That's the reason support for the National Endowment of the Arts is so important. It enables those ventures that aren't viable commercially to be done.
Mr. Chairman, obviously a $60 million cut in the National Endowment for the Arts would be a disaster.
The arts need funding.
I'd clean house at the National Endowment for the Arts ... the place would be shut down, padlocked and fumigated.
Making a living in the arts, though, creates so many jobs for other people.
Just as a city cannot protect its manufacturing base without keeping its factories, we cannot have a strong arts sector without studios, rehearsal space, and performance venues.
Cincinnatians support a symphony, an opera, a ballet, museums, many galleries and theater groups.
When the subsidies are going out there to fund arts, I'd like to see jazz given a better shake of the dice. It attracts as many people as opera does, but not the subsidies.
When you have a community that's strong in the arts, it brings all sorts of attention and different businesses into the community.
Another turn in my life happened when I took on the Canada Council.
The arts are part of the fiber of American society and should get Federal support.
In government they learned their lesson. They don't trust artists anymore. Now the money has to go through arts organizations. But, yeah, back then you could get a grant, and I got $5,000 - a huge amount of money.
I'm going to do some consulting for nonprofits and arts agencies. These are areas I'm interested in that didn't come directly out of Harvard, but certainly I started looking at things in a different manner.
