MOLI VIEW™

Thanks, America. For the past 10 days I've been shuttling around Los Angeles watching plays, all on the taxpayers' dime. Believe me, I'm grateful. But in this uncertain economic climate, with people losing their homes to foreclosure and struggling to get decent health care, why's the National Endowment for the Arts shelling out for 25 theater critics from across the nation to get together and chatter about the state of American musical theater?

NEA chairman Dana Gioia has an apocalyptic vision. "If we don't support critics," he told us at a meeting at LA's Museum of Contemporary Art this week, "we will go from a culture that has a diversity of options to a culture that is — how shall I say it — stupid. Stupid commercial culture."

A celebrated poet and one-time VP of General Foods, Gioia is an uber-bureaucrat. He has a gift for making whoever he talks to feel he's on their side. Gioia took office when the NEA was in the toilet, so to speak, after controversies surrounding government-funded work by artists like Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano. In the past six years, he has built a bipartisan consensus on behalf of the agency and secured an astonishing increase in funding of $20.1 million in the current budget — the largest increase since 1979.

As Gioia sees it, "the problem in the US right now is not a shortage of the arts. The problem is that we're losing the audience." Arts education in public schools has been decimated. Mass media focuses on celebrity rather than creativity.

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