Arts Advocacy Day revisited

When it took place about six weeks ago, Arts Advocacy Day may not have registered with all the people for whom a job and a home have suddenly become unattainable needs. 

In fact, the annual event co-organized by Americans for the Arts may not have registered with anyone much at all outside the national arts community, because so many Americans still regard expressive pursuits as frivolous, elitist self-indulgences unrelated to a normal life.  And they are so wrong.

I hope some of them will take a few minutes to learn how essential the arts, and creativity in general, are to the healthy mental and emotional development of children, to the mastering of brain skills none of us can live or work without, to culturally and thus economically vital communities, and to the formation of strong and lasting personal bonds.

I hope they’ll listen to the testimony of artists such as Wynton Marsalis and Linda Ronstadt and find out what music gave them as children and as adults. (Cleveland, Ohio, readers will be especially interested in Marsalis’s story about the late Bob Bergman, who used to be the director of the Cleveland Museum of Art and who taught Marsalis how to think about, and look at, images.) With their art, they have earned livings, won fame, enriched lives and have since invested their skills and knowledge in helping others benefit as they did when their families sang together or because someone handed them an old guitar to play with. 

That kind of gift can’t be left to luck. It has to be offered to all as part of a standard education and a normal community life, or Americans will become less than we can be – a people of stunted imagination, limited ability and small heart.