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PAGE 24
1ST STORY of Level 1 printed in FULL format.
Copyright 1998 The Kansas City Star Co.
THE KANSAS CITY STAR
January 30, 1998 Friday METROPOLITAN EDITION
SECTION: METROPOLITAN; Pg. C1; BARBARA SHELLY
LENGTH: 662 words
HEADLINE: Learning the art of citizenship
BYLINE: BARBARA SHELLY
BODY:
They came from Mexico, Singapore and the nations that used to
make up the Soviet Union. In all, 66 persons became citizens of the
United States last week at a ceremony at the federal courthouse in
Kansas City, Kan.
Behind each beaming face - everybody beams on these occasions -
lie some common themes. Everyone struggled. They wondered whether
they were doing the right thing. People helped them out. They got
lucky.
Among those 66 new citizens were Kwan and Ling Wu, immigrants
from China.
Their story has all the familiar elements. They struggled to
choose between their homeland and their new land. They had help. And
they were lucky - luck in this case being the intersection where
talent and opportunity cross paths.
The story of Kwan Wu, who previously used the name Xin Kun Wu, is
not unfamiliar to many in Kansas City.
He is the artist selected in 1991 by federal judges to design and
sculpt the 14-foot bronze sculpture in front of the federal
courthouse in Kansas City. The sculpture was created as a frame for a
plaque inscribed with the Bill of Rights.
At the time, Wu had been in this country just more than two
years. An informal arrangement to act as a visiting professor at the
University of Kansas had evolved into a wish to remain.
Wu's reasons were many. China's crushing of the democracy
movement at Tiananmen Square was a big one. He and his wife had one
child, all they would be permitted in their homeland. He liked the
freedom of an artist's life here - he didn't need official permission
to design a sculpture.
Ling Wu - who also is an artist - and their son, Lon, joined him
in 1990. They applied for permanent residency.
Now they have it. And unlike most newly naturalized citizens,
Kwan and Ling Wu were toasted at punch-and-cookie receptions in two
PAGE
25
THE KANSAS CITY STAR, January 30, 1998, Friday
U.S. courthouses.
The first was after their ceremony in Kansas City, Kan. : The
second was Wednesday in Kansas City, in the offices of U.S. adge
Scott O. Wright.
Wright loves naturalization ceremonies.
"by
far
the
most
pleasurable thing we do in this business,
said.
He dearly wanted to preside over the rites for the Wus.
But
they
live in Olathe, and Wright doesn't handle affairs in Kansas.
As noted above, every new citizen has gotten help along the way.
Two of the persons who helped Kwan Wu were Wright and his wife,
Shirley, who was one of Wu's first sculpturing students.
It was Shirley Wright who recommended that the judges consider Wu
to create the Bill of Rights sculpture. A committee of lawyers raised
money for the project.
The Bill of Rights sculpture opened up other opportunities. Wu
designed a sculpture of Phog Allen for KU, and another for the Negro
Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City's 18th and Vine district.
Kwan and Ling Wu attended the reception Wednesday with 5-year-old
Lee and 3-year-old Cindy - the son and daughter they wouldn't have
been allowed to have in China.
As friends and court employees crowded into the room, Wu's
English, which is good, faltered a bit.
"I feel I am part of the country now, he said. "Before, I
didn't feel the same. I still feel like a guest. II
As a U.S. citizen, Wu, 46, can practice art without interference
and follow any religion he chooses. An army will not arrest him, as
it did some of his former students in the Tiananmen Square rebellion.
If he chooses, he can bear arms.
A guest no longer, he can claim all the privileges on the plaque
he encased in bronze.
To leave a comment for Barbara Shelly, call (816) 889-7827 and
enter 1017, or send e-mail to [email protected]
LOAD-DATE: January 30, 1998
FIRST LADY HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON
REMARKS FOR THE OPENING OF THE SCULPTURE EXHIBITION
EAST ROOM, THE WHITE HOUSE
JULY 22, 1996
Today, we celebrate the fourth and final installment in a
series of exhibitions of Twentieth Century American
Sculpture at the White House. As most of you know, this
exhibit in the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden was inspired, in
part, by Mrs. Onassis and her extraordinary artistic and
cultural contributions to the White House. There is no
place more appropriate for this celebration of American art
than in the garden named in her honor.
The 12 pieces in this exhibition represent the diverse
visions and rich talents of sculptors from the Northeastern
part of our country. Many of these sculptures have been
inspired by the Northeastern landscapes and environments.
The sculptors have incorporated such items as twigs from a
backyard, old tires, pennies, leaves, and sardine skeletons
into their works. Tom Otterness created his bronze
sculpture "Head" with the intention of using New York's Wall
Street as a backdrop.
The President and I believe that art should be accessible to
everyone because it can offer each of us a deeper
understanding of our lives and of the rich cultural
traditions we share as a nation and a people. Art can make
our spirits soar and remind us of our powers to imagine and
to create.
It gives me great satisfaction and joy to know that the
thousands of visitors who pass through the White House have
been and will be able to look out the Colonnade window and
share in the extraordinary power of these sculptures.
This exhibition also celebrates the sculptors themselves.
Anne Tucker once said "All art requires is courage.' So on
behalf of the President and myself, I would like to thank
the artists who are featured in this exhibit.
I would also like to thank and recognize the people who have
made this exhibit possible. It took enormous generosity,
dedication, and wisdom to make this happen.
[Special thanks to Marcia Tucker and the staff of The New Museum
of Contemporary Art who curated and organized this exhibit; the
Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Foundation; J. Carter Brown; the
lending institutions; White House Preservation Committee and the
White House Historical Association; White House Curator Rex
Scouten; The Association of Art Museum Directors]
###
THE WHITE HOUSE
WASHINGTON
National Arts and Humanities Month
October 1994
The arts have long been an integral part of America's cultural
heritage, encouraging us to gain a deeper understanding of ourselves
and of our society. In a world too often beset by hatred and inci-
vility, the arts and humanities empower us to celebrate our individual
identities, while reminding us of the values and commitments that unite
us as a country.
Although the rich diversity of our nation would seem to preclude
an official American culture, we have a powerful tradition of artistic
expression and intellectual inquiry that honors every one of us equally.
Through art, music, literature, history, and philosophy, we preserve and
pass along, from generation to generation, our most cherished images,
ideas, and beliefs.
For more than two centuries, the arts and humanities have helped
Americans transcend political, religious, racial, and ethnic divisions
by engaging us in the common task of interpreting and expressing the
meaning of human experience. When we read each other's stories, discuss
each other's ideas, and feel each other's emotions through dance,
painting, and song, we come to understand the complexity and texture
of each other's lives. In SO doing, we gain a greater appreciation and
understanding of the breadth of human thought and emotion. And we gain
a more profound sense of our common purpose as Americans.
But if the arts and humanities are essential to appreciating
and preserving our culture, they are also essential to our growth and
renewal as a people. For it is only by deepening our understanding,
unleashing our imaginations, and enlarging our capacities to see and
to feel that we can envision a better future for ourselves, our
communities, and our nation.
In the new and complicated century that awaits us, we will depend
even more on our artists and humanists to help us discover the roots
of our deepest beliefs and gain a vision of our most promising
possibilities.
