critical difference

When Necessity Feels Like Luxury

2009-11-19T18:29:44Z

The autumn weather was perfect the other night for a stroll through Midtown. So when the theater let out on 45th Street, I headed a few blocks south, cut through the holiday maze of Bryant Park, and crossed Fifth Avenue to the Mid-Manhattan Library. It was late, but there was no need to hurry: The library was open 'til 11 p.m.

Even as I plucked the book I needed from a shelf in the fiction section, I felt a sort of warming gratitude. The New York Public Library fought hard earlier this year to fend off budget cuts that would have devastated its ability to provide services just when demand for them is highest. Its success says a lot about the city's priorities -- and about its wealth, too.

Elsewhere in the nation, the recession is having an ugly effect on libraries. Today's papers alone tell stories of numerous struggles. In Pittsburgh, several branches of the Carnegie Library face closure if funding isn't found to keep them open, and in Southern California, according to the Los Angeles Times, "the city of Colton shut down its three libraries and laid off nearly 60 employees to help plug a $5-million hole in its budget." The city of Ventura plans to close its most heavily used branch.

It's vicious out there -- for the populace and for our libraries, whose worth we recognize most clearly in bad economic times. So those of us who live in a place where the public library is not only open seven days a week, but open late as well, have reason to marvel.

It isn't a luxury, but it feels that way. Who could fail to cherish that?

Male = Mass Appeal

2009-11-12T21:57:21Z

Sage counsel from Amy Poehler: "Girls, if boys say something that's not funny, you don't have to laugh," she said this week at Glamour's Women of the Year Awards.

Is it too great a leap to suggest that Poehler's girl-power advice gets at one of the root causes of women's underrepresentation in so many areas of the arts?

Maybe women, from early childhood on, are trained to be too amenable an audience, ever willing to watch and listen -- politely, appreciatively, passively -- to male performers and writers and directors. Meanwhile, our culture is so certain little boys wouldn't be attracted to narratives about girls (or is it that we fear they would be?) that we don't even test the hypothesis. Children's storybook characters, their movie heroes, even nearly all of the Muppets on "Sesame Street" are male. And so yet another generation grows up with the belief that male equals mass appeal, while female equals niche.

When you're perceived as comprising a niche even though you're the majority, good luck breaking into the mainstream -- which, as it happens, is dictated (loudly, raucously) by the preferences of the minority. Sort of like how Republicans control the Senate even though the numbers say they don't.

What brings this on is Bill Carter's New York Times story today about the absence of women on late-night TV writers' staffs. The most startling fact in the piece -- which adds some depth and color to other recent coverage of that abysmal employment scenario -- is that there are more female viewers of those shows, and of TV in general, than there are male viewers. David Letterman's "audience is almost 55 percent women; [Jay] Leno's is more than 53 percent, and [Conan] O'Brien's just over one half. Yet the writing room and sensibilities of the show itself remain largely male."

It's a maddening piece of information, not least because it lines up so well with other female-majority stats: Women attend the theater more often than men do; read vastly more fiction than men do; want to go to, and work in, the movies just as much as men do. And yet female playwrights and plays about women remain scarce; rosters of "important" novelists, let alone nonfiction authors, tend to be overwhelmingly male (or, like Publishers Weekly's list of 2009's top 10 books, all male); and Hollywood, which must have the attention span and cultural memory of a gnat, is genuinely surprised whenever a female-centric movie is a monster hit. (Wasn't "Thelma & Louise" -- which, by the way, I saw with three guys when it came out in 1991 -- supposed to change that once and for all? Sigh.) And let's not even get into dance, where female choreographers are still struggling to commandeer even a little bit of the spotlight.

Pondering the egregious underrepresentation of women in the theater industry, playwright Marsha Norman frames the problem this way in the current issue of American Theatre:

The U.S. Department of Labor considers any profession with less than 25 percent female employment, like being a machinist or firefighter, to be "untraditional" for women. Using the 2008 numbers, that makes playwriting, directing, set design, lighting design, sound design, choreography, composing and lyric writing all untraditional occupations for women. That's a disaster if you're a woman writer, or even if you just think of yourself as a fair person.

