Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowments for the Arts, recently spoke with BDN editor Todd Benoit about the creative economy and the role of the arts in it. In addition to leading the NEA, Mr. Gioia is an acclaimed poet, literary critic, educator and former business executive. Here are excerpts from their conversation.

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DG: I think it’s impossible to talk about the concept of a creative community without the arts. People tend to compartmentalize and departmentalize human endeavors too much. In the real world, they tend to spill over into one another, the different creative forces tend to reinforce each other. There is a currently fashionable argument about creative communities, and I think it’s a generally reliable concept, but it tends to be simplified too much.

In general, there are places where people want to live and other places where people don’t want to live. People who have many choices in their lives tend to choose the places that are more desirable to live in, for any number of different reasons. So if you’re going to create a community which attracts people to live and work, or to retire or to visit, there have to be things which are available there which are not available elsewhere, or things which are available better there that are not available elsewhere. And you see this again and again, that there are communities which have built vital economies around the arts.

I would think of a city like Ashland, Oregon. Charleston, South Carolina, would be another one. In one case, Ashland, Oregon, has created a Shakespeare festival that now has become a year-round, multi-stage theatrical complex. It’s fostered restaurants and all kinds of people moving there because they visited the festival two or three times and they liked it. So they’ve created what is actually a mid-sized town whose economy is based on William Shakespeare. Charleston, South Carolina, revived itself, essentially, in the downtown through the Spoleto Festival, which now becomes an international festival. But it’s encouraged all kinds of people to come there and open restaurants, open shops, then in the course of a couple of decades transformed it from kind of a decaying downtown to one of the most attractive places in the American South.

TB: Do the arts have an obligation to make a community a desirable place to live, or an obligation to do anything at all that would relate to community or civic life?

DG: What the arts are are ways of communicating. Painting is a way of communicating, poetry is a way of communicating. There is no obligation of a medium to do anything. But throughout history the arts have been universally recognized as one of the most powerful ways of creating civic and communal identity. You can go all the way back to Athens, where twice a year the citizens of Athens would come in and see these theatrical festivals, the Greater and the Lesser Dionysia. And Greek drama was one of the ways Athenians defined and celebrated their civic character. So without trying to be too complicated about it, the arts are powerful ways of building, defining and celebrating community. You see this most conspicuously in the performing arts – theater, dance, opera, symphony, jazz. Those are art forms which are necessarily public and communal. They create really vibrant public life. I would never make my argument on behalf of the arts as primarily an economic argument. The arts exist because without them we are impoverished as human beings. They’re not merely forms of entertainment; they’re forms of human development and self-realization.

TB: Does a community then have an obligation to support the arts financially?

DG: The community that wants to fully realize the human potential of its citizens would be foolish not to support the arts. If you’re in a community where people don’t have enough to eat, opera might not be the highest priority. But a community that is trying to create an environment which develops and enhances the potential of all of its citizens, including children, has to take the arts seriously both in education and in terms of its civic identity. The arts are media which transform people. If you create a culture, if you create a community in which arts play a role, it has very powerful economic effects. Because when people go to the theater, they also have to park their car, they usually have dinner, afterwards they might have a drink or a cup of coffee and dessert. So when you look at arts neighborhoods, you’ll see restaurants, shops; things like this all foster it.

Charlotte, North Carolina, is an interesting city, I’ve visited it many times over the last three decades. It has gone from a city where, really, the arts barely existed to one which the whole downtown development plan has been basically around, putting in museums, theaters, concert halls, performance spaces, galleries. And it has created this absolutely vibrant downtown community, which they call Uptown Charlotte, which brings crowds of people down, supports all kinds of businesses that are non-arts related, like restaurants and shops, hotels, because it’s become a kind of magnet. Why has Charlotte done this? Because Charlotte is becoming one of the financial centers of the United States. And they know that in order to keep these national financial institutions, they’ve got to create a community where people want to locate their businesses, people want to travel to.

TB: How important is the quality of what’s presented, the level of excellence? What does that mean to a small town if it has to be of a certain level of professionalism to succeed?