The month of October has been designated National Arts and
Humanities Month, and I urge all Americans to celebrate the artistic
and intellectual freedoms we enjoy and to reflect on the crucial role
they play in reinvigorating and renewing our great nation every day.
Bins Clinton
THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary
June 6, 1995
Immediate Release
Remarks by
First-Lady-Hillary Rodham Clinton
at the 125th Anniversary Celebration of the
Metropolitan Museum of Art
New York, New York
MRS CLINTON: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, very much.
such a great honor and pleasure for me to join you this
vening I am someone who is a great fan of this Museum and a
fan of the Cantors.
to have an occasion such as this where we celebrate both
cial I want to add my word of thanks to this Museum and
you who have supported it, nurtured it, loved it,
it to where it is today. I have just had an opportunity
the proposed new galleries, for the exhibition of the
of Greek and Roman art, as I was told, the finest
DI ction in the Western hemisphere.
nd It is very exciting to see the plans for this and to
what a contribution it will make to the continuing greatness
Museum. None of this would be possible without all of you
have been patrons and supporters of this Museum. And
honor two people who have been especially important.
ind Bernie have over the years stood behind so many
nt causes in health care and education. And tonight, we
to their contribution to the arts. What they have done by
enerosity has not only meant that literally millions of
1-5-75
have been enhanced by their eye, their passion, their
But it has also, I believe, served to spur others to
dailarly generous with their own love of art.
OF 11 we celebrate tonight, I must say, though, it is
thind of a bittersweet moment, for those of us who care
bout the arts in our country. Because, there is, as you
a movement underway to undermine the cultural
sions that all of you in this room are upholding by your
tonight.
1
It is sad, that there are those among us who do not
appreciate what this Museum represents - what it stands for. And
no more than that, do not understand that our democracy depends
ipon culture. We are witnessing a full-scale assault on public
support of the arts which in many ways is misguided and
sisinformed. One of the great accomplishments of the arts in
merica is that it truly has become part of the public domain.
Accessible to all, firing the imaginations of all. I was
cold that Bernie saw his first Rodin here in 1945 and look where
it has led. There is a proud tradition in our country of both
rivate and public support - a unique partnership unlike what
exists in many other countries not only in modern times but going
back through history. Where art was either the domain of the
bublic or of the private. But instead, in America there has been
this marriage.
And that is thanks, in large part, to far-sighted people,
like yourselves in both the public and the private sector. The
NEA has helped to bring art to millions. of Americans who would
102 have otherwise enjoyed it.
It has supported artists and teachers, students, men, women
17. children, whose daily lives have been transformed by their
exposure to great art. And I would like to thank Bill Lures and
the trustees, and the members of the business committee and all
you who have raised your voices in the last months on behalf
public support for the arts. I hope you will continue to do
because we cannot afford to retreat from that commitment.
would argue strongly, that, contrary to what some say,
Public support for the arts is a luxury we can no longer
ford " that it is, instead, a necessity for the continuing
rength and vitality of our community of culture in this
country
It is particularly ironic that those who bemoan the loss of
Sivility and character and the loss of values in America are the
list to recommend obliterating the federal agencies, in many
outting back on state and local support, responsible for
romoting our cultural traditions.
For example, the Greek and Roman exhibition that is being
orked on now, for those who at one hand, claim they support our
estern traditions and Western civilization but who on the other
hand would not support the kind of exhibition that would bring to
to those very traditions and roots; are living, in my view, a
03. ironic way of demanding we do what they say, without
cognizing how important it is to give other people the chance
have the same experience that they have had.
2
They fail to appreciate what every generation of Americans
have intuitively known, that our artistic imagination is critical
to our civilization and our democracy. So I hope that, as we
think about this Museum tonight and the contribution of the
Cantors, we will think about ways that each of us can try to
continue the traditions represented. And we will think, too,
bout all of the children, two hundred to three hundred thousand
year, who come to this Museum. The potential artists and
teachers and lovers and patrons of the arts of the future.
To make sure that their potential for appreciating what we
have today, thanks to the partnership between public and private
lovers of the art; will always be there. Yes, we have hard
decisions to make in America; yes, they are challenging. But let
us remember what really lies at the root of greatness as a people
investing in our future, caring about the best of our
traditions. And let's not turn our back on that kind of legacy.
With your help, your generosity, your energy and your
commitment, I don't think we will, but I know this is a
challenging time. I personally wanted to be here this evening to
thank the Cantors, to thank the Museum' and to thank all of you
or standing up on behalf of the arts in America. Thank you all.
(Applause)
###
3
PAGE
36
8TH STORY of Level 1 printed in FULL format.
Copyright 1995 The New York Times Company
The New York Times
August 13, 1995, Sunday, Late Edition - Final
SECTION: Section 7; Page 1; Column 2; Book Review Desk
LENGTH: 2177 words
HEADLINE: Bigger Than the Family, Smaller Than the State
BYLINE: By Fareed Zakaria; Fareed Zakaria is the managing editor of Foreign
Affairs.
BODY:
TRUST
The Social Virtues and
the Creation of Prosperity.
By Francis Fukuyama.
457 pp. New York:
The Free Press. $25.
IN 1989, as Communism teetered on the brink, Francis Fukuyama wrote a
now-legendary essay extravagantly titled "The End of History. In it, he argued
that the global movement toward democracy and capitalism had brought to a final
conclusion the centuries-old ideological debate over the ideal form of
government. Now Mr. Fukuyama has shifted his attention from the state to
society; the result is a fascinating and frustrating book, "Trust: The Social
Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity.' We have settled on the structure of the
state, he writes, but "liberal political and economic institutions depend on a
healthy and dynamic civil society for their vitality."
In the world of ideas, civil society is hot. It is almost impossible to read
an article on foreign or domestic politics without coming across some mention of
the concept. And "civil society" has bipartisan appeal; from Hillary Rodham
Clinton to Pat Buchanan, politicians of all stripes routinely sing its praises.
At the heart of the concept of civil society lie "intermediate institutions,
private groups that thrive between the realm of the state and the family. Alexis
de Tocqueville famously observed during his sojourn in this country that
America was teeming with such associations -- charities, choral groups, church
study groups, book clubs -- and that they had a remarkably salutary effect on
society, turning selfish individuals into public-spirited citizens.
The renewed interest in civil society first emerged in Eastern Europe after
Communism crumbled. Leaders like Vaclav Havel wanted to go beyond establishing
new governments and create a culture that could sustain political and economic
liberalism. They looked for help to those private groups beyond the reach of the
state -- citizens' associations, churches, human-rights chapters, jazz clubs --
that had nourished dissident life. Around the same time, the victorious Western
democracies found themselves confronting sagging economies, a fraying social
fabric and the loss of national purpose. Here too, the experts and statesmen
agreed, revitalizing civil society would overcome our malaise.
PAGE
37
The New York Times, August 13, 1995
Mr. Fukuyama, a social scientist and former State Department analyst who is
now a scholar at the Rand Corporation, pushes Tocqueville's argument a step
further. The art of association is good not just for politics, he asserts, but
for economics too: association inculcates the habit of working together with
ease and therefore increases productivity; it makes rigid rules and complex
legal contracts unnecessary. In short, it smooths the frictions of capitalism.
Since Tocqueville, we have assumed that Rotary Clubs help democracy; Mr.
