Author: Wirtz, W. Willard

Publication Year: 1964

Media Type: Report

Summary:

What a week this has been in Washington - a whirling collage of culture and current events, poets and politics, patrons and performing artists, astronauts and architects. This is the week, surely, of the ultimate fulfillment of Jacques Barzun's apostrophe, in The House of Intellect on conferences: Take, he said, at any instant, a census of the great talents of the world and you will find a large portion preparing, attending or recovering from a conference.

Abstract:

What a week this has been in Washington - a whirling collage of culture and current events, poets and politics, patrons and performing artists, astronauts and architects. This is the week, surely, of the ultimate fulfillment of Jacques Barzun's apostrophe, in The House of Intellect on conferences: Take, he said, at any instant, a census of the great talents of the world and you will find a large portion preparing, attending or recovering from a conference.

While you of the Arts Councils of America and the American Symphony Orchestra League conferred here at the hotel, members of the Senate and the House conferred on Capitol Hill. To the politics of consensus is added now the politics of conference; for between you there was established, forty-eight hours after your convening, the principle for the performing arts of presentation without taxation.

Yet, here you are, another twenty speeches later, on Saturday night still at it. An appropriate treatment, at this point, of the subject of labor and the arts, on which you invited me to speak, would be - with Beethoven's consent - a rendition of The Moonlight Sonata.

Earlier good sense would have prompted my declining the compliment of your invitation, for I can command at best only half of my subject. It is one thing, in the developing dialogue between the arts and the administration, that creeping poetic license should extend to include foreign policy, but it is quite another to invite to a convocation of patrons of the performing arts one who cannot sing the national anthem, who whistles (my family tells me privately) a half-tone flat, who doodles and can't see the difference between his product and Picasso's or op art. There is, in short, no more excuse for my being here tonight than there would be for Jack Benny playing a violin concerto with a world renowned symphony orchestra. (p. 40-45)

Arts & Intersections:

Categories: Organizational Planning