Bringing Art to All Americans

There is no central ministry of culture that sets national policy for the arts in the United States government. The two national endowments – the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) – provide grant support for individual artists and scholars and for arts and humanities institutions. While the NEA budget is quite modest when compared to other nations’ public arts funding, private donations have always provided the major support for American culture. When Dana Gioia took over the NEA chairmanship early in 2003, he brought unusually broad cultural expertise to the position.

In the following conversation, Gioia discusses a range of subjects, from the public and private aspects of American culture to the evolution of various disciplines.

Q: Let’s begin by viewing the arts in America through your unique prism – the NEA itself.

A: I come to the NEA with a very simple vision. A great nation deserves great art. America is the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the history of the world. But the measure of a nation’s greatness isn’t wealth of power. It is the civilization it creates, fosters, and promotes. What I hope to accomplish here, in the broad sense, is to help foster the public culture that America deserves.

Although we are the largest arts funder in the Unites States, the NEA’s budget represents less than one percent of American philanthropic spending on the arts. So the federal government could never “buy” a certain kind of culture. Our role at the NEA is leadership. We are in the unique position of being the only institution that can see all of the arts from a national perspective. Enlightened leadership from us could accomplish goals in American culture more quickly and more pervasively than efforts by any other institution might. What excites me about my position is the possibility of using the arts to make America a better place in which to live.

Q: Contrast, in general terms. American philanthropy with the European model with which the world is quite familiar.

A: The European model grew out of a tradition of royal and aristocratic patronage that in modem times has been assumed by the state. Over there, the majority of an arts institution's budget comes from federal or local subsidies. The American model rests on private philanthropy. And it works. We have an enormous range and depth of museums, symphonies, theaters, opera houses, and ballet companies.

Historically, particularly during the 1970s and 1980s, the NEA used federal funds across the country to seed the development of regional dance, theater, and opera, as well as, to a lesser degree, museums and symphonies. The enormous number of these institutions that now exist in middle-sized American cities is evidence of the power of the NEA to lead.

Q: How do we explain the emergence of significant private funding for the arts, over the decades, even the centuries?

A: The arts in America grow out of American culture. The reason that America has had this diversely distinguished history of art, this unprecedented breadth of achievement – ranging from movies to abstract expressionism to jazz to modem literature – is because America was and is a society that recognizes the individual freedom of its citizens. American philanthropy follows the same model. America is perhaps the only nation in the world in which there have been hundreds of people who created enormous fortunes and gave them away within a single lifetime to philanthropic enterprises.

Q: Is there a comer of culture that might have escaped wide notice?

A: The original mission of the NEA was to foster excellence and bring the arts to the American people. We would now probably qualify that as bringing art to all Americans — recognizing the multitude of special communities in the United States, some cultural, some geographic, some related to language, and some related even to age and physical capabilities. Al of those groups are our constituencies. We've also come to realize that to support our goals, we must have a role in education. And so providing leadership in arts education is now another goal of the NEA.

Q: What excites you the most about American culture these days?

A: There are several huge, overarching trends in the arts today. The first I would characterize as a kind of aesthetic crisis. As America enters the 21st century, there is a growing conviction that the enormous explosion of energy that came out of the modernism movement that began after World War I has reached its end. We still appreciate the rich legacy of modernism and the avant-garde, but it no longer seems to have the generative power it once possessed. There is a growing consensus on the need for synthesis between the intensity and power of modernism and experimental art, with the kind of democratic accessibility and availability that traditional and popular arts have. In every art form in which I have an active participation, I see this trend of artists trying to reconnect themselves to the public. What is emerging — whether one likes it or not — is a kind of new populism.

Q: What spurs your cultural sensibility these days?

A: I’ve long felt that one of the missing pieces in American culture is a new generation of public intellectuals – serious intellectuals, that is, who are not affiliated with universities. America needs more artist-intellectuals who can speak without condescension in a public idiom.

Q: How is American intellectual life currently changing?

A: I believe America is currently undergoing a transformation that I like to think of as the creation of a new Bohemia.

Today, a new sort of Bohemia is emerging – not as neighbouring in big cities, but as a virtual community through technology. It moves through the Internet, inexpensive phone calls, the fax, overnight delivery, electronic publishing – and also through the creation of such temporary Bohemias as writers conferences, artists colonies, and artists schools, where people come together for a week or more. These communities are not defined by local geography but by cultural affinity.

In the broadest sense then, the question is, how do you create artistic and intellectual life outside the institutional support of the university? Not that the university is bad, but rather that a culture is richer when art is created in many places in a society and when academic and bohemian cultural life creates a healthy dialectic.

Source: U.S. Society & Values / April, 2003

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