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    In Detroit, an Opera Leader Finishes With One Last Triumph

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    After Yuval Sharon became the artistic director of Michigan Opera Theater in 2020, the company renamed itself the Detroit Opera — perhaps the most visible among moves that have led to a remarkable streak of successes based on a new, ambitious approach.The house has placed itself at the center of operatic conversation with productions like a drive-through “Götterdämmerung” and a virtual-reality “Walküre.” It has broken fund-raising records, drawn first-time ticket buyers by the thousands and collaborated more with companies elsewhere. Robert O’Hara’s staging of Anthony Davis’s “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X” at the Metropolitan Opera last November, for instance, began life a year and a half earlier in Michigan; the Met asked Detroit if it could join the production, not the other way around.Sharon receives most of the plaudits for the rise in Detroit’s fortunes, but little of its advance would have been possible without the courage and acumen of Wayne Brown. One of the few Black leaders in the field, Brown served as the Detroit Opera’s president and chief executive from 2014 until he retired at the end of 2023.“Wayne has always been wonderful to deal with,” said Peter Gelb, the general manager of the Met. “One doesn’t think necessarily of Detroit as a center of opera production or creativity, but by hiring Yuval he has accomplished that. He has changed that impression of Detroit.”From left, Ethan Davidson, Yuval Sharon and Brown onstage at the Detroit Opera House.Austin Richey/Detroit OperaBrown, 75, is a veteran executive with almost half a century of varied experience, from stints at regional symphony orchestras to a spell from 1997 to 2014 as the director of music and opera at the National Endowment for the Arts. Even upon his retirement, his enthusiasm for the process of putting on a show remains infectious.“The fascination is about making sure that those connections can be made,” Brown said. “It’s not just about transaction; it’s about, how does one find that sweet spot where the art and the audiences align?”Brown is widely admired in the field for being a leader different from the norm, and one reluctant to take the spotlight for himself.“He’s been a uniter of people,” said Deborah Borda, the former head of the New York and Los Angeles Philharmonics, who has known Brown since the 1970s. “He has a very quiet strength. He has a kind word for all, which is quite unusual in our business. I think he’s regarded as somewhat Solomonic.”Davóne Tines, the bass-baritone who served as an artist in residence at the Detroit Opera in 2021 and 2022, said that Brown’s support for creativity was an example, especially as “a young Black creator whose career began in arts administration.”“Someone in the position of the C.E.O. or the top executive of an opera company, you may have presuppositions about what that sort of person might be,” Tines said. “He’s a man of incredible gravity and conducts himself with a dignity that’s very inspiring. It’s wonderful to see that balance with how genuinely curious he is.”Davóne Tines, front center, in the title role of “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X” at Detroit Opera in 2022.Micah Shumake/Detroit OperaBrown’s musical life began with learning the violin in fourth grade, and later the cello. As an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, he joined the men’s glee club, and was its president. “Increasingly, it became not just performance” that mattered, he said, “but performance with context, the whole notion of making it work.”Shortly before Brown graduated from college, the dean of the music school asked if he would be interested in a job with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, which was looking for an assistant administrator. “I said sure,” he recalled. “I mean, I didn’t know what it was.” He was quickly promoted to assistant manager, and embarked on a career working for orchestras that later included tenures as executive director of the Springfield Symphony Orchestra in Massachusetts and, for a decade, the Louisville Orchestra.Brown also briefly worked as a producer for the Cultural Olympiad that took place during the Olympic Games in Atlanta in 1996, a remit that included jazz, opera, chamber music and more. “Those were interesting opportunities,” he said, smiling.Borda recalled the tact with which Brown later convened the expert panels that advised the National Endowment for the Arts on its grants. “You had to go to Washington, D.C., for four days, you had to review literally a hundred applications, and listen to them, to do a good job,” she said. Brown made a burdensome process more meaningful. “When Wayne was there, I think he asked me almost every year, and I would go. After Wayne, I didn’t do it anymore.”Brown speaks fondly of the opportunity for public service that the N.E.A. afforded him, and he took useful lessons from the opportunity it gave him to see the field as a whole. “You can’t necessarily apply a scenario that’s taking place in one community to another,” he said. “Innovation is a relative term. Something can be innovative but be perceived as just a marginal difference in a larger setting.”At Detroit Opera, Brown said, “We wanted to make sure that we could convey a message of openness, inclusiveness, and a level of engagement.”Nick Hagen for The New York TimesContext certainly counted in Brown’s decision to return to Detroit to run Michigan Opera Theater in 2014. Going back to the city where his career had begun, Brown was determined to secure what the downtown house’s longtime leader, David DiChiera, had achieved after founding the company in 1971, four years after the 1967 race riots in the city.“If I could play a role in a place that I cared about, a place that inspired me, I could not imagine at the time any other role that would have been of interest,” Brown said. “We wanted to make sure that we could convey a message of openness, inclusiveness, and a level of engagement.”Marc Scorca, the president of Opera America, believes that Brown was the ideal person to manage the house’s transformation after DiChiera’s retirement. “It was Wayne’s extraordinary diplomacy that enabled that transition to happen with respect and dignity,” Scorca said.Hiring Sharon in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic was something of a tribute to the theater’s founding mission. DiChiera, Brown said, “had an interest in making sure that what was taking place in Detroit could resonate broadly.” Yet the theater was nothing if it was not rooted in its city.Sharon entered the job promising not only to make the house the most progressive in America, but also to embed it still more deeply in its community, even asking that it change its name when he arrived. Brown urged restraint, so that they could do the patient work necessary to build consensus.