As she also notes, "it's awful all over the arts world for women." So there's that.

In trying to combat this arts-world disaster, perhaps women can take a lesson in what not to do from the Democrats, who have a longstanding, extremely self-defeating habit of being polite and empathetic beyond the point of reason. They also have a catastrophic tendency to be cowed by Republican name-calling and the prospect thereof, which means they exercise their backbone less than they otherwise might, even when they're in the majority.

Women, socialized to be polite and empathetic, simply are not, as a group, as assertive as men are -- partly, perhaps, because in behaving that way they risk being stuck with labels like "aggressive" and "bitch" (or, God forbid, "feminist"). But the numbers here are in our favor: numbers that say women make up more of various lucrative audiences than men do, numbers that say women aren't being properly served, numbers that say -- as Norman points out -- basic fairness is being ignored, and it's getting in the way of people's livelihoods.

There is some hope even in the appearance of Carter's Times piece today, which suggests this issue has legs. There's a glimmer of hope, too, in an unlikely spot, comedycentral.com, which streams full episodes of both "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report," generally targeting a Wired-meets-"Animal House" demo with ads for beer, BlackBerrys and incipient boy-blockbusters like "Paul Blart: Mall Cop."

But one day not long ago a cosmetics ad came on. I nearly fell off my chair: Someone had noticed -- at last, at last, at last -- that women were watching.

Well, yes. We've been there all along. Might as well try to sell us something.

Okay, then. Now that those shows have picked up on our presence, maybe they and the other late-night guys will acknowledge, too, the absence of women in their writers' rooms, and finally do something about it.

Audience, Please Exit Now

2009-11-09T21:13:04Z

Not even a half hour into the 80-minute performance, much of the row behind us gave up and left, clumping and clattering out of the theater. A short while after that, more of the crowd fled, the wood of the risers amplifying their every footfall. Those of us who remained were quiet, whether out of absorption, puzzlement or indifference. I couldn't detect the tenor of the audience, or even the reaction of the good friend beside me. Occasional sparse laughter aside, the spectators at yesterday's matinee of Richard Foreman's "Idiot Savant," at the Public Theater, were so subdued as to seem unresponsive.

But would we have been so at the curtain call? It's impossible to know, because there wasn't one. Instead, the disembodied voice that had spoken to us and to the actors at the beginning of the play ("Message to the performers: Do not try to carry this play forward") spoke again at the end to tell the audience that the performance was over and we were to exit now. The applause that came anyway from those who were not immediately out the door was befuddled, and consequently muted: Are we really supposed to leave without saying thank you?

It's the actors who bow at a curtain call, but it's not only their performance that we're applauding. It's also the writing, the direction, the design -- or, in the case of Foreman, more likely those same three things in reverse order, language being the least of it with him. Nearly everything psychological about his voyages into the imagination is perceptible in his weird, sometimes hallucinatory stage pictures, so vivid that knowledge of English is probably not a prerequisite for viewing. The delicious set of "Idiot Savant" is like a shoebox diorama made human-scale (and, for what it's worth, the best spatial use of the Public's difficult Martinson stage I've ever seen); the actors, the costumes, the scores of props are objects Foreman moves around his diorama. What he's creating is spectacle, and we are spectators. Which is a step removed from being a true theater audience: We're observers, not crucial participants.

And yet when my friend and I walked out onto Lafayette Street (he said he loved it, by the way; so did I), I couldn't help feeling a little bit bad for the actors. If I hadn't been able to gauge the audience's response, had they? Some of the best curtain calls come after performances like that, when a seemingly tepid crowd turns out to have been with the actors all along. If our audience was -- and maybe they weren't; maybe it was mostly a crowd of "Spider-Man" fans who'd come to see Willem Dafoe, mixed with white-haired matinee-goers who are Foreman's contemporaries but not his peers -- the cast will never know it.

