Monday,
February 19, 2007
Dana Gioia Saved
NEA from Itself ,Kept it Alive, Now Flourishing
The
ANNOTICO Report
Dana
Gioia, a former marketing manager for the
desserts division of General Foods, with "Jell-O Jigglers"
one of his big successes before he left the corporate life in 1992 to write
full time, mostly poetry and music criticism, and become a highly regarded
poet.
When
Gioia was drafted to be Chairman of the NEA in
2003, the NEA Board had previously emphasized Exhibits, and felt that Art was
an effective tool for Radical Politics, with the apparant theory
that the more Controversial, the greater the effect and the audience. It
was a very narrow view, with a very limited positive effect on the Arts
nationwide.
The
Right was frothing at the mouth and monthly were introducing bills for the NEA 's abolishment. The Left was hoping for his
failure, because they wanted anything that Bush was involved with to fail.
A decade after Congress was on the verge of killing the agency, the NEA's most recent budget was readily approved on a voice
vote, with no dissents.
Gioia has single-handedly reversed that course, he has had a profound effect on the NEA, converting
the once-beleaguered federal program into the nation's main engine for
integrating arts and education.
Gioa has accomplished this by redirecting the agency toward
rebuilding the nation's arts infrastructure by sponsoring research into arts
and reading habits, and helping arts organizations become more integrated with
and vital to their own communities while creating a broad consumer market for
the arts.
He has conceived or backed such NEA innovations as sending theater and opera
troupes to military bases; creating a national network of acting companies to
perform Shakespeare to expose more people to the work and give actors jobs;
helping support the Big Read, a program building on the trend of communities reading
and discussing a single literary work; and sponsoring Poetry Out Loud, aimed at
getting high schoolers to connect with poetry.
Less visibly, Gioia has ensured that the NEA awards
at least one grant a year in each congressional district.
Such a sensible and productive program.
By
Scott Martelle
Times Staff Writer
February 19, 2007
From
Dana Gioia, 56, grew up a few blocks from here in
Gioia, a highly regarded poet and former marketing manager
for the desserts division of General Foods, is just a few weeks into his second
term as chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. "Jell-O Jigglers" was one of his big successes before he left
the corporate life in 1992 to write full time, mostly poetry and music
criticism.
Now Gioia sells the arts, a gig he says he initially
didn't want when first approached more than four years ago.
"I was a writer. I was very successful. I was living in
The trend: the erosion of arts education from the nation's public schools.
Though no one claims that Gioia has single-handedly
reversed that course, he has had a profound effect on the NEA, converting the
once-beleaguered federal program into the nation's main engine for integrating
arts and education.
It's a remarkable turnaround for an agency whose mere name was once enough to
get Newt Gingrich and other social conservatives foaming a t the mouth.
Controversial exhibits, including Robert Mapplethorpe's homoerotic photographs
and Andres Serrano's picture of a plastic crucified Christ in a jar of urine,
made the NEA the central battleground in the 1990s culture wars.
"The most important thing for the NEA was to bring it outside politics and
to refuse the polarization that the critics had imposed on the agency," Gioia said, sipping a Beck's beer from a glass in a Marina
del Rey hotel a few hours after his Moffett school
appearance and visits to the Torrance Cultural Arts Center and L.A. Theatre
Works.
For Madeline Puzo, dean of USC's
theater school and a former NEA consultant, the key questions raised by the
assaults on the NEA remain unanswered.
"In a democracy, what is the role of the arts and what is the role of the
government with the arts?" Puzo said.
"There was support for the arts from those political and religious
institutions. We haven't figured that out."
But she believe s "one has to credit Dana Gioia for managing to not only help [the NEA] survive, but
to grow a bit."
A decade after Congress was on the verge of killing the agency, the NEA's most recent budget was readily approved on a voice
vote. "We let our critics dictate the public conversation about the arts
endowment and government funding then you're always reacting," Gioia said about the earlier NEA controversies.
"It seemed to me that we had to take an active role in creating the public
conversation that would lead to productive change in society. You don't do this
by venting opinions. You do this by figuring out what should be done, and what
works."
Stepping into the fray
When Gioia was drafted to take over the agency in
2003, the bullets were flying from all directions.
"Both the left and the right would have been happy for me to fail for
different reasons," Gioia said. "The right when I came to Washington, every month
there were abou t 125 members of Congress who voted
to abolish the NEA. They were constantly shooting warning shots across the bow.
And I think the left would have loved to see any of the [Bush] administration's
efforts fail, just to prove that it wasn't working."
Gioia, taking Franklin D. Roosevelt's Depression-era
Works Progress Administration as his inspiration, decided to redirect the
agency toward rebuilding the nation's arts infrastructure by sponsoring
research into arts and reading habits, and helping arts organizations become
more integrated with and vital to their own communities while creating a broad
consumer market for the arts.
He has conceived or backed such NEA innovations as sending theater and opera
troupes to military bases; creating a national network of acting companies to
perform Shakespeare to expose more people to the work and give actors jobs;
helping support the Big Read, a program building on the trend of communities
reading and discussing a single l iterary work; and
sponsoring Poetry Out Loud, aimed at getting high schoolers
to connect with poetry.
Less visibly, Gioia has ensured that the NEA awards
at least one grant a year in each congressional district, under his belief that
arts support should be spread as widely as possible.
"When I got there, 22% of the
Spreading the grants around also has the politically pragmatic effect of giving
the agency a support base in every congressional district.
"You're in a lot better position to face controversy if you've got grants
going to districts throughout the
Still, such initiat ives take their own large slices of the NEA's shrunken pie.
"Expanding these kinds of programs could mean less money for other kinds
of programs," said Bob Lynch, president of the Americans for the Arts
advocacy group. "Everything like that is a choice. His emphasis and his
hope is to create a broader visibility for both the
arts and the NEA," which Gioia believes
"translates into a broader consumer market."
Though some of the turnaround began under one of Gioia's
predecessors, Bill Ivey (1998-2001), Gioia's efforts
to mend political fences in
"He's been pretty systematic in the way he's gone about doing that,"
said Doug McLellan, a Seattle-based arts writer and
editor of ArtsJournal.com. "It's no longer the political hot button it
once was. That's partly the changing political climate, but he has certainly contri buted to it by making it
an institution that's difficult to argue with."
The cost? A certain homogenization.
"They're not on the cutting edge," McLellan
said. The benefit? Even Democrats like him.
"I really think he's a star in this administration," Rep. Jane Harman
(D-Venice), a harsh White House critic, said as she introduced Gioia to the grant seekers at Moffett Elementary this
month.
Over the last four years, Gioia has overseen a
fundamental change in the way the NEA works. The terms were dictated in part by
the Republican-led Congress, which in 1996 effectively gutted the NEA with the
acquiescence of the Clinton administration after Congress threatened to shutter
the agency altogether. A budget that peaked at $175 million in 1992 was slashed
to $99.5 million, and 40% of that was set aside as block grants for states.
Direct grants to artists were eliminated.
Funding since then has slowly climbed to $124.4 million in the current fiscal year, an d President Bush's budget proposal sent to Congress
recently would hike the budget to $128.4 million. Direct artist grants are
still banned. Though private groups such as the Warhol Foundation have sought
to try to pick up some of that slack, the net effect for the NEA was its
removal from the battlefield of the culture wars.
"I don't believe the arts are about right or left," Gioia said. "If we want to create the communities we
want to live in, and if we want our schools to produce the best educations for
our children, we need the arts. This is not a partisan issue. This is civic
common sense."
scott.martelle@latimes.com
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