IN AN ADMINISTRATION THAT HAD NO SHORTAGE OF THEM...:

Thankful for the NEA?: We should be grateful for Dana Gioia’s tenure, at least. (Thomas S. Hibbs, 11/26/08, National Review)

‘The Right viewed us as purveyors of smut and filth, while the Left saw us as the inept, but loveable, purveyors of smut and filth.” That is the humorous way in which Dana Gioia — who recently announced his intention to step down at year’s end from his position as chair of the National Endowment for the Arts — describes the attitudes toward the NEA when he began his tenure just after 9/11. Embroiled in controversy during the Clinton administration over its support of works of dubious artistic quality — whose merit was chiefly to offend the views of taxpayers — the agency was under increasing fire from conservatives.

Gioia — an award-winning poet and author of the influential article “Can Poetry Matter?” — has been a trenchant critic of the increasing professionalization and isolation of the arts, and of poetry’s smug and self-congratulatory retreat to the confines of academia in particular. After many years as a successful poet, Gioia still thinks of himself primarily as a reader. One of his early shifts at the NEA was away from a focus on the producers of art to a greater emphasis on the consumers of art. “Controversy,” he reflects, “is not an intrinsic artistic concept; it’s a byproduct. I can’t defend things that are wild and crazy for the sake of being wild and crazy.”

Whatever one thinks about the NEA — whose history up to and including the Gioia era has been marvelously told in David Smith’s new book Money for Art: The Tangled Wed of Art and Politics in American Democracy — Gioia’s own work offers something for which conservatives should be justifiably proud and grateful. They might even look to his life, thought, and art for ways to overcome the current divide in their own ranks between elitism and populism, between high and popular culture.

...appointing Mr. Gioia was a particularly good call.

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 26, 2008 8:41 AM