Fukuyama tells us they help capitalism as well.
The ability to form the kind of groups that will help, Mr. Fukuyama argues,
depends on trust. If a society has a culture of trust, and particularly if its
members have the capacity to trust people outside their families, it generates
"social capital, which is as useful as financial capital to its economic
well-being. "Social capital is critical to prosperity and to what has come to be
called competitiveness, he says.
Or that is what he says sometimes. Mr. Fukuyama has almost written two books
in one. The first is his argument, interleaved throughout his 457 pages, for the
virtue of trust, social capital and intermediate groups. The second, the bulk of
the book, contains well-researched case studies of three "high-trust" countries
-- Germany, Japan and the United States and three "low-trust" countries,
France, Italy and China. In a discussion that is dazzling in its intelligence
and complexity, he explains how trust and culture have affected the economic and
political life of these six countries. Mr. Fukuyama ranges widely across
civilizations and subjects, writing with as much originality and insight about
Confucianism as about corporate structure. This very richness and nuance,
however, undermines his book's general arguments.
MR. FUKUYAMA'S central assertion is that the strength of civil society
strongly affects the industrial structure of societies. Far from being three
distinct forms of capitalism, the American, Japanese and German economies, he
says, bear a striking resemblance to one another. All three are dominated by
large, private, professionally managed corporations, like the General Electric
Company, the Toyota Motor Corporation and Siemens. France, Italy and China, on
the other hand, have many small, family-run companies and a few giant,
state-owned or subsidized corporations, like Renault and Italy's large banks.
Mr. Fukuyama makes a persuasive case that this difference in industrial
structure stems from differences in levels of trust within these societies. In
France, Italy and China, people appear little able to trust anyone outside their
families and form few intermediate organizations. The United States, Japan and
Germany, by contrast, are societies of joiners, filled with organizations that
bring strangers together in various ways. In a striking example, Mr. Fukuyama
recounts how Wang Laboratories, "the one Chinese brand name familiar to many
Americans, collapsed because its founder could not bring himself to trust
professional managers and instead handed the company over to his incompetent
son.
The correlation between trust and industrial structure is unimpeachable. But
does it matter? Mr. Fukuyama admits that large professional corporations are not
necessarily better for a country's growth or productivity. (The three
fastest-growing industrialized nations in the postwar period have been Japan,
France and Italy -- one high-trust and two low-trust countries.) In fact, some
economists argue that in the post-industrial age, small companies have the
flexibility to outwit their larger, lumbering competitors. Small businesses have
produced most of the jobs in the industrial world in the last two decades. In
PAGE
38
The New York Times, August 13, 1995
the end, Mr. Fukuyama reverts to a best-of-both-worlds prescription: the ideal
economy, he says, would have small companies that are linked together, thus
gaining both flexibility and size. Yet it is not clear why high-trust societies
would be better at creating such arrangements. Indeed, linkages among small
firms have already begun flourishing in low-trust Italy and China.
Social capital, then, is not critical to prosperity. Mr. Fukuyama mentions
some ways that it might be useful economically, in positioning a country in key
technological sectors, maintaining domestic control of arms industries and so
on. But in truth, he seems to believe that civil society and social capital are
good, not for their economic consequences, but rather for their noneconomic
benefits. The "more important consequences, he writes, "may not be felt in the
economy so much as in social and political life. Civil society breeds
sociability, community and citizenship, and bolsters liberal democratic
government; in other words, we are back to Tocqueville.
But even Tocqueville may have been wrong, not in his empirical observation
that intermediate institutions bolster the American system of government, but in
his generalization that such institutions are the key to democracy. Much of the
current scholarly interest in intermediate institutions has been based on a
study of Italian politics by the distinguished social scientist Robert D.
Putnam, who argues that the rich civil society of northern Italy has fostered
better government than the group-poor society of southern Italy. The book is
brilliant, but its title, "Making Democracy Work," is utterly misleading. The
Italian north has been better run than the Italian south for hundreds of years,
during which time the country was, to put it mildly, not always democratic. One
might more reasonably conclude from Mr. Putnam's research that social capital
makes any regime work, whether monarchical, democratic or fascist. Democratic
theorists, in fact, have typically disliked efficient government because it
increases the power of the state vis-a-vis society, which is why James Madison
consciously designed the Government of the United States to be unwieldy.
Behind much of the new interest in civil society, on the part of
communitarians as well as social conservatives, is the idea that culture and
society shape the nature of government. Obviously, there is some truth to this.
But there is a tradition much older than Tocqueville's, running from Aristotle
to Montesquieu, that asserts that fundamentally the state shapes society, not
the other way around. Mr. Fukuyama claims that deep (and relatively unchanging)
cultural traditions create trust, but his empirical sections suggest that
culture is quite malleable. He argues persuasively -- that the growth of an
overly centralized, regulatory and legalistic American state in the last 25
years has crowded out our once-flourishing civil society. Similarly, he shows
that the reason the French, Italians and Chinese seem unwilling to trust people
outside their families in business activities is a simple one. All three
countries experienced long periods of centralized, arbitrary and domineering
government with little respect for property rights and business contracts.
From East Asia to Africa, states that hit the right balance between order and
liberty create successful nations and societies. (Even the Czech Republic will
succeed more because of what Vaclav Klaus, the conservative economist who is
Prime Minister, does to its state than what Vaclav Havel, the philosopher and
playwright who is President, does to its society.) Consider Russia today, whose
success or failure surely depends more on getting its political and economic
fundamentals right than on the number of soccer leagues that spring up in
Moscow. This is because the structure of the state has powerful effects, for
PAGE
39
The New York Times, August 13, 1995
good or for ill, but also because not all Russia's private groups will be soccer
leagues. The Mafia is, after all, an intermediate institution. The Middle East,
to take another example, is currently experiencing a renaissance of intermediate
institutions, but the citizens' groups forming there are often intolerant,
politically and religiously extreme, and advocate violence and terror. It is
difficult to believe that the emergence of more groups like these will lead to
genuine democracy there.
We have come to think of civil society as being full of Rotary Clubs, Red
Cross chapters and social workers' groups. Such organizations, of course, help
bolster liberal democracy. But the space between the realm of government and
that of the family can be filled with all kinds of associations, liberal and
illiberal. Historians have amply laid out how the Nazi Party made its first
inroads through infiltrating local groups. On a less extreme note, many of the
small groups that have formed in America over the last two decades have been
thoroughly illiberal in spirit: victims' groups that have discouraged individual
responsibility, minority clubs that have Balkanized the campus and the
workplace, pseudoreligious cults with violent agendas. Will more of these save
American democracy?
In the economic realm, some private groups can actually hurt economic growth.
Mr. Fukuyama is well aware that historically "medieval producers following the
economic doctrines of the Catholic Church," as well as some unions and small
special-interest groups, have created the deadlock and stasis that are inimical
to energetic capitalism. Social capital, he says revealingly, "is likely to be
helpful from an economic standpoint only if it is used to build wealth-creating
economic organizations." Exactly. We like intermediate institutions when they
have good effects and dislike them when they have bad ones. What we want, it
would seem, is not civil society, but civics -- what the Romans called civitas;
that is, public-spiritedness, sacrifice for the community, citizenship, even
nobility. But not all of civil society is civic minded.
