Photo by Vance Jacobs

Dana Gioia, outgoing chairman of the National Endowment of the Arts

A POEM BY
DANA GIOIA

Elegy with Surrealist Proverbs as Refrain

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The most important thing I learned in business is something that few artists ever learn: the importance of creating win-win situations. In art, one person tends to win the prize, and the others do not. One person gets the part; the others do not. So artists tend to think of the world as a zero-sum game. In business, you learn that you can increase the universe of rewards, and you try to create a situation in which everybody participates in success.

I was able to run the NEA as an arts organization and successfully navigate the complex political world of Washington. As odd as it might seem, I did this by being idealistic and believing that I could speak to the best in people.

One of the things that people say about your tenure is that you’ve democratized the NEA.

We are a public agency, and we cannot ignore whole sections of the country. When I joined the NEA, there were about 80 million Americans who lived in communities not served by the agency. That struck me as a failure of imagination in a democracy. We now have programs of the highest quality in every community in the United States.

Which of your initiatives are you most proud of?

First, I’m proud that we’ve been able to serve as a catalyst for the revival of arts education in the United States. Programs like Shakespeare in American Communities, Poetry Out Loud, and the Big Read are reaching tens of millions of students, and, in the process, providing superb paying employment for thousands of artists.

Second, we’ve been able to change the public conversation about the arts and arts education. After 20 years of being trapped in a public conversation dictated by its enemies, the NEA has taken the leadership in creating an informed conversation about the importance of arts and arts education.

How do you explain the decline in arts education?

Essentially, there are three major trends undermining arts education. One is the systematic dismantling of arts education at every level of American schooling, largely for budgetary reasons. Why did communities make those cuts? Well, that’s number two: American society does not respect or understand the importance of the arts. Consequently, when people are trying to decide what’s important, the arts aren’t on that list. We’ve never had so many artists or professors of art in U.S. history, but these people have become better at talking among themselves than to the general public. There are very few effective cultural public intellectuals left in the United States. And this leads to the third problem, which is that our overly commercialized, dumbed-down mass media has almost eliminated the arts as a topic of conversation or coverage.

What breaks my heart is how difficult it is today for a young person who wants to be an arts critic to make a living. Twenty years ago, it wasn’t as difficult. I paid the bills as a literary critic, music critic, BBC commentator, for a dozen years. But the markets are drying up, the articles are getting shorter, the journals are getting dumber. And no one critic can fight these trends single-handedly. One of the necessary roles of the NEA is to provide leadership in the arts in a society which doesn’t particularly understand them.

You are an idealist.

Unapologetically. I think the fact that I had never worked in government before was an advantage, because I had not lost my idealism or my feistiness.

So why leave now?

There are two reasons. First of all, I’m a poet and a writer. I have given up six years of my creative life. If I wait much longer, I worry that I won’t be able to write well again. No one in official Washington understands what it’s like to be an artist. To them it’s something like playing golf or collecting butterflies.

Second, my success in public office has exacted a huge personal cost. I have traveled every week for six years. I’m exhausted by having lived at that pace. I want to have a private life again. And I want to have an inner life. I’ve given so many speeches in the past six years that I need to shut up for a while.  

A lot of people in Washington are upset that I’m leaving. Leading members of both parties would like me to stay. But the NEA will be well served by having another chairman who will have his or her own passions and interests. It’s important that public institutions change their leadership.