“My approach was very impulsive,” Sharon said. “Wayne’s more analytic and thoughtful approach, and his calm way of thinking through these things, made it so that when we ultimately took the vote on it, it had complete board support.”“I really saw the value,” Sharon added, “of what it means to not necessarily go into things like a bull in a china shop.”Sharon singled out the co-production of “X” as Brown’s other major achievement during their time working together in Michigan. “It really was so out of the realm of what the company has ever done in terms of its scale,” Sharon said. Almost half of the sold-out crowd that attended the run in Detroit was visiting the company for the first time.“The art form spans centuries; it’s not stopping,” Brown said of opera. “It’s about moving forward and being bold about it, and there’s no better time to do so than now.” More

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      Terence Blanchard, Pushing Jazz Forward From a New Perch

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      The trumpeter and composer follows the premiere of two Met operas with an appointment as executive artistic director of SFJazz in San Francisco and a Jazz Masters honor.Two big announcements came down recently about the trumpeter and composer Terence Blanchard — both monumental, neither one a surprise.In June, the National Endowment for the Arts announced that Blanchard, 61, would receive a 2024 Jazz Masters fellowship, the highest lifetime-achievement honor available to a United States-based improviser.Then a month later, as if a reminder that this lifetime still has a few major chapters ahead, the nonprofit organization and performance center SFJazz named Blanchard its executive artistic director. Hardly any other musician has so solid a grasp on the scope of what’s going on in jazz today — and no institution is as committed to reflecting, even goading, its growth.A six-time Grammy winner, Blanchard possesses one of the most commanding and slippery trumpet styles in jazz, and for almost a decade he has led one of its most reliable ensembles, the E-Collective, full of musicians a couple of decades his junior. He has written and recorded over 40 film scores, including for most of Spike Lee’s movies. Despite being a conservatory dropout himself, he has become a leading educator, helping shape programs at U.C.L.A., the University of Miami and the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz. And in recent years, he has made headlines for the back-to-back Met premieres of his two operas, “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” and “Champion.”All of which makes for relevant job training for the new role. “The thing that I’ve always loved about SFJazz is that they don’t treat the music like it’s a fossil,” Blanchard said in a phone interview. “It’s a living, breathing, ongoing thing. And they respect young artists who are bringing something different to the table.”Blanchard is taking the reins directly from SFJazz’s founder, Randall Kline, who has run the organization since it started in 1982, always with a passion for what’s next. “I remember thinking how much I love that dude,” Blanchard said. “He was just a serious music lover who happened to be a promoter.”Blanchard onstage at the SFJazz Gala in June 2022.Drew Altizer PhotographySFJazz began as a jazz festival and traveling presenter around San Francisco. It convened a house ensemble of all-star musicians, the SFJazz Collective, in 2004, and opened the $64 million, state-of-the-art SFJazz Center in 2013. This week, Blanchard and Kline will both be at the kickoff for the center’s 2023-24 season, the last booked by Kline.SFJazz’s board chair, Denise Young, who led the search for Kline’s replacement, said Blanchard stood out because he “had a vision that matched what we believed was important to this music in these times.”Blanchard will relish the chance to pick up on one of Kline’s pet obsessions: bringing new technologies to the SFJazz stage. And as a musician who consistently uses his platform to speak about social issues — recording music with Cornel West, dedicating an album to the memory of Eric Garner, putting narratives of Black queer life into song — he’s also eager to confront questions of unequal access in a city where inequality continues to balloon.He’d like to keep SFJazz high-tech, but low-barrier when it comes to entry. To promote “outreach into the community,” he said, he envisions a matinee concert program directed at students in local high schools, and a series of traveling shows that might bring SFJazz-level talent into some of the Bay Area’s more neglected neighborhoods.Last week Blanchard stole an hour for an interview from his new office there. The building buzzed around him as the team prepared for the season launch, and by the end of the call an assistant was hovering, waiting to whisk him away to a donor meeting.Born and raised in New Orleans, Blanchard broke out on the New York scene in the early 1980s — the so-called Young Lions era, when many were longing for a return to the halcyon sounds of midcentury jazz. In 1982, he joined Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, taking over the trumpet chair from Wynton Marsalis, his childhood friend. Then he followed Marsalis onto the roster of Columbia Records, where he recorded a series of straight-ahead albums with a quintet he and Donald Harrison led.While Marsalis doubled down on Neo-Classicism, founding and directing Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York as a beacon of tradition, Blanchard has veered toward the cutting edge. With his E-Collective, he has emulated Blakey in one crucial way: His side-musicians are all significantly younger. On other fronts, Blakey wouldn’t recognize much of that quintet’s tool kit: the electronic effects, the hip-hop backbeats, the swatches of distorted guitar and electric bass.So there’s something poetic about seeing Blanchard — the Young