I noticed a brief post by Robin Pogrebin in yesterday’s New York Times reporting that President Obama has created a White House position “to oversee arts and culture.” The President has selected Kareem Dale (“a lawyer who last month was named special assistant to the President for disability policy”) for the job. Dale previously worked for Senator Obama on arts policy, and former NEA Chairman Bill Ivey is quoted as saying that this is “a big step forward in terms of connecting cultural and government [sic] with mainstream administration policy.” Ivey noted that Dale’s position would “mainly involve coordinating the activities of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute of Museum and Library Services ‘in relation to White House objectives.’” Ivey made the point that in previous administrations this function was usually housed in office of the First Lady.
It is hard to know exactly what the administration intends by this move. The arts community has devoted a lot of time in recent weeks to lobbying for the creation of some sort of “arts czar” in the Executive Office, and this would appear to be the Obama response. There have been failed efforts to create a mechanism for coordination across the cultural agencies ever since NEH and NEA were established in 1965. We’ll have to see what the current agenda is, and whether there are distinctive policies for cultural policy. Bill Ivey was in charge of the transition process for three agencies (NEA, NEH and IMLS) for the transition, and he appears to think these are the agencies that will come under the jurisdiction of Mr. Dale. But of course there are other federal agencies with important cultural functions — certainly the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution, the National Publications and Records Commission, to name only a few. If President Obama were genuinely to develop and implement a broad cultural policy for all the federal cultural programs, he could accomplish something quite unusual and important. We’ll have to see how this develops, and what sorts of relationships the new heads of the Endowments develop with Dale and the White House.
For the moment, however, culture is doing well in terms of appropriations. President Obama signed the Omnibus Spending Bill into law last Wednesday. Each of the cultural agencies got a significant boost in its funding: NEH and NEA got $10-million increases, the NHPRC $1.75-million. the Smithsonian $48.7-million, the Teaching American History program (Dept. of Education) $1-million — and of course the arts earlier received $50-million in the Stimulus Bill. This is a vote of confidence in the cultural agencies of a kind that we have not seen for a good many years. It will be interesting to see what we can do with the funds.