In a thoughtful essay at the beginning of this year, Mr. Putnam argued that
America's social capital is dwindling dangerously; membership in Rotary Clubs,
P.T.A.'s and the Boy Scouts is dropping. As a symbol of the problem, he noted
that while more Americans are bowling, fewer are bowling in leagues and groups.
With its haunting title, "Bowling Alone,' the piece won applause across the
spectrum, from George Will to President Bill Clinton.
Less noticed was a report in The New York Times four months later on Timothy
J. McVeigh, the accused bomber of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City. It
turns out that Mr. McVeigh and his buddies, Terry and James Nichols, would go to
a bowling alley some evenings. The group seemed to perform all the functions of
a good intermediate institution, creating a sense of community, fostering
comradeship and facilitating the planning of group projects. But perhaps we
would all have been better off if Mr. McVeigh had gone bowling alone.
GRAPHIC: Drawing
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
LOAD-DATE: August 13, 1995
SEP-26-1996 10:35
202
682
5668
P.02
hissh
THE PRESIDENT'S COMMITMENT TO THE ARTS AND THE HUMANITIES
"For more than two centuries, the arts and the humanities have helped Americans transcend
political, religious, racial and ethnic divisions by engaging us in the common task of interpreting
and expressing the meaning of human experience. When we read each other's stories, discuss
each other's ideas, and feel each other's emotions through dance, painting and song, we come
to understand the complexity and texture of each other's lives. In doing so, we gain a greater
appreciation and understanding of the breadth of human thought and emotion. And we gain a
more profound sense of our common purpose as Americans."
President William J. Clinton, October 1994
President Clinton believes that a strong cultural life is the signature of a great nation. He has
observed that the arts and the humanities stir our citizens' minds and senses, stimulating the
learning and collective discourse we need in a participatory democracy.
Affirming Public Support
"America has flourished for over 200 years because of our willingness to cultivate the human
spirit. In these challenging times, when some are questioning the value of public support for the
arts and humanities, we must remember that these pursuits are not a luxury that we can live
without - they are a vital part of our national character, the motivating force that makes us who
we are."
President William J. Clinton, October 1995
President Clinton stood firm in his defense of the National Endowment for the Arts, the National
Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute of Museum Services in the face of Congressional
attempts to eliminate these agencies and to undermine our nation's rich cultural tradition. In
vetoing the 1996 Interior Appropriations bill, he wrote to Congress in December of 1995:
"This bill is unacceptable because it would unduly restrict our ability to protect America's
natural resources and cultural heritage the bill represents a dramatic departure from our
commitment to support for the arts and the humanities. It cuts funding of the National
Endowments for the Arts and Humanities so deeply as to jeopardize their capacity to keep
providing the cultural, educational and artistic programs that enrich America's communities
large and small."
In his 1997 budget message, the President recommended restoring $36.5 million to the NEA's
reduced budget of $99.5 million, $26 million to the NEH (now at $110 million) and $2 million
to the IMS (now at $21 million).
Celebrating America's Artists and Scholars
"The human imagination is still the most powerful tool we have in moving forward as a
civilization."
President William J. Clinton, October 7, 1993
SEP-26-1996 10:36
202 682 5668 P.03
"Where there is imagination, there is always hope. Where there is potential for creative
expression, there is always the possibility for human progress."
Hillary Rodham Clinton, June 15, 1994
Through events at the White House, the President and the First Lady convey the importance of
the arts and the humanities, in their rich variety, to American society.
Awards:
Each year the President honors the nation's leading artists, scholars and cultural
institutions.
The National Medal of Arts recommended by the National Endowment for the Arts, and
the Frankel Prize for outstanding work in the humanities - recommended by the National
Endowment for the Humanities awarded each year in a ceremony on the White House
lawn. Recipients include? Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, Charles Kuralt, David McCullough,
Ray Charles and Arthur Miller.
The National Award for Museum Services, presented by the First Lady in October 1994
and 1995,
(explain)
The National Heritage Awards, also presented by Mrs. Clinton, which recognize great
traditional artists from the rich diversity of U.S. heritage.
The Presidential Design Awards, hosted annually by the First Lady, showcase the
best in federal buildings and construction.
Isn't it also inventions and machines?
Exhibitions: The First Lady opened up the White House for exhibits of American art that the
visiting public have the chance to see. on new for he visiting public.
The First Lady created the White House Sculpture Garden to showcase 20th century
American sculpture from museum collections all around the country, and to make the
White House grounds more inviting and accessible to the thousands of Avicilors who
visit everydays enter each day.
The First Lady assembled the White House Crafts Collection, a permanent collection of
72 pieces by 77 outstanding American artisans.
Events:
Hundreds of artists performed at the Inaugural ceremonies and at the White House
during the last four years, including Maya Angelou, Aretha Franklin, Mstislav
Rostropovich, Isaac Stem, Jesse Norman, Pinchas Zukerman, Kathleen Battle,
Thomas Hampson and Dawn Upshaw. Also showcased were:
Jessye?
Young artists such as the St. Lawrence String Quartet, young dancers from Jacques
'Amboise's National Dance Institute, and the Chicago Children's Choir.
The four-part Public Broadcasting Service series, "In Performance at the White House,"
presenting American talent in jazz, country and western, blues and soul who music. snaud
American historians and other scholars, such as
, adding their ideas
and expertise to the Administration thinking
will pp Administration special.
SEP-26-1996 10:36
202 682 5668 P.04
Expanding Our Children's Creativity
(HRC quote?)
Exposure to the arts must be a part of every child's schooling. Whether a youngster grows up
in a ghetto, on a farm, in a city or a suburb, the arts are a vehicle for self-expression and for
building self-esteem. The arts enable children from all backgrounds to develop their individuality
and to contribute positively to the larger mosaic of American culture.
As part of our GOALS 2000 legislation, the arts will become a core subject in the school
curriculum, along with English, math, science, history, civics, geography and foreign language. If
we plan wisely today, our children will enjoy a lifelong connection to the arts, to our collective
spirit, and to the never-ending process of learning.
President William J. Clinton, April 14, 1994
The President and Mrs. Clinton believe that all children should be able to explore their creative
potentials through artistic and intellectual activities. They also have seen first hand) how
participation can transform "any child, but especially those at risk, beyond the bounds that
circumstance has prescribed." (Hillary Rodham Clinton)
continues to)
The First Lady draws attention to the central role the arts and the humanities play in children's
lives as she highlights some of the most successful programs in the country.
Recently, she visited the Manchester Craftsman's Guild in North Pittsburgh and Gallery
37 in Chicago - programs for at-risk youth.
faller 37 notjust & at-rish
In a White House ceremony recognizing the work of the National Endowment for the
Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute of Museum Services,
she released Corning Up Taller: Arts and Humanities Programs for Children and Youth
At Risk, prepared by the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities,
explain its findings
(note: not sure we were including the above bullets)
The Administration encourages programs and partnerships across within the government, such as the
youth program "Pathways to Success" funded by the Department of Justice and the National
Endowment for the Arts.
Providing Cultural Leadership
President Clinton believes that the federal government can be a leader in supporting and
promoting our cultural traditions.
