No Culture Czar

Should President Barack Obama create a cabinet-level post for an arts administrator? Music producer Quincy Jones has promised to beg the new president to create a "Secretary of Arts" the next time they speak, while an online petition to similar effect currently claims more than 200,000 signatories. But John Adams, one of America's most-performed living composers ("Nixon in China," "Doctor Atomic"), says he isn't so sure. He spoke with NEWSWEEK's Seth Colter Walls. Excerpts:

NEWSWEEK: What do you think President Obama owes America's artistic community, if anything?
John Adams: Poor Obama! The last reporter who talked to me was asking me about Obama, too! You know, I've seen several people circulating e-mails [encouraging the president] to create a cabinet-level position for the arts. My attitude is: let's get the really critical things done. I'm just hoping the guy doesn't get destroyed.

But it's not as though past presidents haven't bolstered the arts from the bully pulpit, like Kennedy and his "New Frontier in the Arts," for example.
How many billion people were watching, the moment [Obama] took the oath? And what did they see right before that? They saw Yo-Yo Ma and Itzhak Perlman and this young guy from the Met [clarinetist Anthony McGill]. That's pretty thrilling, even if the performers were lip-syncing. What they could do would be to give a tiny amount of funding to the NEA [National Endowment for the Arts] or something. That's one of the great disgraces, that our federal budget for the arts is laughably small.

In the current version of the stimulus bill, there's $50 million for the NEA—a fact that has already become a talking point for House Republicans and the Wall Street Journaleditorial page.
That, again, just reflects this great distrust of the arts in this country. Anti-intellectualism has great prestige!

How should concert halls go about attracting new listeners? Does government play no role in this?
Well, the one and only way to interest people in classical music is to get them to play it as children. People who grow up not having learned an instrument or not having been exposed to playing Bach on the piano—or playing, as I did, clarinet in a concert band—they have no understanding and no exposure to it. When I was a kid, we all had music lessons as part of the school program.

Isn't that changing, to some degree? Aren't composers who cross streams with "indie" or experimental rock—people like Nico Muhly or Caleb Burhans—bringing non-instrumentalists into the concert hall?
But both of those guys, they're highly trained musicians.