The Wall Street Journal-20080205-A Cultural Conversation With Dana Gioia- Great Art for the Greatest Numbers

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A Cultural Conversation With Dana Gioia: Great Art for the Greatest Numbers

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Los Angeles -- As we sit down to afternoon tea, Dana Gioia launches into an explanation of why the Millennium Biltmore Hotel's Rendezvous Court resembles an ornate Renaissance chamber. The hotel's grand public spaces, Mr. Gioia says, were modeled after rooms in Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand's Spanish palace.

Before the evening is over, still at the Biltmore, we will have seen the world premiere of "Tony Caruso's Final Broadcast," a one-act opera with music by Paul Salerni and libretto by Mr. Gioia. The winner of the National Opera Association's Chamber Opera Competition, the work "begins in a very realistic satiric situation," the death throes of a classical music station, "and moves -- I like to think cleverly and inevitably -- towards a kind of mythic statement," Mr. Gioia says.

Prior to the opera's well-received unveiling, Mr. Gioia enjoys a scone and clotted cream and explains just how he has propelled the National Endowment for the Arts to its biggest budget boost in nearly three decades, a $20.3 million increase to $144.7 million for fiscal 2008, which ends Sept. 30.

"I never knew it," says Mr. Gioia, 57, "but all my life I had been preparing to be chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. This is a job in which I use virtually everything I know every week." That is no small statement. Mr. Gioia, a graduate of the Stanford Business School, is a former vice president of marketing for General Foods Corp., where he was credited with the revival of such brands as Jell-O and Kool-Aid. But he also holds a master's degree in comparative literature from Harvard and is a poet, critic, translator and anthologist of some renown. His 1991 essay, "Can Poetry Matter?" -- published in The Atlantic Monthly and later expanded into a book -- sparked a cultural furor, and his most recent poetry collection, "Interrogations at Noon" (2001), received the American Book Award.

BusinessWeek has dubbed Mr. Gioia, who took over as chairman in February 2003, "The Man Who Saved the NEA." A less effusive article in last month's Commentary by Michael J. Lewis, professor of art at Williams College, calls the NEA "a cautious dispenser of largesse" and says that Mr. Gioia's chairmanship "has been notable for its calm."

"My objective has been to insist that there are things in our society that are neither right nor left," Mr. Gioia says. "What I sought to do was to take arts and arts education out of the divisive and destructive rhetoric of the culture wars."

The NEA was, for a while, a prime battleground. In late 1980s and '90s, after a handful of grants to controversial avant-garde artists such as Andres Serrano and Robert Mapplethorpe, the endowment found itself under assault from conservatives seeking its abolition. With its budget peaking at $176 million in 1992, it remains smaller than in its heyday.

But Mr. Gioia's NEA is distinguished by its ambition. Using both public and private partnerships to bolster its impact, it now reaches schoolchildren, military families, and cultural organizations in every U.S. congressional district.

"The Big Read," which sponsors community-wide festivals around a select group of classics and contemporary works, is the largest NEA program ever, says Mr. Gioia. An attempt to address declines in reading, it expands to 400 U.S. cities this year. "Shakespeare in American Communities" has sent 66 theater companies to some 3,000 schools in all 50 states. "Operation Homecoming," a writing program for soldiers and their spouses, has spawned two films and a Random House anthology.

"American Masterpieces: Three Centuries of Artistic Genius" supports the performance of American works. The "NEA Jazz Masters" program takes fellowship recipients on the road. The popularization of poetry that Mr. Gioia has long advocated gets a boost from "Poetry Out Loud," a national recitation contest for high-school students that is co- sponsored by the Chicago-based Poetry Foundation. And who else but Mr. Gioia would have imported opera to military bases?

"We set a simple goal at the NEA," he says, "which is to serve all Americans." That necessitated an activist stance, he says, because "if you only wait for the applications to come in to you, they come overwhelmingly from established arts organizations."

"See, I'm an artist," he says, "and so my primary goal is really bringing the transformative power of great art to the broadest audience possible. And I'm a business person, and I had a day job for two decades, and it taught me that there are ways to take a good idea and make it more effective and more affordable."