President Clinton appointed strong, energetic leaders to head the federal cultural agencies:
Jane Alexander as Chair of the National Endowment for the Arts
John Brademas as Chair of the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities
Diane Frankel as Director of the Institute of Museum Services
Sheldon Hackney as Chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
SEP-26-1996 10:37
202 682 5668 P.05
Signaling his dedication to the importance of America's cultural life, the President revitalized the
President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities and charged the Committee with the tacks
of increasing private sector support for the arts and the humanities and increasing the public are
perception of their value to society.
appreciation
Federal agencies with cultural programs expand the influence of the arts and the humanities at
home and abroad.
U.S. Information Agency artistic and scholarly exchange programs share America's
cultural genius with people around the world.
The General Services Administration improves the design of public buildings and
incorporates art into federal architecture.
The Art in Embassies Program at the U.S. Department of State places over 2,200 works
of art in more than 170 countries.
The 1995 White House Conference on Travel and Tourism promoted cultural and heritage
tourism.
??
End with quote?
Try to list more federal agency programs?
Under Affirming Public Support add: President Clinton supported full appropriations to our great
federal cultural institutions such as the Smithsonian Institution, the Library of Congress, the
National Gallery of Art and the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. (?)
I think this is still too long - what can we drop?
SERVING DEMOCRACY BY SERVING
THE ARTS AND THE HUMANITIES
(Traditional Perspectives, Unique Modern Conditions)
BY BENJAMIN R. BARBER
PR PRESIDENT'S AMOUNT THE AND COMMITTEE ARTS NN THE
Washington, D.C. 1997
An essay prepared for Creative America,
a report by the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities
describing the system of support for cultural life in the United States today
The relationship of the arts and the humanities to a free democratic
society -- its diversity and pluralism, its manifold liberties, its openness and
flexibility - is complex and often problematic. The arts can flourish in
democracy but have often developed with remarkable vibrancy as part of a
culture of dissent or rebellion in autocratic societies. Democracy needs the arts
(and the humanities which they anchor), for they constitute a crucial element
in civil society's cultural infrastructure. Yet the democratic impulse has
sometimes found itself at odds with artists and felt threatened by the avant
garde or anti-majoritarian or the aristocratic in culture.
Ultimately, democracy perhaps needs the arts more than the arts need
democracy - although there is an obvious and vital symbiosis between the two
in a well-functioning free society. For a free society gains its liberty and its
democratic vitality from civil society, and the arts and humanities invest civil
society with its creativity, its diverseness and its liberating spontaneity. What
complicates the relationship is the market, with which civil society is
sometimes conflated. The market offers free and private space to art and
culture and thus insulates it from official governmental direction and
censorship. But because market space is commercial space it draws the arts
into commerce and exchange and can imperil artistic autonomy from a
different quarter.
Historically, the relationship between the arts (which I will take here as
paradigmatic of the larger phrase "arts and humanities") and society has taken
1
a number of different forms: some of those forms have seen the arts as
mimetically reflecting society's norms and mores or even cheerleading for its
official conventions and ideologies; others segregate the arts from society or
give it a romantic rebellious character. Among the possible perspectives are:
THE CLASSICAL
THE ROMANTIC
THE REALIST (DISSENT VERSION)
THE REALIST (OFFICIAL VERSION)
THE AESTHETIC (LIBERAL)
THE ARISTOCRATIC (HIGH ART)
THE DEMOCRATIC (POP ART)
THE COMMERCIAL
THE CLASSICAL perspective treats the arts as a way of seeing (theoria
or spectatorship) that, because it competes with religion, philosophy and
political philosophy, either reinforces or rivals their visions of the social and
the political. The tragic poets saw themselves as allies of the new democracy,
for example, while the comedic writers of later Athens were critics of
philosophical aristocracy (Aristophanes ridiculing Socrates in The Clouds).
Aristocratic philosophy saw itself engaged in the same competition and so,
Plato felt constrained to ban the poets from his aristocratic Republic, protesting
that "artists craft phantoms" at a third remove from reality and are likely to
corrupt justice in a well-ordered commonwealth.
Crucial to this perspective is the insistence on the absolute interactivity
of art and politics. For better or worse, the two are regarded as being engaged
in a single enterprise: that of fashioning a common vision for a people to feel,
2
think and live by. In the Athenian world, art had explicit public functions and
was, for example, well represented in religious and civic festivals such as the
Olympiad -- the forerunner of today's more narrowly construed athletic
competitions. The great tragic trilogies of Aeschylus and Sophocles were
written for these festivals, and were regarded less as mere entertainments and
more as reflections on the civic and spiritual life of the Athenian polis.
The neo-classicism of the Enlightenment reflected the same intertwining
of aesthetics, politics and truth. It supposed the three to be bound up together
in much the same fashion. Keats' certainty that "truth's beauty and beauty's
truth" and Shelley's wish that poetry might be the world's true legislator were
nothing if not Athenian in their unitary aspirations.
THE ROMANTIC perspective lies at the other end of the art/society
spectrum, although it also posits art as a profound form of power. It treats it,
however, as an expression of inner vision -- a journey to the interior of the
soul -- that is necessarily at odds with the norms of conventional society and
its officialdom, whether they are democratic or autocratic. As a function of
radical individual imagination, especially as it emerged immediately before
and after the French Revolution, romantic art implacably opposed the ordinary
and mundane. Because its sense of justice was personal and individual, it
rarely could make common cause with social movements, even when they
were conducted in justice's good name. Society could appreciate the products
of the romantic imagination, but got no quarter from romantic artists who saw
3
themselves not as society's true teachers but its eternal rebels - its outlaws and
outcasts.
A revolutionary democratic society may be assisted at its birth by
romantic culture, but almost as soon as it becomes institutionalized and
constitutionalized finds itself the target of its erstwhile romantic allies. Byron
may have hoped to liberate Greece and put into practice Shelley's dream of
poetry as the true Legislator of the world, but romanticism has succeeded as
society's conscience and prod rather than as its constitution.
Eric Bentley referred to artists, approvingly, as "desperate characters,"
while John Cage has defined art as "criminal action." In the romantic vision,
the artist is an outlaw of the mundane who pushes against limits, revolts
against convention, and makes war on reality itself. "The weapon of poetry,"
wrote Ortega y Gassett with only a hint of hyperbole, "turns against natural
things and wounds and murders them." Romantic artists are thus often
viewed by society as self-lacerating madmen; they in turn treat social reality as
a form of conventional madness (see the charming inversions of the film King
of Hearts). No wonder that such artists may feel homeless in the mundane
world, and see their journey (Eliot's words) as one of "continual self-sacrifice, a
continual extinction of personality."
THE REALIST perspective (in its dissent version) has much in common
with romanticism, but is outer- rather than inner-directed: rooted in a
4
sociological concern with justice in the real world and concerned with the
individual as a member of communities of class, race and gender. It is thus
fix on reforming the world and its actual constitutions even if that means
the refashioning of human souls. In writers like Ibsen, Zola, Shaw and Brecht
the world's injustices are uncovered and revealed. Art's program here is
liberation, not just of the unfettered imagination but of individuals as social
beings. Nora's plight in Ibsen's A Doll's House models realism's concern with
coercion and freedom and its quest for a way out. Like romantic art, realist art
has a hand in democracy's generation. Unlike romanticism, however, it is less
skeptical of the social products of its imagination - which leads it sometimes
into imprudent alliances with states putatively founded on social justice,
realism in its official version.
