My thanks to Doug McLennan at Diacritical for introducing my AJ blog earlier this week. I am glad to be here.
Then yesterday Doug posted “Is the NEA Bad for the Arts?” about cultural policy, which sure brought back memories. It was 10 years ago this coming August that I wrote an article for the New York Times about the Pew Charitable Trust’s effort to get the nation to focus on culture. The key paragraph:
Over the next five years, the Pew plans to devote about 40 percent of its culture budget, some $50 million, toward getting policymakers to focus on issues like arts financing, intellectual property rights, zoning in historic areas and an arts curriculum for public schools. The effort will involve academic research, opinion polls and more media coverage, among other things.
The Pew later retrenched, ending its efforts. But Stephen K. Urice, who headed the project for the Pew, was right when he told me: ”The next Presidential election should be the last one in which the parties are without a cultural policy plank in their platforms. But first they need to have smart academics, think tanks and data focusing on this, and that’s where we’re headed….We’re talking about developing an infrastructure for understanding the role of culture in America.”
That infrastructure — though a little bigger now — still doesn’t exist.
I was very interested in the subject then, and remain so; I hope to find more developments.
Here’s the link to my 1999 article — “Heavyweight Foundation Throws Itself Behind the Idea of a Cultural Policy.”