Americans are notoriously stingy with their applause, so it may be a little weird that I'm bothered, as an audience member, by the lack of a curtain call. Nonetheless, I am. The absence of it fits the form of the piece, but it doesn't quite fit its spirit, which is nothing if not generous. There's no quibbling with the rest of "Idiot Savant": From Foreman's overflowing imagination come a giant papal stigmata duck and a spotted spider, too; it's simply ungrateful to complain. But amid all that bounty, he leaves us hungry for the chance to give thanks.

The Book Tour ...

2009-11-06T16:01:46Z

... in 140 characters, max. Garry Trudeau is a genius.

Circles of Influence

2009-11-06T14:38:42Z

At Politico, Pia Catton has a fun look at the social links between the members of the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities. As she writes, "these 26 private-sector appointees are intricately connected through years of leadership in the overlap of politics, arts and culture. Studying their resumes, some clear patterns and paths emerge." An accompanying chart by Sarah Lauren Bell maps the circles of influence.

Articles and charts being limited by nature -- they can't, after all, go on forever -- there's amusement for the reader, too, in finding connections the piece doesn't mention. Quick! How many additional social groups does George C. Wolfe belong to?

Lounging at Lincoln Center

2009-11-05T10:00:00Z

A few elegant chairs. That's all it took to significantly ameliorate a design disaster in the Barclays Capital Grove at Lincoln Center.

The god-awful concrete benches marring the plaza just north of the Metropolitan Opera House are still there in all their multifaceted dreadfulness, but it's only fair to point out -- a bit belatedly -- that visitors seeking a place to sit under the trees now have a far better option.

In the new context, the benches serve as a frame for the activity inside them. An ugly, ill-advised frame, but one that can more easily be ignored.

Our Sense of Place, Dismantled

2009-11-04T19:55:35Z

There was a startling melancholy to a street scene in Chelsea yesterday, just off Eighth Avenue. An old Boston Globe delivery truck, now with New York plates, idled at the curb, removed from its native habitat, disconnected from its original purpose. The painted lettering that betrays its past life is only partly scraped off, legible enough to lend the new owners -- a Brooklyn firewood delivery business -- a certain retro cool.

But melancholy is the mood where newspapers are concerned. A reporter friend, as weary as I am -- as we all are -- of the endless coverage of newspapers' demise, roused himself from his professional ennui the other day to recommend a stellar essay on the subject. I was skeptical; who wouldn't be? But Richard Rodriguez's "Final Edition," in the current issue of Harper's Magazine, is lovely, literary, smart: the kind of thing that reminds you why you fork over money to read good writing -- which you'll have to do for this, even online.

A taste:

We are a nation dismantling the structures of intellectual property and all critical apparatus. We are without professional book reviewers and art critics and essays about what it might mean that our local newspaper has died. We are a nation of Amazon reader responses (Moby Dick is "not really a good piece of fiction"--Feb. 14, 2009, by Donald J. Bingle, Saint Charles, Ill.--two stars out of five). We are without obituaries, but the famous will achieve immortality by a Wikipedia entry.

Like all the best obits, Rodriguez's essay tells us what's been lost, and why it matters, not least to our sense of place. But, as he points out, "An obituary does not propose a solution."

The Yankees' Cautionary Tale

2009-10-28T22:45:52Z

Just in time for the World Series, WNYC has a seriously fascinating report on the effect the new Yankee Stadium is having on its Bronx neighborhood. With the team having built what one fan approvingly describes as a mall, brimming with pricey dining and shopping options, there's correspondingly less economic benefit to area restaurants and stores -- though local impact is always a significant part of the argument when a sports team, or any other organization, is seeking incentives and concessions from municipal or state officials. Nationwide, reporter Ailsa Chang says, that's the trend: New athletic facilities are designed to get and keep visitors inside, spending money on concessions there.