THE REALIST perspective in the official version - realism after the
revolution, as it were - portrays culture as a critic of corrupt, autocratic
societies but as a friend of democratic or socialist government or national
socialist governments. Indeed, it is their handmaiden since, when successful,
such governments supposedly incorporate the ideals in the name of which the
revolution has been made and liberation won. The stubborn rebel may here
become the mindless cheerleader. A visionary realist like Gorki thus becomes
a supporter of the Soviet State after the Bolshevik revolution just as a realist
critic of bourgeois society like Brecht becomes a cultural apparatchik of the
East German State after the Communist accession to power there.
5
If justice and liberation are the true aims of art, the realist argument
insists, then a "just" state legislating for a supposedly liberated society can
presume to call upon artists to legitimate and communicate its ideals and
order. Socialist as well as national socialist realism made exactly these claims.
Even genuine democracies have enlisted artists in their cause. Democratic
artists like Whitman, Frost and Langston Hughes, even as they protested the
unjust and thus "un-American" features of the United States, have written
"patriotically" about America as a potential land of liberty.
THE AESTHETIC perspective assumes the traditional liberal separation
of private and public that insulates art from official society. It has no truck
with officialdom, whether democratic or tyrannical. It assumes that art has
private, aesthetic ends that are neither for or against democracy (or any other
regime form) but simply irrelevant to it. Art is what artists do. It is to be
prized for its integral aesthetic standards and its universal effect rather than
judged on its relationship to the politically particular. "My art," said Nabakov,
"bears no messages. I am not a postman." Irving Howe, often regarded as a
moralist, nonetheless wrote: "There are kinds of beauty before which the moral
imagination ought to withdraw." Even the realist Brecht decided, towards the
end of his life, that art finally could have no other justification than itself, than
Spass or simple fun (entertainment). In this liberal view, the only
responsibility democracy has for art is to guarantee it private space in which it
can flourish. The only thing art demands from democracy in turn is to be left
6
alone. True liberals are unlikely to think state subsidies for the arts are any
more legitimate or desirable than state censorship. A high wall between the
two that guarantees art security from the democratic "tyranny of opinion"
(Tocqueville) and guarantees society security from political and propagandistic
interventions by politicized artists is, from the liberal perspective, the only
prudent policy. When at the end of his life Joseph Papp of the New York
Shakespeare Festival decided he could no longer accept funding from the
National Endowment for the Arts and preserve his aesthetic liberty, he was
adopting a classical liberal posture.
THE ARISTOCRATIC perspective (defending high art) takes art to
have an aristocratic function in a democratic society: to preserve the finer
things in a vulgar world, to represent the taste of the cultivated minority in a
mediocre majoritarian arena. Here beauty and truth are thought to represent
independently grounded standards that can be used to mark off and judge the
practices of a democratic culture (there is thus an element of neo-classicism
here, since the high art perspective is not indifferent to the society by which it
feels compromised and demeaned). Journals like The New Criterion have
purveyed this aristocratic perspective with verve and Allan Bloom made it the
keystone to his arch critique of democratic culture in his The Closing of the
American Mind.
The art for art's sake complaint against government subsidized art is
less the liberal fear of censorship as it is the aristocratic fear of a levelling
7
mediocrity. To yield to a democratic government's well-intended cultural
ministrations is to acquiesce in what Tocqueville called the powerful "empire
of opinion" that can only corrupt a pure cultural vision. The aristocrat
eschews government "meddling" in the arts not out of respect for the liberal
wall between private and public but out of disdain for a (by definition)
"debased" democratic public realm.
THE DEMOCRATIC or popular art perspective is in some ways the
mirror image of the aristocratic perspective. It takes art to be an expression of
the dominant popular culture, and thus privileges as art those forms of
popular expression that best reflect the majority's tastes. Art is not something
distinct from or "above" society but society's aesthetic expression. It represents
not some elite's abstract standards but whatever artists -- understood broadly
as anyone who is engaged in self-expression and communication -- do. There
is no distinction here to be made between pop art and high art other than the
"pretensions" of those who purvey the latter.
In concrete terms, this perspective appeals to the "artist in everyone,"
and leads to "democratic" arts policies aimed at arts education and programs
of fair distribution that spread the cultural wealth - art and art subsidies -- to
every part of the country rather than leaving them to a narrow coterie of so-
called "elite" institutions. Its egalitarianism (depending on your point of view)
both popularizes and vulgarizes art. Some claim that it also relativizes art by
equating one "taste culture" (Herbert Gans) with another and, in the post-
8
modernist fashion, declaring all aesthetic visions and all cultural texts equal.
In a popular arts perspective, government intervention is a natural outgrowth
of art's public and popular character.
THE COMMERCIAL perspective treats art as a commodity no different
than any other commercial product of the free market. To the degree
democracy is reduced to free market philosophy, the commercial perspective
may appear as an economistic version of the democratic perspective. It
measures art by its capacity to attract consumers and pay for itself in the
market's hard currencies. In doing so, it blurs distinctions between art and
entertainment, between culture and commodity, and between self-expression
and consumption. It treats popular (pop) art as conventional: fully embedded
in the market. The commercial perspective can be understood as one
particular dimension of the democratic perspective, but because it has serious
consequences for policy (the commodification of art), it requires its own
category and has policy entailments that may differ from those of the pop art
perspective. Government, from this viewpoint, may wish to offset the
constraining effects of markets and try to guarantee diversity against the
market's uniformity, for example.
Historically, few societies have represented only one of these ideal
types, least of all, the United States. In practice, they overlap and intersect.
9
Most polities are characterized by some variable and evolving combination,
often in contradictory ways. In America, there has been some movement
historically from liberal and aristocratic perspectives (in the nineteenth
century), through romantic and realist/dissent perspectives (from the twenties
through the sixties in this century), to a rough dialectic of aristocratic,
democratic pop art and commercial perspectives in recent years. However, it
would not be hard to demonstrate that aspects of nearly all of the perspectives
noted above can be detected today in American struggles over arts policy and
discussions of censorship, funding and arts education. Is there a state council
for the arts where aristocratic advocates of pure art do not confront democratic
advocates of art for everyone? where zealous supporters of culture's
necessarily subversive (romantic) role are not arrayed against patriotic boosters
of an official art sanctioned by and supportive of conventional cultural norms?
Indeed, these ongoing arguments are themselves an expression of the
pluralistic character of the "culture of culture" in the United States.
Like other observers and critics, I have my own generic views about the
relationship between art and politics generally, and the arts and humanities
and American society as it exists today. I suspect in general that art and
culture are a good deal more resilient than most worriers allow. Absent
subsidy, absent even democracy, and in the presence of the conformist
pressures of either political autocracy or majoritarian mass opinion, the arts
survive. For they are rooted in indelible human genius and an irrepressible
10
need for authentic self-expression and communication that surface under
almost every imaginable condition, including the Gulag and the extermination
camps of Nazi Germany. They are as difficult to root out and destroy as the
human spirit itself.
At the same time, there are important and quite distinctive practical
consequences that flow from the several perspectives portrayed above. The
ultimate survivability of art is not an adequate reason to avoid addressing
tough questions of arts policy in a democracy. Perhaps most importantly, the
common linkage of democracy and the arts to a robust civil society demands
careful attention. Democracy is not just a matter of formal governing
institutions and a constitutional framework of popular sovereignty. A free
press and a ready sense of rights are necessary but hardly sufficient conditions
for democratic practice. As Dewey noted, democracy is as much a way of life
as a form of government, and its success rests on the existence and heartiness
of the civic domain - understood as distinct both from the government and
the private commercial domain.
Civil society is constituted by free voluntary institutions that are also
public in nature. Foundations, civic associations, charities, schools, religious
institutions and the free media are all part of this domain - along with the
arts. Indeed, the arts are civil society's driving engine, the key to its creativity,
its diversity, its imagination and hence its spontaneousness and liberty. As
democracy depends on civil society for its liberal spiritedness, so civil society
11
depends on the arts. And in this manner, democracy ultimately rests on the
arts' commitment to free creativity, liberal diversity and unfetterred
imagination. A government that supports the arts and the humanities is not
engaging in philanthropic activity but assuring the conditions of its own
flourishing. This is perhaps the most important single argument in favor of a
democratic government playing some role in the arts: not in the name of the
needs of the arts, but in the name of the needs of democracy.
Under normal circumstances, however much a democratic way of life
depends on the creativity and critical imagination generated by the arts and
however much it is enhanced when it rests on a robust civic infrastructure
nourished by the arts, the arts can survive without democratic support --
indeed, without a democratic constitution. Our circumstances today are not
entirely normal, however. Under the adverse conditions of pervasive mass
commerce, and as a consequence of our growing ambivalence about diversity
and pluralism in what some fear is a hyper-pluralistic society, the arts may
both be at risk and be necessary in unprecedented ways. Consequently, there
may be some specific arguments in favor of a modest government presence in
arts education and an argument for incentives and subsidies for creation and
performance beyond the general relationship posited above between
democracy, civil society and the arts. In particular, there are two conditions
that have altered the landscape today and offer special justification for
government intervention. The first is an ever more overweening commercial
12
environment, the second an ever more diversified and (some fear) fragmented
society. Let me briefly address each of these crucial issues and how they may
impact on arts policy.
COMMERCE: Art may have more to fear from the uncoerced and largely
invisible constraints of commercialization nowadays than it does from a too
pushy or censorious government. Artists in turn, although they certainly have
the "right" to isolate themselves from society and pursue their muse free from
interference, may discover that by assuming responsibilities for arts education
and civic engagement, they contribute to a climate that is as tolerant and
pluralistic as liberal philosophy says it ought to be. Artists as artists are
responsible only to their art; but artists are also citizens, and as citizens they
have a particular responsibility to contribute to and nourish an arts-supportive
civil society. In doing so they serve both democracy and themselves, their
fellow citizens and their art.
Advocates of "privatizing," suspicious of government meddling in the arts,
may think that they are supporting a liberal domain of the private when they
call for laissez-faire. But in an era when civil society has been collapsed into
the commercial market sector, privatization may turn out to mean
commercialization and the arts will not be "left alone" but subjected to the
harsh interventionist dynamics of commerce. Under such conditions, neither
high art, rebellious art nor even ordinary amateur art (community theater for
13
example) are likely to thrive. The market pushes towards uniformity of taste,
a levelling of standards, and the commodification of art product in ways that
will satisfy almost no one -- whatever perspective they represent. Magazines
trump books, newspapers trump magazines, tabloids trump newspapers,
television trumps tabloids, MTV trumps television - until not even popular
culture in its full diversity can survive, let alone the more fragile arts found on
the margins of the conventional.
Not just high art and rebellious art, but popular culture too needs the
incentives and balancing support of government and arts council subsidy in a
market that, while "free" in theory, is in practice often monopolistic in
ownership and conformist in taste. "Public" television has offered a place on
the broadcast spectra where "other" tastes -- some "high," some "popular," but
in any case not necessarily likely to flourish in a pure market environment -
can have a chance to educate, cultivate and entertain audiences. I can think of
no good reason why so modest a presence, had for so modest a cost, should be
seen as either a harbinger of government-sponsored taste or a usurpation of an
otherwise quite nearly sovereign set of commercial market mechanisms.
DIVERSITY: Ours is not only a democratic market society in which
commerce plays an usually powerful role in conditioning other features of the
social landscape; it is also a pluralistic society that in recent decades has
become so diversified and differentiated that historians like Arthur Schlesinger,
14
Jr. have begun to worry about the disintegration of our cultural fabric (see The
Disuniting of Democracy, for example). The arts have a special role to play in
this domain because they have the capacity simultaneously to offer expression
to the particular identities of communities and groups (including those that
feel excluded from the dominant community's space) and to capture
commonalities and universalities that tie communities and groups together into
a national whole. The Southern novel did not fragment America: it helped
define an American perspective. The Hudson River School of painting
represented an emerging American taste in the nineteenth century, just as New
England transcendentalism helped create an American philosophical
perspective. Jewish culture in New York helps tie the city together even as it
gives special expression to particular identity. African-American music and
theater have offered American blacks a unique avenue for particularistic
cultural expression (see most recently Bring in Da Noise, Bring in Da Funk!) and
at the same time stamped our national culture with much of its common
identity. Jazz, tap, and blues. (and the broader popular music culture that
finds its roots in them) at once define America and define the special
contribution of African-Americans to America.
Thus, perhaps uniquely, the arts have the power to give voice to and hence
to empower and recognize the marginalized and the minorities, and at the
same moment to constitute from them an inclusive common culture from
which none are excluded. This is their special contribution to an era in which
15
hyper-diversity has become a problem, and a special reason to consider
offering unintrusive support to them from independent government bodies
such as arts and humanities councils even though under more normal
circumstances such support might seem unnecessary, superfluous or perhaps
even undesirable.
Finally, let me recall that art and democracy share a dependency on one
extraordinary human gift, imagination. Imagination is their common link to
civil society. If imagination flourishes in the arts, democracy is benefitted. If it
flourishes in democracy, the arts and the civil society the arts help ground also
benefit. Imagination is the key to diversity, to civic compassion, and to
commonality. It is the faculty by which we stretch ourselves to include others,
expand the compass of our interests to discover common ground, and
overcome the limits of our parochial selves to become fit subjects to live in
democratic communities. The democratic citizen needs critical imagination to
ward off tyranny and defend liberty. The artist needs critical imagination to
ward off convention and defend creation. Ideally, in serving imagination, the
arts serve democracy and democratic citizenship; and ideally, in supporting the
arts, democracy serves itself - even where the arts it supports defy convention,
outrage taste and flaunt democratic mores. It is only a mature democracy that
fully appreciates these linkages. Ironically, youthful democracies that most
need the arts to grow and mature are least likely to support them. It has been
16
a mark of America's maturity as a free society that it has sustained a
supportive arts policy without becoming either proprietary or censorious.
