Will Rocco Landesman bring changes to the NEA?

With poet Dana Gioia at the helm of the NEA, literature seemed to take a front seat. It was under his tenure that two major reports about the state of reading in America -- "Reading at Risk" and "To Read or Not To Read" --  were issued.

Can we expect the same attention to literary matters from Rocco Landesman? Landesman is the current nominee to head the NEA, and his background is very different from Gioia's. He's helped produce 15 Tony Award-winning plays and musicals, including “Angels in America” and “The Producers” and has taught in the theater department at Yale. What's more, Landesman is "devoted to baseball, country music and playing the ponies," according to our blog Culture Monster.

“He’s sort of fabledly impatient, and I think he will be a really interesting fighter for the arts,” says Steven Lavine, president of the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia and a member of the National Arts Policy Committee that advised Obama during his presidential campaign. “He’s seen as someone who’s willing to place big bets, who wants to accomplish something, and has this sense of not being very interested in business as usual.”

... Landesman, 61, arrives at a promising but difficult moment for the arts. Obama, in contrast to George W. Bush, who partially rebuilt the agency’s budget from a Clinton-era low, is seen in the arts community as a president who fully “gets it” when it comes to culture and creativity. But the nonprofit arts, which the NEA fosters via grants from a $155-million budget, have seen their private and public sustenance perilously diminished amid the economic downturn. So Landesman, who was not available to be interviewed for this article, arrives with heady expectations as a change agent but under straitened circumstances that could inhibit ambitious initiatives.

So maybe it's not just the future of literature at the NEA that's in question, but what kind of resources all the arts can hope for in this economic climate. Ever optimistic about the role of arts in our society, I'm deciding to hope for the best.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Landesman in 1995. Credit: Joe Tabacca / For The Times