To a lesser extent, in-house dining and shopping have been the trend in arts facilities as well. But it would be a rare theater, concert hall or museum that could meet the needs of every visitor who wants to pair a cultural outing with lunch or dinner, coffee or a drink. The actual numbers can be squishy in the extreme, but arts patrons really do flock to neighboring establishments before and after they get their culture fix. Even die-hard Yankee fan (and opera buff) Rudy Giuliani acknowledged as much in the weeks and months after the September 11 attacks, when he begged tourists to come back to Broadway not just for the shows but for the sake of the surrounding businesses.

The self-sufficient new Yankee Stadium, then, is both ammunition, in that it appears to provide another argument against sports teams in the battle for government funding, and a cautionary tale -- albeit maybe not for the Yankees, who have an annoying habit of getting whatever they want the instant they want it, and throwing a tantrum otherwise. But arts organizations have to tread more lightly. For them, the lesson is this: If, with the help of public dollars, you engineer things so that the rising tide helps only your boat, people might get the idea that their aid, next time, might better be directed elsewhere.

Comedy Writing with a Side of Sex

2009-10-28T17:29:19Z

Former "Late Night with David Letterman" writer Nell Scovell's excellent Vanity Fair piece about the show's hostile work environment is juicy reading, and illuminating, too. But it's worth mentioning that the point Scovell makes from the inside -- that "there are more females serving on the United States Supreme Court than there are writing for Late Show with David Letterman, The Jay Leno Show, and The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien combined" -- is one Nancy Franklin made nearly a month ago in The New Yorker:

Did a bomb go off and kill all the women comedy writers and leave the men standing? The other night on the Emmy Awards broadcast, the names of the nominees for best writing on a comedy or variety series were read, and, out of eighty-one people, only seven were women. Leno has no women writers on his show. Neither does David Letterman, and neither does Conan O'Brien. Come on.

Score another one for Franklin, who worked that eloquent little cri de coeur into her takedown of Leno's prime-time show, just as the Letterman extortion attempt was grabbing headlines.

One of the great things about scandals is their function as catalysts for evolution that's long overdue. Is it too much to hope that, in the wake of Letterman's sexual-harassment debacle, the comedy-writing clubhouse will go co-ed for good, and the behavior of those who toil there will become professional at last?

Sexual attraction is natural; it happens in every workplace. But adults are expected to have some impulse control, and funny people are grown-ups just like the rest of us. Feeling attracted doesn't have to mean acting on it, especially when acting on it is illegal. No one should have to compete sexually at work -- and that's exactly the dynamic that's set up for the entire staff when superiors and subordinates sleep together.

Separate but related is the trouble female comedy writers have getting in the door in the first place (and, as this week's headlines remind us, the trouble persists even in fields perceived as relatively female-friendly, like dance and independent film).

"I just want Dave to hire some qualified female writers and then treat them with respect," Scovell writes. "And that goes for Jay and Conan, too."

Comedy writing jobs are just that: jobs. This whole discussion is, at bottom, about the right to work, and to work unmolested, literally and figuratively. For most men, that's the status quo; they take it for granted, and they ought to. It shouldn't be any different for women -- but at the moment, it still is.

The Wild Rumpus

2009-10-12T01:37:50Z

My friend Tim keeps a spreadsheet listing the details of every concert he's been to since the early '80s -- or is it the late '70s? Either way, it's very "High Fidelity," but with an emphasis on the Grateful Dead that Nick Hornby's own spreadsheet probably wouldn't own up to.

When I find myself at a concert, it tends to be with Tim, and it tends to have been his idea. Likewise, when he finds himself at the theater, it's because it was my idea.

So there we were the other night at the Public, for a LAByrinth Barn Series reading of Padraic Lillis' "Lights Up on the Fade Out," when we spotted a woman in a fuchsia "Where the Wild Things Are" t-shirt, Maurice Sendak's characters swinging in a line across her chest.