DG: I think that the arts are properly judged on their excellence. I’ve never believed that more art is better art. That being said, sometimes the best productions I’ve seen of a play or some of the most interesting musical performances I’ve seen have been in smaller communities. They may not have the production budget of “Miss Saigon,” but you find these very powerful productions that are done on a shoestring. … I don’t think that Bangor, Maine, would be under any artistic disadvantage if it was doing things seriously.

TB: Can the NEA help communities with this? I don’t mean just by sending out more dollars, but by helping them or theater companies or what have you, orchestras, understand how they might do things more effectively?

DG: The National Endowment for the Arts has as its charter to foster excellence in the arts and to bring art to all Americans. I’ve inserted the word “all,” but it’s always been there implicitly. We cannot realize that goal unless we take an active leadership position in small and rural communities. If you go back 50 years, the arts existed and were very healthy in major cities. The greatest legacy of the National Endowment for the Arts has been to foster the development of great institutions outside of the major urban areas, let’s say the major dozen urban areas in the United States. The theaters, opera companies, dance companies, jazz orchestras, chamber music groups, symphonies and museums that exist all over the United States today are often the legacy of the arts endowment.

Clearly, if we look at our evolution, our current challenge is while continuing to support the existing institutions, to take this American development one step further and to do a better job serving rural and smaller communities. We’re doing this in a number of ways. In “Shakespeare in American Communities,” which is the largest tour of Shakespeare in American history, we’re going to 100 cities in all 50 states. We’re focusing it on mid-size and smaller communities. There’s not a lot of cultural advantage to us bringing Shakespeare to New York City, but to Orono, but to Boone, North Carolina, it’s a more important undertaking. And also to bring it into the schools in these communities is important.

TB: What does that do besides show people Shakespeare? What does it mean to have the productions come to these towns?

DG: Well, the average American teenager has never seen live professional play. So first and foremost, it creates an opportunity for people to see a great play and a great performance. I believe that, in and of itself, is an important activity. Secondly, for schools, it helps galvanize and focus the teaching of theater and the teaching of Shakespeare. We’re going to be providing super, high-quality materials free to schools. We’re also going to be bringing in versions of the plays, workshops with actors, to as many schools as possible. We’re going to be creating high school recitation contests of Shakespeare. …

TB: Is there a danger to the arts being linked to a creative economy, the expectation that the arts will produce revenue in a community?

DG: There is a danger if you denominate artistic value solely by box office appeal. By that standard, “Matrix Reloaded” is one of the triumphs of Western civilization. The better way of looking at it is that if you do not present the arts in a way which invites and involves people, then they will have a very minimal impact. You could say that opera in the park for free generates no revenue, but it does enhance a community. So what I would say is that the goal of the National Endowment for the Arts, which I would urge on local communities, is to try to present the best possible works in whatever medium to the broadest possible audience, to an audience which is mixed and involves different segments of society. I also think that it’s important if you’re doing a museum show to have outreach to schools, outreach into the community.

TB: Should a community strive to establish an artistic identity?

DG: I think a community should strive to create an artistic identity, but it can only be done by working with whatever real artists happen to emerge in the community. Maine is famous as a summer resort for artists. You could not write the history of American art without placing it in Maine from June to August. So there may be something in that rich heritage that it has. Orono, for example, has for all kinds of interesting reasons become deeply associated with high Modernist poetry in English. They’ve produced editions of the Objectivists and the early Modernists. If I were in Orono and I wanted to do something that was artistic, I think I would start with poetry, because it’s there, and there are people that are really actively involved in it. Bangor has a variety of communities, including the visual arts. I would say look around to see the talent in your own community and what can the community then do to foster, develop and promote that talent.

The wine country of northern California, Sonoma County, my home, is now the greatest single wine-producing region in the world. In blind tastings it outperforms the great regions of France. How did they do that? By, over generations, discovering what grapes grow better on this particular acre than anywhere else in the world, and how, on the other side of the hill, does a different grape grow? It’s by finding what grows best in the soil and the climate of your community. I would say that the same lessons hold true for the arts.