Lion-turned-innovator — land at SFJazz, which has long been positioned as a kind of left-coast alternative to Marsalis’s JALC. “The idea was eclecticism: Don’t fly the flag of one thing,” Kline said in an interview. “San Francisco at the time had all these amazing scenes going: There was an Asian American jazz scene, there was this kind of trad-jazz scene, there was this hard-core avant-garde thing going, there was Brazilian music and Afro Cuban music.”To the extent that SFJazz has developed a winning formula, Kline said, “it’s been a formula around being open.”That conviction came in handy when Blanchard was invited to SFJazz in the mid-2010s for a series of artist residencies. He had recently composed “Champion,” which tells the tragic story of the world champion boxer Emile Griffith, and an opera company in San Francisco was hoping to stage it. The center had never done an opera before, and sure, this wasn’t exactly “jazz,” but it was just the kind of ambitious project that the center was built to handle.“The thing that I’ve always loved about SFJazz is that they don’t treat the music like it’s a fossil,” Blanchard said. “It’s a living, breathing, ongoing thing. And they respect young artists who are bringing something different to the table.”Ike Edeani for The New York Times“It fit so perfectly with our programming aesthetic, and also getting creative around the space,” Kline said. “It was just as good as it gets.”When Blanchard had first been approached about an opera commission in the early 2010s, he was thrilled. His father had sung opera, and he had grown up hearing Puccini and Verdi in the house, along with the sounds of jazz and Black popular music. But he wasn’t sure where to begin.So he did what he’d done at so many inflection points throughout his career: He went to his teacher, Roger Dickerson, a now 89-year-old composer and pianist and a New Orleans music giant in his own right, who had helped Blanchard write his first large-scale compositions.“He told me, ‘Stop thinking about writing an opera, just tell a story,’” Blanchard remembered. “That was extremely helpful for me, because then I wasn’t trying to live up to something.”“Tell your story” is, of course, a catchphrase among jazz musicians. But partly thanks to his work with Dickerson, Blanchard has developed a special aptitude for using music to narrate ideas and convictions — which swiftly moves listeners past any fixation on genre. Dickerson also thinks of it as a reminder that complexity, nuance and misdirection don’t have to dilute narrative drive — or even relatability — but can in fact enhance a story line.“He could pick up on little things that I would show him, and very quickly discover the inside meaning of it. That is, make it his own,” Dickerson said in an interview, remembering Blanchard’s interpretive skills even at age 16. That ideal — learn the fundamentals, and then make something undeniably yours — is something that Blanchard has passed on to his own students.Ambrose Akinmusire, who studied with Blanchard in the 2000s, remembered him stopping class whenever he heard students making direct references to old jazz tropes. “We don’t do that here,” he recalled him saying.On the flip side, Blanchard remembers having to convince the cast of “Fire” that they should draw upon their whole musical lexicon. “I’m listening to them warm up, and I’m realizing a lot of those singers grew up in the church, sang gospel, some of them were jazz singers — but they were all taught to throw that away when you sing opera,” he said.“I said, ‘Listen man, bring all of that back to your performance. This is a current story, so hearing gospel in the middle of this is no problem. Hearing you sing a blues phrase, because you’re a jazz musician, is no problem. And, man, I can’t tell you the type of performances we got out of people.” More

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      Slide Hampton, Celebrated Trombonist, Composer and Arranger, Dies at 89

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      He began playing professionally as a child, worked with some of jazz’s biggest names in the late 1950s, and remained a leading figure in the music for the next 60 years.Slide Hampton, a jazz trombonist, composer and arranger who arrived on the scene at the end of the bebop era and remained in demand for decades afterward, was found dead on Saturday at his home in Orange, N.J. He was 89.His grandson Richard Hampton confirmed the death.Mr. Hampton made his name in the late 1950s with bands led by Dizzy Gillespie, Maynard Ferguson and others. He was considered a triple threat — not just a virtuoso trombonist but also the creator of memorable compositions and arrangements.He won Grammy Awards for his arrangements in 1998 and in 2005, the same year the National Endowment for the Arts named him a Jazz Master.During the 1980s, he led a band called the World of Trombones that consisted of up to nine trombones and a rhythm section. Big, brassy jazz was out of favor at the time, but by then he had become an elder statesman of jazz, and he was able to insist on bringing his full band into clubs more interested in small, intimate groups. Once in the door, he was almost always a hit.He was also a fixture on college campuses, teaching composition and theory to the next generation of jazz musicians and instilling in them a respect for jazz — and the trombone — that went well beyond the music.“Playing a trombone makes you realize that you’re going to have to depend on other people,” Mr. Hampton told The New York Times in 1982. “If you’re going to need help, you can’t abuse other people. That’s why there’s a real sense of fellowship among trombonists.”Mr. Hampton in concert at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center in Manhattan in 2006.Rahav Segev for The New York TimesLocksley Wellington Hampton was born on April 21, 1932, in Jeannette, Pa., about 30 miles east of Pittsburgh. He was the youngest of 12 children, and his parents, Clarke and Laura (Buford) Hampton, recruited most of them to be in the family band they led — Locksley joined as a singer and dancer when he was just 6.In 1938 the family moved to Indianapolis in search of more work. The city had a thriving jazz scene, and they were soon touring the Midwest.They never lacked for gigs, but they did lack a trombone player, a deficit the elder Mr. Hampton remedied by handing the instrument to his youngest son when he was 12 and teaching him to play it. He took to the instrument — no