I confess that I was not a huge fan of "Where the Wild Things Are" when I was small. It didn't take up residence in my heart until I was older, in high school, babysitting for Stephanie and Billy, my favorite little kids down the street. Once I'd roared my terrible roars, gnashed my terrible teeth, rolled my terrible eyes and shown my terrible claws along with a couple of spectacularly adorable moppets doing the same, I couldn't not love Sendak's book.

I almost wrote "Sendak's tale" there, but it truly isn't the tale as much as it is his telling of it, in words -- which repetition soldered into my memory decades ago -- and pictures.

So Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers' movie adaptation? Not so attractive to me. I feel about it the way I feel about the movie of "Atonement," which I haven't seen and won't see: I don't want a movie to mess with what's already in my head. If the Narnia movies had come out back when I was nine years old and as enraptured by the books as I was unaware of their Christian imagery, I wouldn't have wanted to see those, either.

And the Variety review of "Where the Wild Things Are" that just popped into my inbox? I don't even want to read that.

My militant opposition to the very idea of this movie is monstrously closed-minded, I know, and maybe intellectually inconsistent, too, given that I once owned a Max doll and a couple of Wild Thing dolls, and have been known to give Maxes and Wild Things (and the book, of course) as gifts to children in my life. But the dolls, three-dimensional though they are, are faithful to Sendak's drawings. The faces, the legs, the toes: The details are from his pen.

Still, at least the movie was made with Sendak's blessing. When Tim and I noticed the woman in the t-shirt the other night, he told me a story about a Dead show years ago, where he'd run across a guy selling "Let the wild rumpus begin" shirts. "It's 'start,'" Tim told him. "'Let the wild rumpus start.'" No, no, the guy insisted; it's "begin."

Sigh. People who trample on intellectual property: You just can't trust them with the details.

If nothing else, Jonze and Eggers will get that line right.

The Nobels' Biggest Surprise

2009-10-09T19:04:06Z

Let's just admit straight out that the Nobel people relish a surprise far more than the average world-renowned prize-granting organization does -- and far more, too, than do many of the interested parties they startle with their choices.

This year, as ever, the primary reaction to the naming of new laureates has been grumbling and snark. On NPR, 1986 laureate Elie Wiesel's initial response to President Obama's peace prize was graceless ("It's certainly strange for me to think of him now as my fellow Nobel laureate"), while in The Washington Post a "prominent editor and writer in New York" suggested that Herta Müller's win over authors like Philip Roth, Haruki Murakami and Salman Rushdie tarnishes the literature honor. "If the Nobel prize committee awarded the medicine prize like this, we'd still have polio," he grumped.

But Müller's victory is part of a happy trend this year: As AFP reports, this is the best year ever for female laureates. Of the 39 women who've won in the 109-year history of the prize, four won this week, three of them in science (take that, Larry Summers!). That's just north of 10 percent of all female recipients, and exactly 10 percent of the 40 Nobels ever bestowed on women, two of which went to Marie Curie (um, Larry?). Women make up 36 percent of this year's laureates, and prizes in three of the five categories go entirely or in part to women.

The stats on that matter -- not out of so-called political correctness but because of the widespread tendency to downgrade or dismiss women's work, whatever it happens to be, rather than take it as seriously as men's work is automatically taken. The brilliant Nancy Franklin expressed one tiny facet of that disparity this way recently in The New Yorker:

Chick lit [...] gets a lot less respect than the male equivalent, which people tend to approach as if it were automatically more artful, more written. Women write "thinly veiled accounts"; men write "romans à clef." Women writers may have a room of their own, but men who thrash around in front of the mirror and record their every failure, humiliation, moue, and excretion for an audience's consumption still own the house, even if all they do in it is lie on the couch--and then write about it.

It's not an even playing field, not in literature or elsewhere, so it's significant when women win. It's progress. Every victory is a reminder not only of what an individual woman has achieved, but of what other women can aspire to achieve. Being recognized on the world stage is no small thing; just ask Elie Wiesel and that bitter, nameless writer-editor. So if this is what a Nobel laureate looks like, good.

