What Is the Greatest Contribution We Can Make?

Posted by on June 13, 2006

I have been belatedly reading transcripts from the Creative New York Conference held in April. Panelists were unusually impressive (Judith Rodin, Barry Diller, Ann Moore, Clive Gillinson, Michael Bloomberg, Bill T. Jones, Glenn Lowry, Terry Lundren and more). But several things struck me as I read.

After much fawning over New York as the center of the arts universe, a number of panelists, particularly Barry Diller and Glenn Lowry, questioned whether New York can remain the communications and arts capital. Diller said, "With Google in Palo Alto, and with the Internet and the changing world from everything that is analog to digital, -- our period's industrial revolution -- I think that New York's ability to remain the communications capital is really questionable." MOMA Director Glenn Lowry pointed out that "the artists that make New York go come from Latin America, Asia, Canada, Africa... they come from every part of the world, and they'll be just as at home in Shanghai as they are in New York if that becomes a more attractive city for their practice."

Fernando Espuelas, chairman and CEO of Voy, an integrated media company focused on the English-speaking Hispanic market, also complained that the default answer to a deal in New York is "no." "I now live half my time in LA beccause I found that I was just exhausted from talking about something that didn't exist and having blank faces. In LA, as you know because of the culture there now, you show up and say, 'I have an idea, an idea of two gay cowboys,' and people go, wow, can I give you $50 million dollars? And, you know, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't work, but that opening is there and it's there as a default. What I've found is that the default, unfortunately, in our city [New York] is a door closed, and it takes a long time and a lot of energy to break that door down."

Lowry also delivered an impassioned plea for arts donors to invest in programming rather than simply capital projects. "Let me be very clear [about the flaw in London's creative city strategy]. All of those organizations and all of those buildings that were created as part of the millennium drive, if you go into them today, they're shabby. They're struggling to put programs on, they're struggling to keep up. So what do they do? They create 'friends of' in the U.S. and they come poaching over here."

Clive Gillinson, the still relatively new executive and artistic director of Carnegie Hall, challenged artists and arts administrators to rethink their objectives. "All of us will come to the right answers if instead of asking what's best for us, we actually say, what is best for, in our case, music? What is the greatest contribuiton we can make to music? And what is the greatest contribution, through music, we can make to the society in which we live." Most of us, he said, aren't asking the right question.

One more interesting item: Many panelists lauded Mayor Bloomberg's focus on neighborhoods beyond Manhattan and the renaissance that has occurred throughout the boroughs.