easy task for a child — and it didn’t take long for him to earn the nickname Slide.He studied at a local conservatory, but most of his musical education came through his family and other musicians. He was particularly taken by J.J. Johnson, the leading trombonist of the sophisticated school of jazz known as bebop, who lived in Indianapolis. Mr. Hampton later recalled that one evening he was standing outside a club with his instrument, too young to enter, when Mr. Johnson walked by. He was supposed to play that night, but he didn’t have his trombone. Mr. Hampton gave him his own.Mr. Hampton later adapted several of Mr. Johnson’s compositions. He kept one of them, “Lament,” in his repertoire for decades.After his father died in 1951, the family band was led by Locksley’s brother Duke. In 1952 the band won a contest to play at Carnegie Hall, opening for Lionel Hampton (no relation).While in New York, Mr. Hampton and one of his brothers went to Birdland, the fabled jazz club, where they saw the bebop pianist Bud Powell play. That experience, he later said, left a much greater impression on him than performing at Carnegie.Mr. Hampton married Althea Gardner in 1948; they divorced in 1997. He is survived by his brother Maceo; his children, Jacquelyn, Lamont and Locksley Jr.; five grandchildren; and 13 great-grandchildren. His son Gregory died before him.The Hampton family band later returned to New York to play at the Apollo Theater, and Slide urged them to relocate to the city. When they demurred, he made his own plans.A friend recommended a once-a-week gig in Houston, and Mr. Hampton jumped at the chance. It paid well enough that he could use the rest of the week to study and compose.In 1955 the rhythm-and-blues pianist Buddy Johnson recruited him for his band, and he relocated to New York. A year later he moved to Lionel Hampton’s band, and a year after that he joined Maynard Ferguson’s. He composed some of the Ferguson band’s better-known pieces, including “The Fugue” and “Three Little Foxes.”Mr. Hampton found himself in high demand and struck out on his own in 1962 as the leader of the Slide Hampton Octet. Though that band lasted just a year and he later said he did a poor job as its leader, it greatly increased his visibility.As a leader, Mr. Hampton was humble. He often took a seat in the audience after playing a solo so as not to upstage other band members when their turns came. Once, when a television crew showed up to film the band, he cut his solo short to make sure everyone got a turn on camera.In the early 1960s he bought a brownstone in the Fort Greene neighborhood of Brooklyn, which quickly became a hot spot for jam sessions and a crash pad for some of the country’s top musicians. The saxophonists Wayne Shorter and Eric Dolphy and the guitarist Wes Montgomery all lived there for a time.After his octet broke up, Mr. Hampton worked as a musical director for Motown Records, collaborating on productions for Stevie Wonder, the Four Tops and others. There he encountered firsthand the rising popularity of pop and R&B and concluded that jazz was being boxed out of the American music scene. After touring Europe in 1968 with Woody Herman, he settled in Paris, where he found not just a thriving jazz audience, but public subsidies that supported the music.“The conditions and the respect for the artist in Europe were so incredible that I was overwhelmed,” Mr. Hampton told The Times in 1982. “They saw jazz as an art form in Europe long before they did here.”He returned to America in 1977, initially to write arrangements for the saxophonist Dexter Gordon, who himself had recently returned from Europe. By then the place of jazz had changed — major labels were becoming interested, government grants were becoming available and colleges were adding jazz to the curriculum.Mr. Hampton was once more in demand as a musician — and now also as an educator. Over the next decades he taught at Harvard, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, DePaul University in Chicago, and elsewhere. And he continued to play at New York venues into the 2010s.When asked what explained his success over such a long career, Mr. Hampton insisted that it wasn’t just talent, but also practice — he practiced four to five hours a day, and would do even more if he had the time.“Everything that’s really of quality requires a lot of work,” he said in a 2007 interview with the National Endowment for the Arts. “Things that come easy don’t have the highest level of quality connected to them.” More

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      National Endowment for the Arts Announces Jazz Masters

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      Its 2022 class includes the bassist Stanley Clarke, the drummer Billy Hart, the vocalist Cassandra Wilson and the saxophonist Donald Harrison Jr.The National Endowment for the Arts has announced its 2022 class of Jazz Masters — and it represents a broad swath of the blues-based, boundary-pushing music that has been made in the last 50 years under the label of jazz.The new Jazz Masters are the bassist Stanley Clarke, the drummer Billy Hart, the vocalist Cassandra Wilson and the saxophonist Donald Harrison Jr. They will be honored in April 2022, at a ceremony at the SFJAZZ Center in San Francisco, the N.E.A. said on Tuesday. The Jazz Masters award is the highest national honor given to living American jazz musicians, and comes with a $25,000 cash prize.Clarke, 70, is best known as a founding member of the seminal jazz-rock fusion band Return to Forever, though he has also enjoyed a vibrant career as a solo artist. Hart, 80, can be heard on timeless recordings by Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock and others. In recent decades, his quartet has often been hailed as one of the leading bands in jazz.Wilson’s husky, confiding vocal style and passion for scrambling genres made her one of the leading jazz vocalists of the 1990s. Both Wilson, now 65, and Clarke are multi-Grammy winners.Harrison grew up in New Orleans, immersed in the city’s Black musical heritage, and after earning national recognition in the 1980s and 1990s he recommitted to cultivating his hometown scene through activism and education work. Harrison will be this year’s recipient of the A.B. Spellman Fellowship for Jazz Advocacy, which the N.E.A. more typically gives to non-musicians. More

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      The Arts Are in Crisis. Here’s How Biden Can Help.