Update, Oct. 12: The numbers for women got even better today with a Nobel in economics for Elinor Ostrom, the first woman ever to win the economics prize. She shares the category with Oliver E. Williamson. So that's five women this year (12.5 percent of all female laureates, 38.5 percent of this year's winners), in four of six categories. Not bad. Not bad at all.

What Letterman Can Teach Nonprofits

2009-10-06T18:48:44Z

I'm not going to name names -- not of the artistic director, not of his theater. But a post on the Salon blog Broadsheet brought him to mind with this line: "Bosses who are hound-dogs taint the reputation of their women subordinates who don't sleep with them."

Broadsheet is talking about the David Letterman scandal, but the issue that quote raises applies to all bosses (male and female, gay and straight) and all workplaces. And although Letterman's production company is very much a for-profit enterprise, nonprofits would do well to take the talk-show host's forced confession as a wake-up call.

The artistic director I'm thinking of is well known (as is his theater), straight, married and given to hitting on any reasonably attractive woman in his vicinity who has less power than he has. Even in the touchy-feely world of theater, he does more pawing of the women on his staff -- especially, of course, the young ones -- than many of them find comfortable. The drain of female talent from his theater over the years has been striking and harmful. More striking is that apparently none of the women has sued him, or the theater, which does, after all, have an obligation to protect them in the workplace. (I am not optimistic that his board will stop his behavior anytime soon. When I covered him as a journalist, he once loudly announced a crush on me, then kissed me lingeringly on the lips right in front of one of his trustees, mere yards from where his wife stood unaware. I was frozen in horror. The board member didn't seem at all perturbed.)

The absence of employee lawsuits against that theater may or may not hold, but the current economic climate likely gives workplace predators like that artistic director -- and there are plenty of them -- even freer rein. What better time to prey on the staff than when they're fearing for their jobs?

Conversely, for boards, there's no better time to be vigilant, protecting the staff from unwelcome advances and protecting the institution from scandal, embarrassment, internal turmoil and the financial drain of legal payouts. Trustees need to ensure, too, even in this tough job market, that their institution can attract top talent: that good people aren't turning down positions there because of what they've heard about a boss with boundary problems.

Boards of arts organizations are often filled with people enamored of the notion of the artist and infatuated with the myth that bad behavior is inherently artistic behavior. The charisma that's so attractive in artistic leaders can also be used to charm trustees into overlooking sexual transgressions. Board types aren't always sure where the line is with creative types.

But there's nothing creatively healthy or normal about a hostile work environment in which subordinates, female or male, believe they have to submit to advances if they want to be successful. There is something, to use Letterman's term, creepy about that -- and, too, about a workplace in which superiors and subordinates are consensually involved, romantically or sexually. Whether the relationship ends well, badly or not at all, there's a perception of quid pro quo.

Which means the tainting of reputations for the talented and untalented alike. At an institution known for pervasive sexual harassment, staffers' rise through the ranks will be marred -- even if the boss never touched them, and especially if he did.

An Unethical Audience Member?

2009-09-06T14:05:59Z

In The New York Times Magazine today, The Ethicist answers an intriguing question from a Lincoln Center chorus singer: "Making disruptive noises at a concert is certainly rude, but if you are sitting close enough to distract the performers, does it rise to unethical?"

Mrs. Dollop and the Death Panels

2009-09-01T16:57:06Z

Doubtless, George Eliot would have a lot of catching up to do if she time-traveled to the early 21st-century United States, but "Middlemarch" suggests she'd grasp our health care debate, and its various distortions, almost instantly. In her fictional 1830s landscape, as now, there's hardly anything more threatening than a clever, good-looking young upstart who arrives on the scene and immediately starts fiddling with people's health care in the name of reform.

