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Arts for arts' (education) sake
Without school spirit, arts funding has no chance in the White House race.
The laughter at the other end of the phone is good-natured but revealing. When I ask the receptionist in the National Endowment for the Arts’ D.C. office if she could connect me with someone who can weigh in on whether either presidential candidate is expected to mention arts funding between now and November 4, her first reaction is a sweet chortle. “You think someone’s going to mention us?” she says in a voice of slightly cynical-but-flattered surprise.
Well, not really, no. But it couldn’t hurt to ask.
I have no delusions that a President Obama might christen his administration on behalf of a Broadway musical the way JFK did (after Lerner and Loewe’s Camelot) or that a President McCain might hire a Pulitzer-winning playwright the way FDR did (when he drafted three-time winner Robert Sherwood, author of the wartime satire Idiot’s Delight, for his speech-writing staff). On the contrary, I’m relatively Zen about the fact that the theater in particular and the arts in general will play almost no role in public debate between now and Election Day. For now, the fact that the circuslike 2008 White House race is free, sensational populist American theater will have to suffice.
But one thing seems certain: If the word arts stands a snowball’s chance of cropping up in the prime-time debates, it will need to be attached to the phrases in the schools or education programs. Unless it can be spun as good for the children, American arts funding is a reeking albatross no candidate will touch.
“[Education]’s something that everyone can understand and relate to,” says Liz Bartolomeo, a spokeswoman for Americans for the Arts, a nonprofit organization that does much of the work the federally run National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) cannot. (The NEA rep I eventually spoke with explained that, as a department of the government, the NEA can take no formal political stand on the election.) In the last two weeks, Americans for the Arts sponsored panels at the Democratic and Republican conventions under the elephantine, nonspecific topic “the future of arts in America.” DNC panelists included Top 40 recording artist John Legend, Black Entertainment Television cofounder Sheila Johnson and New York Congresswoman Louise Slaughter. Meanwhile, Republican panelists ranged from Broadway director-choreographer Debbie Allen to former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee to ironclad Kansas conservative Todd Tiahrt.
To accommodate this surreal Love Boat–like assemblage of public personalities—as any politically credible gathering must—the common thread among the participants must be an idea so basic that to argue against it would make a person sound ridiculous. And since everyone can agree that marching band can do a kid more good than harm but no pol in his right mind would argue that Tony Kushner should get some NEA money to finish his next play, our arts-funding lobby becomes our arts-education lobby.
Bartolomeo allows that the Denver panel was more politically charged than the comparatively pat Minneapolis one. But she won’t trash-talk neoconservative officials such as Huckabee, an outspoken Christian who nevertheless unapologetically plugged arts education on Meet the Press, or Tiahrt, a former Boeing worker whose shilling for his former employer earned him the nickname “Tanker Todd” but who has still hosted NEA president Dana Gioia and personally walked him through Wichita’s museums and a rehearsal for a local production of Damn Yankees. In fact, Bartolomeo’s quick to point out that without support like theirs, the NEA’s budget might have shrunk instead of grown from $121 million to $144 million during Bush’s second term (a small-but-unexpected funding bump that’s rarely addressed by W’s legion of haters).
Yet even as she is “hopeful” that a question about the arts might be raised during the debates, Bartolomeo acknowledges it could only be raised in the broad context of education. “Education is universal. People can wrap their brains around it,” she says.
And even then, the fact that the issue polls well still earns a candidate next to nothing. “It’s the difference between preference and intensity,” says The Nation’s Washington editor, Christopher Hayes, a former Chicagoan (and an emeritus member of the gonzo nomadic troupe Walkabout Theater). “People [in both parties] do in fact appreciate the issue of arts in classrooms, and they’re likely to respond affirmatively to it if asked about it in a poll. But it’s not gas or the economy,” Hayes adds, “which is why people will be going to the polls.”
Given both parties’ radar-jamming media machinations, this topic will only bubble to the surface of campaign rhetoric if one of the candidates needs to reach for a feel-good topic everyone can agree on. So if enough Americans can concur that more music classes and after-school drama programs are a good thing so that arts education scores a broad-appeal mention, we’ll have nothing to be but grateful.