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsCredit…Invisible CreatureSkip to contentSkip to site indexThe Arts Are in Crisis. Here’s How Biden Can Help.The pandemic has decimated the livelihoods of those who work in the arts. How can the new administration intervene and make sure it doesn’t happen again? A critic offers an ambitious plan.Credit…Invisible CreatureSupported byContinue reading the main storyJan. 13, 2021, 5:02 a.m. ETWhat is art’s function? What does art do for a person, a country?Scholars, economists, revolutionaries keep debating, but one very good answer has held now for 2,500 years. The function of art, Aristotle told us, is catharsis. You go to the theater, you listen to a symphony, you look at a painting, you watch a ballet. You laugh, you cry. You feel pity, fear. You see in others’ lives a reflection of your own. And the catharsis comes: a cleansing, a clarity, a feeling of relief and understanding that you carry with you out of the theater or the concert hall. Art, music, drama — here is a point worth recalling in a pandemic — are instruments of psychic and social health.Not since 1945 has the United States required catharsis like it does in 2021. The coronavirus pandemic is the most universal trauma to befall the nation since World War II, its ravages compounded by a political nightmare that culminated, last week, in an actual assault on democratic rule. The last year’s mortal toll, its social isolation and its civic disintegration have brought this country to the brink. Yet just when Americans need them most, our artists and arts institutions are confronting a crisis that may endure long after infections abate.Professional creative artists are facing unemployment at rates well above the national average — more than 52 percent of actors and 55 percent of dancers were out of work in the third quarter of the year, at a time when the national unemployment rate was 8.5 percent. In California, the arts and entertainment fields generated a greater percentage of unemployment claims than even the hospitality sector. Several hundred independent music venues have closed; art galleries and dance companies have shuttered. And in my own life, I’ve listened to painters and performers weep over canceled shows and tours, salivate over more generous government support in Europe or Asia, and ask themselves whether 2021 is the year to abandon their careers.Beyond value in its own right, culture is also an industry sector accounting for more than 4.5 percent of this country’s gross domestic product, according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis.Credit…Invisible Creature“Hell, they’ve got to eat just like other people,” said Harry Hopkins, the first supervisor of the Works Progress Administration, when an official in President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration queried whether artists merited federal employment. Art, music, dance and theater are social goods, but also individual professions — ones more endangered than at any time since the 1930s, and facing lasting damage even as the pandemic abates.The effects of this cultural depression will be excruciating, and not only for the symphony not written, the dance not choreographed, the sculpture not cast, the musical not staged. Beyond value in its own right, culture is also an industry sector accounting for more than 4.5 percent of this country’s gross domestic product, according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis.Other leaders have noticed: in their New Year addresses, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, singled out culture as a sector in economic peril, while Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany said that “freelancers and artists fear for their livelihood.” But until last month, when the outgoing U.S. president belatedly signed a stimulus package with targeted arts relief bundled within, this government had barely acknowledged the crisis that Covid-19 has posed to culture. Nor have private philanthropists filled the gap; while some large foundations have stepped up their disbursements, total giving to North American arts organizations has slackened by 14 percent on average.As President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. prepares to take office next week, and begins to flesh out his proposals to help the nation recover, he and his cabinet have the chance — the responsibility — to offer a new settlement for American culture. Mr. Biden had planned an “F.D.R.-size” presidency, and, with the Democrats’ recapture of the Senate, such heft seems more viable than it did after Election Day. What can the new administration do for culture in crisis? What examples should they draw from in American history, and current international practice? How should Washington approach culture policy with state and local authorities, with nonprofits, and with the entertainment industry? Does the U.S. government need a “Dr. Fauci of culture,” as the Washington Post theater critic Peter Marks called for last month — or even a full-bore Department of Culture, with a cabinet-level secretary?As a senator and as vice president, Mr. Biden repeatedly backed government support for the arts. The country he will now lead, as the pandemic wanes and as the economy recovers, is going to require major social catharsis — and he needs to ensure that the arts are still there to provide it.Reach for a new New Deal.The Biden campaign promised that America could “build back better,” and throughout 2020 the president-elect extolled F.D.R.’s New Deal as a blueprint for American renewal. For the administration to show that sort of Rooseveltian resolve — and, with control of the Senate, it just about can — it’s going to have to put millions of Americans on the federal payroll: among them artists, musicians and actors, tasked to restore a battered nation.Arshile Gorky at work on “Activities on the Field,” his 1936 mural project for Newark Airport sponsored by the W.P.A, which underwrote 2,500-odd murals in addition