In "Middlemarch," the upstart is Tertius Lydgate, the head of the town's new hospital. With his foreign ideas about how medicine ought to be practiced (e.g., doctors steering clear of blatant conflicts of financial interest) and his determination to further the field with his own research, it's no wonder a segment of the population is certain he's out to kill them. That is precisely "the trenchant assertion of Mrs. Dollop, the landlady of the Tankard in Slaughter Lane."

Mrs. Dollop became more and more convinced by her own asseveration, that Doctor Lydgate meant to let the people die in the Hospital, if not to poison them, for the sake of cutting them up without saying by your leave or with your leave; for it was a known "fac" that he had wanted to cut up Mrs. Goby, as respectable a woman as any in Parley Street, who had money in trust before her marriage -- a poor tale for a doctor, who if he was good for anything should know what was the matter with you before you died, and not want to pry into your inside after you were gone. If that was not reason, Mrs. Dollop wished to know what was; but there was a prevalent feeling in her audience that her opinion was a bulwark, and that if it were overthrown there would be no limits to the cutting-up of bodies, as had been well seen in Burke and Hare with their pitch-plaisters -- such a hanging business as that was not wanted in Middlemarch!

As a note in the Modern Library edition of "Middlemarch" explains, William Burke and William Hare were "infamous criminals who murdered in order to sell the bodies for medical research. Burke was hanged for the crime, while Hare turned Crown witness."

The Arts Are 'a Little Gay'

2009-08-08T18:05:59Z

Good for NEA Chairman Rocco Landesman for calling out the homophobia that undergirds opposition to federal funding for the arts. "The arts are a little bit of a target. The subtext is that it is elitist, left wing, maybe even a little gay," he tells Robin Pogrebin in today's New York Times.

The straight-shooting Landesman won't earn many points for diplomacy in that interview, particularly with the ill-considered slap, "I don't know if there's a theater in Peoria, but I would bet that it's not as good as Steppenwolf or the Goodman." That remark is bound to alienate whole flocks of legislators as well as artists outside major cities. Nonetheless, the point he's trying to make about democratizing arts grants -- "I don't know that we have to be everywhere if the only reason for supporting an institution is its geography" -- is perfectly valid, and his new NEA slogan, "Art Works," is beautifully attuned to the zeitgeist.

Meanwhile, however debatable Richard Florida's "Creative Class" gospel may be, Landesman's tacit embrace of it with "a program that he called 'Our Town,' which would provide home equity loans and rent subsidies for living and working spaces to encourage artists to move to downtown areas," is something Congress surely can understand and perhaps even rally around.

It's a sharply different approach from that taken by Landesman's ostentatiously populist predecessor, Dana Gioia, who placated conservatives suspicious of contemporary art and artists by focusing on the classics (Shakespeare) and America's artistic heritage (jazz). Yet in taking that tack, Gioia might have made some lasting progress for the agency, whose natural opponents have been forced to concede, at least to a degree, that there is value to the arts. If Landesman, a Broadway producer, uses creative-class theory to hang a dollar sign on that value and explain the dividends investment in the arts would pay, he may be speaking lawmakers' language.

But back to the homophobia, about which Landesman is dead right. The idea that the arts are gay, and therefore dismissable, is closely related to another notion about the arts: that they are inherently girly. Leaving aside the abundant irony in that assumption, let's consider for a moment what John Stuart Mill -- a feminist way ahead of his time, who believed women should "have the power of gaining their own livelihood" -- had to say on the subject back in 1832: "The only difference between the employments of women and those of men will be, that those which partake most of the beautiful, or which require delicacy & taste rather than muscular exertion, will naturally fall to the share of women: all branches of the fine arts in particular."

In our perception of the arts, we haven't advanced terribly far from that mindset in the past 177 years. The arts are widely viewed as a milieu best suited to women, and to men with an affinity for beauty, delicacy and taste and an aversion to muscular exertion (read: gay -- and, no, I am not endorsing the stereotype, merely articulating it).

As a nation, we tend not to scrape together public funding if we believe it would benefit people like that. Unless, maybe, we can be convinced that it's in our economic interest to do so.

So let the culture-class argument begin.