President Obama is making bold moves everywhere, it seems, even in the arts.

On Wednesday the New York Times announced that Broadway producer Rocco Landesman—the head of Jujamcyn Theaters, the guy who brought Tony Kushner’s Angels in America to Broadway, among other achievements--has been nominated by the President as head of the National Endowment for the Arts.  The news was welcomed warmly among New York culturati, many of whom have been saying for years that we need a real warrior in that post.  The current head of the NEA is Dana Gioia, a nice man (a poet) who has used his position to do nice things like promote jazz but made few ripples in the pond of Washington power. According to the Times, the choice of Landesman, 61, “signals that Mr. Obama plans to shake things up at the endowment.” The producer is “expected to lobby hard for more arts money.”

Landesman is a high-energy kind of guy, you see. A champion of theater and a current or former member of several important boards, including the Municipal Arts Society, Landesman also fancies baseball, horse racing, and country music.  He’s known as a powerful plain speaker—which should serve him well as he both lobbies for more arts money and labors to improve the climate for doing so, by evolving the national conversation about the arts.  Currently the NEA’s budget is $145 million, down from its high of $176 million in 1992, when the so-called Culture Wars, ignited by attacks on NEA funding for artists like Andres Serrano and Robert Mapplethorpe, were allowed to begin eroding national support for all but the “safest” art. Obama seems ready to reverse this erosion; he’s requesting $161 million for 2010.

To get a sense of how people were responding to the announcement, we made a few calls.

“Rocco is an exceptionally bright, experienced and insightful art guy,” Joseph V. Melillo, Executive Producer of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, told Classical TV. “He’s a bold progressive choice by President Obama. It distinguishes his vision for arts in culture in the USA with this selection.  I endorse his decision with great enthusiasm.”

"Wow! Rocco is the perfect balance of academic credential and action,” said noted theater and opera director David Schweizer.  “I remember him at Yale and he is so very smart.  And he's been so very active in the theater as a shrewd, yet deeply enlightened producer. How very Obama: it's a choice that pairs  ‘ideals’ with someone who is highly functional. This portends an aggressive stewardship which the NEA sorely needs. He will, at long last, get things done at that musty outpost.”

"It's exciting to have someone leading the NEA who is so clearly dedicated to live performance, as evidenced by his years on Broadway,” said Boo Froebel, Associate Producer of the Lincoln Center Festival.  “I hope Rocco also recognizes, with NEA support, the importance of the smaller, edgier non-profits who nurture and present innovative and experimental work across disciplines. The next generation's version of Angels in America, Big River, or Noise/Funk is germinating there right now."

Go get ‘em, Rocco.

  Producer Rocco Landesman

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