But his strongest influence, he says, is his childhood in Hawthorne, Calif., "a working-class neighborhood populated mostly by immigrant families." There he saw lives -- including his own -- changed by art, but also how elusive access to the arts could be.

Mr. Gioia says he wanted to tackle the problem in a systemic way. "We're thinking in terms of the whole society," he says. "Most artists in the United States are underemployed. They can't get work all year round. Most arts organizations run a deficit. Most presenting arts organizations in the United States don't own their own facility. That's the supply side.

"On the demand side, most smaller and midsize communities have very limited cultural offerings. And most students have never been to the symphony, a play, an opera. The idea is to help make it possible for people to present good works to communities and groups which would never have access to them. It's not simply to help the supply of art, but it's to match the supply and the demand."

Mr. Gioia's first initiative was "Shakespeare in American Communities," which teamed theater companies, school districts, and NEA-developed educational materials. He describes reaction to the program as "ecstatic."

Mr. Gioia says he was "shocked" to learn that the NEA, founded in 1965, had never served the military. "I felt that that was a failure of democratic vision," he says. Partnering with the Defense Department, he brought Shakespeare to military bases and schools. "We even performed in the hangar where the Stealth bombers were located," he says, "in which there were armed guards who told the actors that if they stepped beyond the line, they'd unfortunately have to be shot." No casualties were reported.

Building on that success, Mr. Gioia launched "Operation Homecoming" with the financial backing of Boeing. He secured the military's promise not to censor soldiers' writings (save on national-security grounds) and enlisted as teachers such literary eminences as the poet Richard Wilbur and the novelist Bobbie Ann Mason. "Most important," he says, "we told people who are serving in this war that their voices are important enough to be heard."

When Boeing offered to sponsor another program, Mr. Gioia "did something that everybody thought . . . was crazy": He invited opera companies to military bases. The tours drew "huge audiences," and the buoyant reception persuaded some opera companies to return on their own steam, he says.

"The Big Read," with the sponsorship of the State Department, has become part of a cultural exchange program. Russians have read Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird," while Egyptians get a chance this year to read three books, including Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451," all in translation. In Los Angeles, Mr. Gioia met with Mr. Bradbury to discuss his new introduction for the Arabic edition. He also talked to the mayor's office about cultural exchanges with Mexico, another "Big Read" partner.

"I think it is a mistake to think that we can communicate with the rest of the world only through politics and money," Mr. Gioia says, suggesting that we need to add culture "as one of our foreign-policy tools."

One of Mr. Gioia's own political tools is the NEA's comprehensive database. "The way I begin a meeting with a congressman now," he says, "is that I ask the congressman to name any high school in the district. I then take my readout and I'll say, 'Do you know [this English teacher]?' So I can demonstrate down to a classroom level how far we reach in their district. At that point, there hasn't been a single member of either house of Congress who hasn't grabbed the printout from me."

Mr. Gioia likes to relate an anecdote about William Faulkner resigning his position as postmaster in Oxford, Miss.: "Somebody asked, 'Bill, why did you quit as postmaster?' And he said, 'I'm sick and tired of being at the beck and call of every son of a bitch who could afford a two-cent stamp.' But the fact is, if you are a public servant, you are at the beck and call of every citizen, and that simply comes with the territory."

The decline of arts education in the U.S. and the paucity of international cultural exchanges "will take decades to repair," Mr. Gioia says. "What we're doing now is simply to craft an estimable beginning, and to do this in a way which has the highest possible quality.

"See, I don't believe that artistic quality and democracy are irreconcilable," he says -- as always, anticipating the next question. "I don't believe you either have to have mediocre art or elitist art. . . . And so I'm trying to reach the broadest number of people possible with the best art possible."

But has Mr. Gioia really quieted all the NEA's critics? On the contrary, he says. "Anything you do someone will complain about," he says. "But that's liberating. Because then you know you should do the right thing."

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Ms. Klein is a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia.