Rocco Landesman Confirmed as Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts

 Rocco Landesman Damon Winter/The New York Times Rocco Landesman

The Broadway producer Rocco Landesman was confirmed by the Senate on Friday as the new chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. Mr. Landesman, 62, produced award-winning productions like “Angels in America,” “Big River” and ”The Producers” and has for more than 20 years been president of Jujamcyn Theaters, New York’s third largest theater owner.

Jim Leach, 66, a former Republican congressman from Iowa who is now a professor at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, was also confirmed as the next chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Both are expected to be sworn in sometime in the next few days. Robert L. Lynch, president of Americans for the Arts, a lobbying group, said the confirmations mark “a moment of great opportunity for our nations cultural agencies.”

In a telephone interview on Friday, Mr. Landesman said he was eager to get to work, which he planned to do on Tuesday. “It’s a daunting thing,” he said. “This historically has not been a great job — or not for a long time — and the challenge will be to make it one and to really accomplish something. There hasn’t been the financial commitment.”

Mr. Landesman takes over an N.E.A. that has been recovering from budget cuts imposed in the 1990’s in the wake of Congressional debate over whether controversial art was worthy of public funds.

“The N.E.A. is way behind the 1992 levels of funding,” Mr. Landesman said, referring to the year the agency’s funding reached a high of $176 million. “The funding level is almost invisible.”

Mr. Landesman’s predecessors, Dana Gioia and Bill Ivey, were known largely for repairing the N.E.A.’s image on Capitol Hill. Mr. Landesman said he hopes to continue good relationships with members of Congress, but he also has a reputation for shaking things up and he is already speaking his mind.

“It’s not easy in this climate with scarce dollars,” he said. “On the other hand, there’s a crisis among arts institutions because so many of them are going out of business or about to – it’s an emergency. Even the pathetic N.E.A. levels of funding will matter to a lot of these institutions and that funding needs to increase.”

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All of this concern about funding the institutions of art are a bit self serving since the institutions lead the arts to become an insiders game in which profit, politics and social positioning crowds out legitimate creativity.

“The American people should have the nerve to invest in the work of individual artists.” Bill Ivey

Funding the arts is good for communities. Not only is there substantial documentation that children who are exposed to the arts develop richer ways of problem-solving, but the theatres and orchestras that stay open and thrive lead to increased traffic at area restaurants, bookstores, parking garages, creating a knock-on benefit to an entire area that might otherwise collapse and blow away without a gallery, theatre or concert hall in its midst.

While I agree with the points “plain Kate” makes, it disturbs me that people feel the need to find extrinsic justification for the arts. Yes, the arts are good for business. And yes, arts education helps students learn to problem solve, and more.

But the arts are more than this: The arts take us out of ourselves, connect us to others through shared universal experience, and bring us back to ourselves changed. The arts are themselves the reason to fund the arts.

I’m delighted that Rocco Landesman will chair the NEA. I explain why in my column at //www.thefastertimes.com/theatertalk/

I think it’s GREAT that a recovering dramaturg is the head of the NEA!

From the man who gave us “The Producers ” to heading up the NEA ,
it baffles the imagination – suppose it
could have been worse, but is hard to
imagine how .

ariel I ‘think’ he’s done more than ‘The Producers” also good business men in the arts are welcome–it will be interesting to see (as I’m not aware of his involvement in Non-Profits) how he works in that arena. An area whicj people often doon’t understand is harder to work in not because of the ART, but because of thing as grants and such–do people realize that Not For Profit groups can’t get away with the ‘crap’ that big business, for profit folk do(which is why they get away with such bad ‘antics’–tax wise-they are held to a higher and more stringent level of accounting. Most folk have no idea about that.

However Mr Landesman, some of that theatre in ‘Peoria’ might actually be better the The Goodman or Steppenwolf–don’t mistake size for ‘better’

In response to Mr. Landesman’s NY Times interview, Suzette Boulais, executive director of ArtsPartners, and I extended invitations to the new NEA chairman to visit Peoria to attend a production at Eastlight Theatre (one of Peoria’s theatres). He immediately responded by email his gratitude for the invitation and that he will come. Tuesday afternoon on his first day in office, I received a call from Mr. Landesman confirming that he is excited about visiting our community to experience our arts scene. Our goal is for Peoria to represent all of the smaller communities in the nation that are doing worthy and worthwhile work in the arts. In homage to the ‘The Beer Summit’, we are lovingly calling this visit, ‘The Lemonade Stand’…not because that is what we drink, but because that is what we do in Peoria – we take lemons and turn them into lemonade.