Archives for February 2019

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, I look at an important new tendency in charitable giving. Here’s an excerpt.

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New York’s Museum of Modern Art closes for renovations in June. When the museum reopens on Oct. 21, it will have 30% more gallery space. The price tag for the expansion is $450 million, more than $200 million of which comes from the estate of David Rockefeller, MoMA’s most open-handed donor, who died in 2017 at the age of 101. To be sure, $200 million is chump change in the fantasyland of pop culture. (It cost $316 million to make “Avengers: Infinity War.”) But when it comes to the fine arts, that’s very serious money—the biggest single donation that MoMA has ever received.

From coast to coast, our national landscape is dotted with fine-arts institutions that exist because of people like Rockefeller….

Unfortunately, big-ticket philanthropy is in the middle of a protracted sea change that is already having a direct effect on the arts. Thirteen years ago, the Journal reported that younger new-money donors were increasingly choosing to give it not to fine-arts organizations but to humanitarian causes like AIDS research and education reform. In 2013, Bill Gates put his seal of moral approval on this new tendency by declaring in an interview with the Financial Times that donating money “to build a new wing for a museum rather than spend it on preventing illnesses that can lead to blindness” was, in his words, “slightly barbaric.”

When I wrote about Mr. Gates’ remarks in this space, I observed that I had yet to hear “any groundswell of support among the rich for Mr. Gates’ rigidly utilitarian view of charity.” Apparently I was a little tone-deaf. Nowadays, everybody in the arts is taking nervous note of what the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance described with alarm in a 2018 report called “Beyond the Check: A Roadmap for Engaging Individual Donors.” According to the GPCA, “younger donors” are “shifting away from arts and culture in their philanthropy.” Moreover, studies show that they’re less likely to make big-ticket gifts to any charitable cause—and when they do, such gifts are rarely arts-related….

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Read the whole thing here.

“Meg had spent the time in working as well as waiting, growing womanly in character, wise in housewifery arts, and prettier than ever; for love is a great beautifier.”

Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

Bishop Fulton J. Sheen appears as the mystery guest on What’s My Line? John Daly is the host and the panelists are Bennett Cerf, Arlene Francis, Dorothy Kilgallen, David Niven. This episode was originally telecast by CBS on October 21, 1956. At this time, Bishop Sheen was appearing on ABC in a highly rated weekly TV series called Life Is Worth Living:

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“For the majority of English people there are only two religions, Roman Catholic, which is wrong, and the rest, which don’t matter.”

Duff Cooper, Old Men Forget

From 2009:

Many years ago I worked as a teller in a downtown Kansas City bank, a job that allowed me to pay the rent while simultaneously playing jazz and writing concert reviews for the Kansas City Star on the side. It was one of the most painful experiences of my life, and the only thing that made it tolerable was that for some inexplicable reason, the people whom I knew in my “real” life as a writer and musician almost never came into the bank to do business. Had they done so, it would have broken my heart….

Read the whole thing here.

“It requires moral courage to grieve; it requires religious courage to rejoice.”

Søren Kierkegaard, journal entry, July 19, 1840

I went to see a play in Rhode Island last Monday. I’d planned to bring Mrs. T with me, but she was under the weather when the time came to hit the road, so I ended up going by myself, leaving early enough to dine before the show at a restaurant directly across the street from the theater. I know how to eat alone—I brought a book—but it isn’t any fun, and I suspect my waitress sensed that I was both lonely and a bit blue, because she was unusually kind and considerate to me. When I got home, I decided to send her a thank-you note. It took me a minute and a half to track her down on Facebook, and within an hour I’d heard back from her. Sure enough, she proved to be as friendly as I’d thought. For me, this isn’t all that unusual a story: I “met” several of my best friends on Twitter before getting to know them in person. But it also reminded me of the many doubts I continue to harbor about the digitally connected world into which I’ve survived.

I’ve been something of a public figure ever since I started writing about classical music for the Kansas City Star when I was an undergraduate, so I’ve had plenty of time to get used to the exigencies of living out loud. When I started blogging a decade and a half ago, I took for granted that it would be essential to draw a bright line between the things I talked about on line and the things I kept to myself. I observed the same precaution when, later on, I started using Twitter and Facebook. The “Terry Teachout” who blogs and tweets each day is a partial portrait of the real me, true as far as it goes but in no way the whole story of who I am and what I think.

Many of my millennial friends, by contrast, seem not to draw that distinction. They disclose themselves on line to a degree that I find startling. I wonder whether they’ll come to regret this openness later on in life. Perhaps not: it may well be that they no longer have any expectation of privacy, and so cannot imagine having any inviolable secrets. Perhaps they’re wise to accept our brave new world of total accessibility as it is.

Perhaps—but I doubt it, just as I doubt that the ubiquity of smartphones is a good thing for the human race. So did Oliver Sacks, who wrote an essay that was posthumously published in The New Yorker the other day in which he expressed grave reservations about the way we live now:

Everything is public now, potentially: one’s thoughts, one’s photos, one’s movements, one’s purchases. There is no privacy and apparently little desire for it in a world devoted to non-stop use of social media. Every minute, every second, has to be spent with one’s device clutched in one’s hand. Those trapped in this virtual world are never alone, never able to concentrate and appreciate in their own way, silently. They have given up, to a great extent, the amenities and achievements of civilization: solitude and leisure, the sanction to be oneself, truly absorbed, whether in contemplating a work of art, a scientific theory, a sunset, or the face of one’s beloved….
 
A few years ago, I was invited to join a panel discussion about information and communication in the twenty-first century. One of the panelists, an Internet pioneer, said proudly that his young daughter surfed the Web twelve hours a day and had access to a breadth and range of information that no one from a previous generation could have imagined. I asked whether she had read any of Jane Austen’s novels, or any classic novel. When he said that she hadn’t, I wondered aloud whether she would then have a solid understanding of human nature or of society, and suggested that while she might be stocked with wide-ranging information, that was different from knowledge. Half the audience cheered; the other half booed.

I feel the same way, which is why I don’t have a smartphone. What’s more, I know that my ability to concentrate—to cut myself free from what I once called in this space the tentacles of dailiness—has been diminished by my use of Twitter and Facebook. Josef Pieper said it: “Leisure is a form of that stillness that is the necessary preparation for accepting reality; only the person who is still can hear, and whoever is not still, cannot hear.” To be on line is the opposite of being still.

As for the very nice waitress who took such good care of me last week, she seemed not at all surprised to find me popping up on Facebook, thanking her for her kindness and wishing her well. She’s young enough to be accustomed to such things, and nice enough (or naïve enough) to take it for granted that I’m not a stalker trolling for fresh prey. Nor am I a Luddite or a Pinfoldite, bristling reflexively at the mere thought of newness: I welcome the miraculous power of the social media to enable such impromptu gestures of genuine gratitude.

I am, however, old enough to have a fully matured appreciation of the Law of Unintended Consequences, and I’m similarly appreciative of the Spanish benediction that one of Patrick O’Brian’s fictional characters cites with approval: “May no new thing arise.” It’s good advice—except when it isn’t. The trick, ever and always, is to have the wisdom to know the difference.

Sir Thomas Beecham is interviewed by Peter Brook on the BBC. This interview was filmed in London on October 30, 1958: 

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)