Dana Gioia: belief

Transcript context

…How can we make arts funding less bureaucratic, whether public or private sector? I think the best arts funding is from the private sector. It’s where people give money while they’re still alive so they can measure the results of what they’re doing. I believe that people should fund things in their own communities and they should become very actively involved. If you think about this, the people who create wealth have skills. Now, they aren’t artistic skills, don’t get me wrong, but they have organizational skills. They can also recognize when something’s working and what’s not working. If we could take some of that energy and bring it into local arts organizations, we wouldn’t have the number of symphonies and museums and opera companies and theaters that are going bankrupt right now. I see a lot of people who have a lot of money not willing to give their time or not willing to give their money. “Well, I’ll give it when I die. I’ll create a little foundation when I die.” I just finished rereading a book on Henry E. Huntington, who like Andrew Carnegie, Andrew Mellon, did it while they were alive. They oversaw the things and they created. In the case of Carnegie, hundreds, thousands of institutions, but in terms of Mellon and Huntington, institutions have absolute world quality that transformed the cultural landscape of their region and we don’t see that much anymore. When people do this, they tend to do it in medicine or science, not in the arts. I have just a few basic questions to close. First, if someone wants to pursue Dana Gioia as a poet, what should they actually go out and do? What’s the first act they should take?…

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