to sculpture, painting, posters and advertisements.Credit…Eisman, via The Arshile Gorky Foundation/Artists Rights Society, New YorkThe Works Progress Administration was a latecomer to Roosevelt’s economic recovery plans, begun in 1935 as part of the so-called second New Deal. Federal Project Number One, as its cultural division was known, accounted for only about one-half of 1 percent of the W.P.A.’s budget — but it endures as its most visible legacy, especially in the murals that adorn the country’s post offices, courthouses, school buildings and even prisons. And it should offer the Biden administration a blueprint for a new, federal cultural works project, which treats artists, musicians and writers as essential workers, and sees culture as a linchpin of economic recovery.Today cultural advocates like to offer a roll call of American artists employed by the W.P.A. as proof of its necessity: Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Mark Rothko, Arshile Gorky, Louise Nevelson, Norman Lewis, Alice Neel, Jacob Lawrence, Philip Guston. The programs, notably, offered Black artists more public support than at any time in the 20th century. Charles White’s mural “Five Great American Negroes,” now in the collection of Howard University, was a W.P.A. commission.But the bulk of the 2,500-odd murals the program underwrote, plus piles of sculpture, painting, posters and advertisements, came from artists who never achieved fame. Most were under 40. Most favored folksy, realist scenes of American life. And most worked in places that America’s culture industry habitually ignores: for example, Bonners Ferry, Idaho (pop. 2,543), where the artist Fletcher Martin decorated the courthouse with bas-reliefs of local loggers and miners.Zora Neale Hurston, far left, during a recording expedition in 1935 for the Federal Writers’ Project. The interviews Ms. Hurston did for the project would profoundly influence her novel “Their Eyes Were Watching God.”Credit…Alan Lomax, via Library of CongressVisual art was the largest of the four (later, five) cultural divisions, but other branches were just as vital. Ralph Ellison, John Cheever and Saul Bellow worked for the Federal Writers’ Project, compiling life stories of American workers; the interviews Zora Neale Hurston did for the project would profoundly influence her novel “Their Eyes Were Watching God.” The Federal Theater Project put out-of-work actors and writers on stages far from Broadway, where audiences saw free plays about Dust Bowl farmers or tenement dwellers known as “living newspapers.”Unlike today, when grantmaking institutions routinely require artists to justify their work before they make it, the W.P.A. programs did not mandate a style; all the government required was an engagement with an American theme, no strident politics, and no nudity. If a few of the program’s murals have stood the test of time, such as Gorky’s bulbous compositions originally at Newark Airport, there’s a reason that Pollock, Krasner and other figures of the postwar avant-garde turned so thoroughly from the socially engaged projects of their youth. More than a fair bit of the art produced under W.P.A. programs was boosterish, conservative, forgettable.But artistic quality was not the principal point — because these were works programs, not cultural grants, awarded on the basis of need rather than merit. (Another New Deal program, run by the Treasury, had a smaller and more selective roster of artists.) A new W.P.A.-style program, likewise, shouldn’t be thought of as government support for “the arts” — that lightning rod of budget negotiations year after year. Nor should it be treated in the same manner as, say, New York’s Percent for Art, which requires city-funded construction to set aside money for public art works.A new W.P.A. is, as the name indicates, an emergency work scheme, whose motivation is economic stimulus. Artists shouldn’t have to prove their “social impact,” shouldn’t have to get a dozen stakeholders to sign off on every note or brush stroke. They should demonstrate what their forebears did in the 1930s — that they are professional artists and they need work.”The Cradle Will Rock,” a play written by Marc Blitzstein and directed by Orson Welles, was part of the Federal Theater Project intended to put unemployed actors and writers to work.Credit…Library of CongressSuch a program might be especially valuable in America’s rural areas and in economically imperiled regions: the parts of the country where Mr. Biden did worst electorally, and whose support for President Trump came in part from a legitimate grievance that cultural elites looked down on them. (That Idaho courthouse lies in a county where Mr. Trump beat Mr. Biden by more than four votes to one.) Embedding unemployed artists nationwide, and tasking them to focus on local populations and local circumstances, should likewise animate any Biden administration cultural works program.The administration should also bring artists on board for infrastructure projects, especially as Mr. Biden’s government pursues an ambitious climate strategy that will require nationwide transformations. Europe already has plans for this. Since the fall Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, has been talking up a “New European Bauhaus,” which will bring artists and designers into the E.U.’s green development program to “give our systemic change its own distinct aesthetic — to match style with sustainability.” Including artists here could help the Biden administration build public support as the country begins, we hope, a decades-long program of green reconstruction.A final place to boost support for culture is the Department of State. Cultural diplomacy has shrunk considerably since the days of the Cold War, when the department sent Dizzy Gillespie to Yugoslavia, Martha Graham to Southeast Asia, Louis Armstrong to Congo, and the New York Philharmonic to Moscow. (“Music costs so much less and produces so much better a result than any propaganda or weaponry,” said its