Nice piece by Jed Perl at TNR on an issue I've been thinking about for some time, President Obama and culture.
As Perl notes, Obama actually mentioned the word "culture" in a recent Meet the Press appearance, signaling to wine-trackers everywhere that he actually gives occasional thought to things like literature and art. We haven't had a president willing to associate himself with high art since Kennedy. Perl:
Tom Wicker commented that [Kennedy] "did not seem to suffer from a great personal involvement in drama, music, art." Be that as it may, it was no small thing to hear Robert Frost at the inauguration, to know that Mark Rothko and Franz Kline had been invited to attend, and to be able to go to your local record store and buy the LP of a recital that Pablo Casals had given at the White House. JFK must have understood that in a democratic society the popular arts can pretty much take care of themselves. It was high art--the art that is by its very nature less commercial--that needed a helping hand in the 1960s. This is all the more true today.
Of course, Kennedy governed during an era of a far less atomized culture. In 1960, everyone read Life magazine and watched Ed Sullivan, and Life magazine would run large feature articles on, say, Robert Rauschenberg or Frank Stella, and Ed Sullivan would feature Maria Callas singing Si, Mi Chiamano Mimi, or whatever. So regular Americans got these little doses of high culture on a pretty regular basis. That just doesn't happen now because there are no more common-denominator, nearly-universal, Life-Sullivan-esque media.
I would love to see Obama, say, go to a show at the National Gallery or the Met, with the wife and girls in tow. Just that one act would reinvigorate belief in the arts as something useful and beneficial. Of course, he should probably go to a few football games first to cover his bases. But having a president who wasn't afraid to say to the American people, "this stuff is good and interesting and enjoyable, and it isn't elitist or snooty" would be amazing.
And pace my headline, perhaps he could persuade us all to celebrate the masterworks of the great composer Arthur "Two Sheds" Jackson.
