
More generally, Mrs. Bush and Mr. Gioia persisted in their efforts to fashion an appropriate arts policy. Last week's announcement was one result. The proposed budget increase is shrewdly targeted to fund a major three-year program titled "American Masterpieces: Three Centuries of Artistic Genius." The aim of the program is to connect large and small communities across the country, including "thousands of schools and dozens of military bases," with our cultural achievements. "Masterpieces" will probably not include many works by Robert Mapplethorpe. Some will be unhappy with this fact. But it will be hard for even the disaffected to deny the program's worth.
The endowment has already launched two prototypes for the program. Last year, "Shakespeare in American Communities" began presenting professional Shakespeare productions in 50 states. The endowment also expanded and increased the visibility of its "Jazz Masters" program, which recognizes and rewards contemporary contributors to this country's singular gift to the world and seeks to ensure that the historical essence of jazz does not disappear in the noise of popular culture. Neither prototype is a merely staff-generated idea.
I confess to a personal excitement at these events. Last year I returned to my native New York City in part to help build the aforementioned jazz museum in Harlem. Years ago, I played jazz saxophone professionally--just long enough to figure out the unbridgeable quality gap between me and truly talented musicians like my bandmate, the sparkling jazz saxophonist Al Cohn. (Alan Greenspan, another bandmate, came to a similar conclusion and left music for economics.)
Later, in the White House as counselor to President Nixon, I worked on civil rights and, with Nancy Hanks, support for the arts via the NEA. I became convinced of three things: First, there are indeed American masterpieces, of which jazz is one, that should not be allowed to drown in the heavy popular-culture seas. Second, jazz, like poetry, is part of the social fabric of America--what George Gershwin, writing in 1927, called "the voice of the soul of America"--and is best understood in the context of Harlem, the community in which it flowered, nourishing geniuses like Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk, who played in venues such as the Apollo, Minton's and the Savoy Ballroom. Finally, though politics will and should be involved in the support of any public program, a decent politics should be capable of placing itself in the service of some things--like jazz in particular and cultural masterpieces in general--that are beyond politics.
Mrs. Bush's announcement and the events that led up to it sounded all those themes and provide a reason to look forward to the next steps.
Mr. Garment is a New York lawyer and chairman of the Jazz Museum in Harlem.
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