Will Act for Food

Gioia says his most important achievement was to change the conversation about arts funding in America "from a bitter argument to a consensus." Long gone are the bad old days of Jesse Helms pillorying some avant-gardist and threatening to shut down the entire agency. Gioia has charmed legislators by emphasizing education; rolling out new programs, including a Shakespeare in American Communities project; and stretching the agency's geographic reach. According to Gioia, the NEA previously hadn't funded projects in a quarter of the country's congressional districts; today, they're in all 435. "The advice I would give my successor," he says, "is to remember that this is not an elitist organization, this is a democratic one."

Actually, this is—or ought to be—both. For all its laudable success at spreading cultural programs to every corner of the country, the NEA lately seems uncomfortable talking about excellence or masterpieces. It's telling that the fact sheet outlining his accomplishments doesn't mention any actual new plays or operas or symphonies. Bear in mind that government patronage is an arrangement with a considerable pedigree: the Parthenon, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, "King Lear."

The NEA's recent success in arts outreach is reason enough to hope that Obama asks for a substantial increase in its budget (currently $144 million, which is well off its all-time peak, but higher than during the ugliest stretch of the culture wars). But if congressional pressure limits the NEA's ability to speak the language of both elitism and democracy, then regardless of whom the next chairman may be, it becomes all the more important for Obama to act as more than simply the arts patron in chief. For culture to have the prominence and recognition it deserves, he needs to ascend his very tall soapbox and be its champion.

In that sense, the precedent to follow isn't FDR's—it's JFK's. In 1962, President Kennedy commissioned August Heckscher to compile a groundbreaking report on government's relationship to the arts. Kennedy was assassinated before the programs could be fully implemented, so what everybody remembers, with good reason, is Camelot, the unofficial and glittering constellation of talent that swirled around the White House. These were evenings of Pablo Casals and Leonard Bernstein entertaining the room, of the First Lady chatting up Lionel Trilling about the novels of D. H. Lawrence.

On a recent "Meet the Press," Obama seemed interested in maintaining that tradition, telling Tom Brokaw that he and his wife want to host "jazz musicians and classical musicians and poetry readings in the White House, so that once again we appreciate this incredible tapestry that is America." That sounds attractive, though a little hard to imagine. For all the elite glamour of his Inaugural lineup—Yo-Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman and Aretha Franklin will perform, and Elizabeth Alexander will read an original poem—neither of the Obamas has shown a burning desire to keep up with, say, the operas of John Adams or the fate of the Chicago Symphony. Plus, things being what they are in this world, President Obama will be busy.

Who, then, will supply the visibility that America's cultural traditions—high, low and everything in between—deserve? Quincy Jones has said in recent interviews that he wants Obama to appoint a secretary of the arts, and last month a dozen-plus arts organizations issued a joint statement making a similar call for a new "senior-level administration official." It's true that the United States is rare in not having a minister of culture, but a cabinet-level post is still a bad idea. For one thing, it's just asking for some Republican administration to kill it—or, worse yet, to bend it to the right's own wishes. Better to leave the cultural programs safely decentralized in many hands.

Besides, the arts don't need another superintendent in Washington—they need an evangelist. So Obama might be wiser to follow the lead of the first President Bush. When Arnold Schwarzenegger was named chair of the President's Council on Physical Fitness, he became a headline-generating dynamo on behalf of good health and the Bush administration. It's possible to imagine Obama multiplying this example by five or 10, enlisting the help of some talented and highly regarded people who will do anything for him—Jones, George Clooney, Andre 3000 (why not?)—and dispatching them as special emissaries to draw attention to various expressions of American creativity around the country. Along these lines, it's also possible to imagine Obama kicking off, with a single phone call to Oprah, the literacy project to end all literacy projects.