conductor, Leonard Bernstein.) Antony Blinken, nominated for Secretary of State, could provide the country both a diplomatic and an economic fillip by bolstering the agency’s diminished Bureau for Educational and Cultural Affairs, which the Trump administration tried to eliminate entirely. In Akron or Accra, American artists have work to do.Knit a better safety net.In the past, unemployment insurance was available only to those “employed” in the first place — and artists rarely were. A violinist furloughed from a full-time orchestra job could get unemployment, but not a gigging saxophonist whose nightclubs were shuttered. A receptionist laid off from a talent agency qualified, but not the actors the agency represents.That changed in March, when the previous Congress passed the first coronavirus stimulus package. It included a program called Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, which, for the first time expanded unemployment eligibility to independent contractors and freelance workers. In their ranks are millions of actors, writers, artists, musicians and dancers, who are three and a half times more likely than the average American to be self-employed, according to a 2019 report from the National Endowment for the Arts. (Where do you think the name “gig economy” came from, after all? From the music industry, where artists first cobbled together an income from stage to stage.)Like so many music venues, Elsewhere in Bushwick, Brooklyn, had to temporarily close because of coronavirus restrictions. Federal support for venues finally came through in December with the Save Our Stages Act.Credit…George Etheredge for The New York TimesA singer who qualified for pandemic assistance didn’t just get unemployment from her home state. She was also eligible for the same $600-a-week federal supplement as others receiving unemployment: a critical lifeline, though one that expired in July. (There have been two smaller supplements since then. The current $300-a-week boost, bundled into the December stimulus package, expires in mid-March, long before stages are expected to reopen.) For all its shortcomings, the program has established a precedent that the Biden administration must build upon: that artists, like other gig workers, are full participants in the national economy — and need to be taken care of as such.So the most immediate measure the new administration can take to stanch the arts crisis is simply to get money into artists’ pockets — by pushing Congress to expand and improve unemployment benefits for them and other independent contractors and gig workers. Congress also needs to smooth out discrepancies in pandemic assistance, including the way it severely undercompensates jobless aid to artists with a little salaried work on the side, such as an actor with a one-day-a-week desk job.If the program establishes that actors, musicians and dancers are true workers, how do we keep them working? Janet Yellen, the Treasury secretary nominee, and Marty Walsh, the Boston mayor nominated to lead the Labor Department, can answer this question by supporting changes to the tax code and to unemployment rights, with both economic and cultural benefits.One model comes from France, where performers, technicians and other workers in theater, dance, movies and television can qualify for a special artists’ unemployment program, known as intermittence, which includes maternity leave, retirement and other benefits.It allows performers to rehearse and train rather than wait tables, which makes a big contribution to the quality of French opera, dance and theater. But more fundamentally, it recognizes that musicians and dancers and the like are not truly self-employed. They are professionals, in a socially necessary industry with an uncommon economic organization. They need to be paid, taxed and insured as such if they are to thrive.Ms. Yellen and the new Congress also need to disburse additional funds to keep other arts professionals on the payroll. Bundled into the December stimulus package was the Save Our Stages Act, which earmarked $15 billion for small-business grants to music venues, movie theaters and the like. The grants (initially, 45 percent of a theater or club’s 2019 income) are a fantastic start — but it’s a Band-Aid when we need a full-scale tourniquet. Berlin’s nightclubs and other for-profit cultural venues were eligible for 80 percent grants.And given both the slow rollout of the vaccine and the continued need for social distancing, venues for the performing arts will be among the last public places to reopen. Congress ought therefore to bundle a second round of Save Our Stages emergency funding with a measure also drawn from the German bailout: cash for pandemic-appropriate infrastructural improvements, from new ventilation systems to digital distribution tools. I used to like a dirty disco; now I want gleaming HVAC.Does culture need a cabinet seat?Compared with Canada, Australia and most of Europe, the U.S. has relatively few cultural institutions funded through federal appropriations. The memorials on the National Mall are erected almost entirely with private cash; the Kennedy Center earns most of its income from donations and ticket sales. Even the Smithsonian Institution is a public-private partnership; its most recent Congressional disbursement of $1 billion a year accounts for 62 percent of its annual budget. At the Venice Biennale, where nations mount exhibitions in a kind of Olympics of contemporary art, the United States is one of the few participants whose government doesn’t pay for the show.Now some emboldened liberals have been dreaming, as they did when Barack Obama took office, that Mr. Biden might establish a cabinet-level Department of Culture — the first new department since George W. Bush established the Department of Homeland Security in 2002. Such a department might absorb the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (all independent federal agencies), the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (a