Neighbor blogger Judith H. Dobrzynski flagged (for me anyway) the first indication that the Obama administration has selected an arts policy liaison to join his staff, in the form of Chicago lawyer Kareem Dale. I hadn’t seen last week’s short and cryptic article in the New York Times that conveyed the decision. Said the Times:
The White House declined to describe the position in detail, since Mr. Dale’s appointment has yet to be formally announced. Mr. Ivey, a former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, said he expected that the job would mainly involve coordinating the activities of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute of Museum and Library Services ”in relation to White House objectives.”
According to the article, Ivey was scheduled to meet with Dale this week.
Last month, Vice President Biden announced Mr. Dale as special assistant to the president for disability policy. The White House release on the subject, however, suggested his work would be ”focused exclusively on disability policy.” A claim the alternate policy task makes untrue.
There’s very little else to report on the subject. Just seemed worth a Google news feed, to track how the story evolves.
“the job would mainly involve coordinating the activities of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute of Museum and Library Services ”
Does it seem odd to anyone else that the NEA isn’t in this sentence?
It doesn’t seem fair to me to split this man’s job between such disparate universes. Wouldn’t it better to have one official solely working with the arts world and another solely working with disability issues? I read part of an article titled “The Creativity Stimulus” (http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090504/chang?rel=hp_picks) that suggests that the fact that President Obama appointed an arts and culture liasion indicates a move away from culture wars to more involvement in the arts. Perhaps this is the case, but I would still argue that there should be a separate arts-only liasion to the president.