There are actually talented conservative arts administrators with actual business experience, and they start with the built-in advantage that conservative art is popular, fun, and enjoyable, as opposed to woke art which is ugly, boring and stupid:
There are actually talented conservative arts administrators with actual business experience, and they start with the built-in advantage that conservative art is popular, fun, and enjoyable, as opposed to woke art which is ugly, boring and stupid:
"Created in 1965 as part of Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society program, the NEA was regularly targeted by some Republicans in Congress as a waste of taxpayer money. The lawmakers often used examples of NEA-funded art or cultural programs that might be likely to anger religious conservatives to drum up outrage. By the time Gioia took over, the NEA’s annual budget had dropped from $176 million in 1992 to just $98 million.
Under Gioia’s leadership, the NEAhas implemented several new initiatives that seem to have escaped criticism. There was the 2003 “Shakespeare in America” tour in which four works by the playwright were staged in a pair of communities in each of the 50 states. A program that brought opera performances to U.S. military bases was another success, and Gioia scored somewhat of a personal triumph with Poetry Out Loud, a national poetry recitation competition. In 2006, President Bush reap-pointed him to another term as NEA, a decision confirmed by unanimous vote in the Senate.
By then Gioia had personally met with most of the Senate and the House. For meetings with the latter lawmakers, he brought with him a list of high schools in their district that used educational materials purchased with NEA grants in order to illustrate what kind of work his agency does. In a 2007 interview with New York Times journalist Patricia R. Olsen, he likened his NEA job to the period of his corporate career when he managed the Jello-O brand and came up with JellO Jigglers after months of trying out various recipes the company had collected over the years."
"My original plan was to go to graduate school in English. I was a state finalist for the Rhodes and Marshall, and other fellowships. For the Danforth Fellowship, a senior Yale administrator called me into her office and told me I would have won but they had “decided that people with my politics shouldn’t become academics.” And that was with me being moderate in politics — I was a Gerald Ford Republican then. So I decided not to beat my head against the wall, and went into law and government. The bias in top academic institutions was very bad in the 70s, but it’s only gotten worse.
It’s not that there’s uniformity in the poetry community, it’s that there’s uniformity in the hierarchy. If you ask me to name somebody in the conservative poetry community who holds an academic appointment, maybe I could come up with a person, maybe. If you say, are there some terrific poets out there whose politics are conservative, I could name many. But they keep a low profile because to be conservative and a poet greatly limits the places you can get published."
There are actually talented conservative arts administrators with actual business experience, and they start with the built-in advantage that conservative art is popular, fun, and enjoyable, as opposed to woke art which is ugly, boring and stupid:
https://www.encyclopedia.com/journals/culture-magazines/gioia-dana
"Created in 1965 as part of Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society program, the NEA was regularly targeted by some Republicans in Congress as a waste of taxpayer money. The lawmakers often used examples of NEA-funded art or cultural programs that might be likely to anger religious conservatives to drum up outrage. By the time Gioia took over, the NEA’s annual budget had dropped from $176 million in 1992 to just $98 million.
Under Gioia’s leadership, the NEAhas implemented several new initiatives that seem to have escaped criticism. There was the 2003 “Shakespeare in America” tour in which four works by the playwright were staged in a pair of communities in each of the 50 states. A program that brought opera performances to U.S. military bases was another success, and Gioia scored somewhat of a personal triumph with Poetry Out Loud, a national poetry recitation competition. In 2006, President Bush reap-pointed him to another term as NEA, a decision confirmed by unanimous vote in the Senate.
By then Gioia had personally met with most of the Senate and the House. For meetings with the latter lawmakers, he brought with him a list of high schools in their district that used educational materials purchased with NEA grants in order to illustrate what kind of work his agency does. In a 2007 interview with New York Times journalist Patricia R. Olsen, he likened his NEA job to the period of his corporate career when he managed the Jello-O brand and came up with JellO Jigglers after months of trying out various recipes the company had collected over the years."
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/poetry/politics-gets-hand-turn-poem
"My original plan was to go to graduate school in English. I was a state finalist for the Rhodes and Marshall, and other fellowships. For the Danforth Fellowship, a senior Yale administrator called me into her office and told me I would have won but they had “decided that people with my politics shouldn’t become academics.” And that was with me being moderate in politics — I was a Gerald Ford Republican then. So I decided not to beat my head against the wall, and went into law and government. The bias in top academic institutions was very bad in the 70s, but it’s only gotten worse.
It’s not that there’s uniformity in the poetry community, it’s that there’s uniformity in the hierarchy. If you ask me to name somebody in the conservative poetry community who holds an academic appointment, maybe I could come up with a person, maybe. If you say, are there some terrific poets out there whose politics are conservative, I could name many. But they keep a low profile because to be conservative and a poet greatly limits the places you can get published."