nonprofit), as well as parts of the State, Interior, and Education Departments.I get the impulse! Artsy Americans have long been jealous of Europe’s government-funded theaters and opera houses — and as cultural institutions have shed jobs over the last year, it’s easy to envy public institutions abroad. Our own museums, symphonies and ballet companies are financed principally through philanthropy, while our film, television and music industries are driven by the profit motive. There is, in consequence, hardly a large enough federal culture budget to merit a department. And as I don’t see a strong argument to nationalize the Metropolitan Museum of Art or Carnegie Hall, a federal culture department risks, at least right now, being more bureaucratic than beneficial.Nor are we so long gone from the (first?) culture wars, of the 1980s and early 1990s, when meager federal support for artists and performers became a flash point in a much larger political battle. Senator Jesse Helms and Republican colleagues fulminated against the photographers Andres Serrano and Robert Mapplethorpe, and then against performers known as the N.E.A. Four — and got on the books a decency test for federal arts grants, barring support for art with gay and feminist themes. (Later the N.E.A.’s budget was slashed, and individual artists’ grants were eliminated.) That history is one good reason for the Biden administration to — at least at first — aid artists on economic and infrastructural grounds, rather than as individual grants for “deserving” artists.And in countries in democratic decline — a category which, after last week’s siege, I struggle not to include the United States — culture ministries have lately become instruments of political wrath. In Poland, governed by the right-wing Law and Justice party, the culture minister has fired or refused to reappoint numerous museum directors; last year he installed a far-right fellow traveler as the head of Warsaw’s leading contemporary art center. The Hungarian government has used its funding rules to control what appears on theater stages; in Brazil, the last culture minister parroted the rhetoric of Joseph Goebbels.A Department of Culture, under a future American presidency, could be as antagonistic to culture as the outgoing administration’s Environmental Protection Agency has been to protecting the environment. Honestly, have the Culture Department boosters forgotten that President Trump promulgated a single style of classical architecture for all federal buildings? That sort of directive would have doomed designs like Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s federal building in Chicago, or David Adjaye’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.Giving the federal government more dominion over culture could have, for example, doomed designs like those of David Adjaye for the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.Credit…Lexey Swall for The New York TimesAmerican arts institutions ought not to give up their independence for crumbs. For now, especially as the pandemic subsides, the more urgent task is to encourage a richer cultural offering at the local level. A nimbler and more practicable solution to do that is with a White House Office for Culture, akin to the National Economic Council or the Domestic Policy Council, that could research and coordinate arts policy across the federal government.An arts center inside the executive office of the president — led, why not, by a “Dr. Fauci of culture” — could be sharper and swifter than a full department. This team could help Treasury create cultural tax policy, advise the Education Department on music instruction, liaise with Congress on arts stimulus. Importantly, it could ensure that stimulus funds for states and municipalities, whose budgets have been pitted by shutdown-induced tax shortfalls, shore up and eventually strengthen local arts organizations. (“Almost no one has been hurt more by Covid than our artists,” said Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York this week, when he announced a public-private partnership supporting the state’s arts organizations.)The new administration should also re-establish the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, whose members resigned en masse in 2017 after Mr. Trump’s response to the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va. (The artists who resigned included the director George C. Wolfe, the author Jhumpa Lahiri, the actor Kal Penn and the architect Thom Mayne.) To use a metaphor I detest but politicians seem to like, this committee should be the sizzle to the steak that is the Office for Culture. Any transformation this large needs a sales pitch; well-known actors, writers and musicians should be the pitchmen, linking Broadway and Hollywood to the town library and the school theater.During last year’s campaign, Mr. Biden had a phrase he invoked with almost musical regularity: the election, he always said, was a “battle for the soul of America.” As a piece of political rhetoric, it might have been just a platitude. How can I deny, though, that the near-sacking of the Capitol — in a week when, for the first time, the daily death toll from Covid-19 reached an unendurable 4,000 Americans — indicates that the United States has undergone, these last years, a kind of soul-death? And if you were treating a patient whose soul had curdled, what sort of medicine might you prescribe?I’ve always been wary of arguments about art’s “necessity.” But a soul-sick nation is not likely to recover if it loses fundamental parts of its humanity. Without actors and dancers and musicians and artists, a society will indeed have lost something necessary — for these citizens, these workers, are the technicians of a social catharsis that cannot come soon enough. A respiratory virus and an insurrection have, in their own ways, taken the country’s breath away. Artists, if they are still with us in the years ahead, can teach us to exhale.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More