To be sure, art will not perish even in the absence of active support and
understanding from a democratic people and their government. Nor will
democracy wilt and die in the absence of a robust arts policy and a
correspondingly vibrant arts community. But democracy, depending for its
liberty on a free civil society, will do better as the arts do better, and the arts
will do better as democratic citizens and their governing institutions choose to
support them (if not always underwrite them) and refrain from censoring
them. Finally, though both benefit by the other's good health, it is democracy
that has most to gain by cultivating and supporting the arts and the artists
who are their creators. Though they remain stubborn, independent, cranky,
rebellious, sometimes ungrateful and always subversive, artists cultivate and
manifest the liberty that lies at the very core of democracy's liberal soul.
***
17
1.
Public/private partnerships bringing art into the heart of urban areas to revitalize.
Encouraging community art to help beautify abandoned spaces which encourages kids to
feel ownership over the space in which they live.
2.
Studies have shown that involvement in worthwhile civic activities encourages people to
be good citizens - nurtures the spirit and allows them to feel a part of a larger whole.
3.
Fareed Zakaria makes the point that government shapes society - not the other way
around. If that is the case, shouldn't government lead by example in setting up a
framework in which arts are prioritized? Does she think this?
4.
The connection between state and civil society - which is more dependant on the other -
what's their connection and how do they influence one another. I think this needs to be
established at some point in the speech.
5.
In his book, Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity, Francis Fukuyama
argues that the art of association is good not only for democracy (Tocqueville) but for
capitalism as well. Fukuyama makes the argument that in a society where people trust
individuals outside of their families, "social capital" is generated, which is as useful as
financial capital to a society's economic well-being. "Social capital is critical to
prosperity and to what has come to be called competitiveness," he says. She probably
isn't going to want to make the argument that art is good for the economy, but one could
link the connection between art as a unifier and universalizer (is that a word?) of the
human experience and its strength in bringing people together in a society, which helps
make the society function better in the big picture. The "most important consequences,"
he writes, "may not be felt in the economy so much as in social and political life," Civil
society breeds sociability, community and citizenship, and bolsters liberal democratic
government.
6.
The arts are civil society's foundation, they are the key to its creativity, its diversity, its
imagination and as a result its spontaneousness and liberty. Just as democracy depends
on civil society for its liberal spiritedness, civil society depends on the arts. A
government that supports the arts and the humanities is not engaging in philanthropy, but
assuring the conditions of its own flourishing. Our support of the arts is not for the sake
of the arts but for the sake of democracy.
7.
I thought this quote was great, not really for her to use but to speak to some of the
movements in American history and the arts and how they have impacted us as a society
and play an integral part in the way we define our history and ourselves as Americans.
"The Southern novel did not fragment America: it helped define an American
perspective. The Hudson River School of painting represented an emerging American
taste in the nineteenth century, just as New England transcendentalism helped create an
American philosophical perspective. Jewish culture in New York helps tie the city
together even as it gives special expression to particular identity. African-American
music and theater have offered American blacks a unique avenue for particularistic
cultural expression and at the same time stamped our national culture with much of its
common identity. Jazz, tap, and blues at once define American and define the special
contribution of African-Americans to America." Art has a way of providing a voice for
those whose voice was muted in the past, and through this voice their experiences or
expressions are universalized and shaped into an inclusive common culture.
8.
IMAGINATION as the tie in between democracy and the arts and the millennium
(Honoring our past. Imagining our future) Connecting the role of imagination in
democracy "It is the faculty by which we stretch ourselves to include others, expand the
compass of our interests to discover common ground, and overcome the limits of our
parochial selves to become fit subjects to live in democratic communities." Connecting
the role of imagination in the arts, "the artist needs critical imagination to ward off
convention and defend creation. Ideally, in serving imagination, the arts serve democracy
and democratic citizenship; and ideally, in supporting the arts, democracy serves itself
event where the arts it supports defy convention, outrage taste and flaunt democratic
mores. It is only a mature democracy that fully appreciates these linkages It has been a
mark of America's maturity as a free society that it has sustained a supportive arts policy
without becoming either proprietary or censorious." In a 1995 speech delivered at the
Met HRC said in response to those who oppose public funding of the arts, "they fail to
appreciate what every generation of Americans have intuitively known, that our artistic
imagination is critical to our civilization and our democracy." She also said on June 15,
1994, " Where there is imagination, there is always hope. Where there is potential for
creative expression, there is always the possibility for human progress."
9.
Common themes that run throughout BC and HRC public statements on the arts:
The arts encourage us to celebrate individual identities while reminding us of all
that we have in common. By sharing in one another's expression, we learn to
understand the universal commonality of human experience. "In so doing we gain
a greater appreciation and understanding of the breadth of human thought and
emotion. And we gain a more profound sense of our common purpose as
Americans. But if the arts and humanities are essential to appreciating and
preserving our culture, they are also essential to our growth and renewal as a
people. For it is only by deepening our understanding, unleashing our
imaginations, and enlarging our capacities to see and to feel that we can envision
a better future for ourselves, our communities, and our nation."
Art as public domain -- for and by the community. They speak out against those
who say "Public support for the arts is a luxury we can no longer afford", by
insisting that it is a necessity for "the continuing strength and vitality of our
community of culture in this country."
Our "moral strength" as Americans is in our appreciation of our rich cultural
traditions and our appreciation of our diversity.
NEA -- Public/private partnership. Makes art accessible to all sectors of our
country.
CHILDREN. In HRC's June 21, 1995 op-ed in the NYT she writes, "Too often,
we seen children who, instead of discovering the joys of painting, music,
sculpting or writing, express themselves through acts of frustration and even
violence. The arts offer an alternative to the more disturbing elements of our
popular culture, and a safe haven that allows children to explore their creative
potential, transporting them beyond the bounds of their difficult circumstances.
Their exposure to the roots and diverse richness of human civilization will
enhance their understanding of their own heritage and the world in which they
live I hope we will remember that public support for the arts is a down payment
on our future. It is an investment in the values we claim to honor and in the
cultural traditions in which democracy has flourished for 218 years. Now is no
time to turn our backs on that legacy or its promise."
April 24, 1998
MEMORANDUM TO CHRISTY
FROM:
Noa
RE:
Non-western thinkers/artists/poets etc.
Christy,
As I mentioned to you on the phone, most of these names are unfamiliar, so I'm not sure how
useful they'll be. I spoke with Ginger at the Millennium Council yesterday and today about the
apocalyptic predictions book. She was under the impression that you were dealing directly with
Sanjay. Here it goes -- be warned, it's pretty slim pickings.
Octavio Paz
Gabrielle Garcia Marquez
Isabelle Allende
Khalil Jibran
Dalai Lama
Umm Khalthoum or Feyrouz - Famous women singers in the Arab world
Gandhi
Ibn Battuta - Arab geographer explored Sahara 1352
Li Hsing Tao - wrote "the chalk circle" famous Chinese play, 1352
Hafiz - Persian poet 1320-1389
Juan Manuel - Spanish poet 1282-1348
Nasir ed-Din - Arab scientist 1201-1274
Djelaleddin Rum - Persian Poet, founder of the Order of Dancing Dervishes 1273
Chao Meng-Fu - painter of the transitional era between the Sung and the Yuan dynasties 1254-
1322.
Saadi - Persian poet 1257
Keiji Nishitani - 1900-1990
Kayashi Razan - Japanese thinker 1683-1657
Ogyu Sorai - Japanese thinker 1666-1728
Shikibu Murasaki - author of Genji, the world's oldest novel and Japan's greatest - circa 1000