Gioia Tells It Straight And In Your Face

Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, Dana Gioia, may not be a celebrity or otherwise famous, nor any great shakes as a poet, but as a university commencement speaker and pitchman for high culture and the arts he rocks.

[Today,] almost everything in our national culture, even the news, has been reduced to entertainment or altogether eliminated. The loss of recognition for artists, thinkers, and scientists has impoverished our culture in innumerable ways, but let me mention one. When virtually all of a culture's celebrated figures are in sports or entertainment, how few possible role models we offer the young. There are so many other ways to lead a successful and meaningful life that are not denominated by money or fame. Adult life begins in a child's imagination, and we've relinquished that imagination to the marketplace.

[...]

Everything now is entertainment. And the purpose of this omnipresent commercial entertainment is to sell us something. American culture has mostly become one vast infomercial.

I have a recurring nightmare. I am in Rome visiting the Sistine Chapel. I look up at Michelangelo's incomparable fresco of the "Creation of Man." I see God stretching out his arm to touch the reclining Adam's finger. And then I notice in the other hand Adam is holding a Diet Pepsi.

[...]

Don't get me wrong. I love entertainment, and I love the free market. I have a Stanford MBA and spent fifteen years in the food industry. I adore my big-screen TV. The productivity and efficiency of the free market is beyond dispute. It has created a society of unprecedented prosperity.

But we must remember that the marketplace does only one thing — it puts a price on everything.

RTWT here.

(Our thanks to ArtsJournal for the link.)