One of the things we’ve been reflecting on these past few days is the decision of the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. in respect of the cultural institutions that will have space at ground zero. It announced last week that it had selected the Joyce Theater for modern dance, the Signature Theater Company for stage productions, the Drawing Center, and something called the “Freedom Center,” which, the LMDC Website says, will operate in the tradition of institutions like the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia to harness the power of history and use it as a springboard for contemporary dialogue, debate, and engagement.

The choices have been greeted not entirely with derision, but with disappointment. This was articulated by Terry Teachout in a dispatch Tuesday in the Wall Street Journal. He, as we, had favored moving New York City Opera, a major house, downtown, and he reckons the LMDC wasted a wonderful opportunity. There was concern about pulling City Opera out of Lincoln Center. In any event, we would characterize the choices LMDC eventually made as the middling way. None is terrible, but neither is any terribly exciting. And we can’t help but wonder whether the middling way is what one is always going to get when a government or quasi-government agency seeks to ignite culture by the allocation of resources by fiat.

It is hard to think of a major cultural institution or movement in New York City that was created by the government. Our greatest museums, the Metropolitan and the Modern, were set up by benevolent New Yorkers. The Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera by the same. Private artistic activity sought and found a public home. The Hudson River School of painting started with one visionary artist putting a painting for sale in a window. Tin Pan Alley and the eruption of the Yiddish Theater were entirely commercial phenomena, as was Broadway, as was Off Broadway, and even the primacy of jazz and the Apollo. Not necessarily for profit — there were plenty of not-for-profit corporate structures — but commercial. Commerce is what made this the visual arts capital of the world after World War II and encouraged the creation of Abstract Expressionism and then Pop Art.

None of our city’s great cultural offerings resulted from city planning. The whole approach to ground zero raises the concern that we are going to end up downtown with something akin to what Governor Rockefeller created in Albany in the infamous Mall. It was described by Robert Hughes in “The Shock of the New” as the architecture of state power. The idea that a cultural renaissance can be ignited downtown by state planning strikes us chimerical. And at the rate things are going, there is risk that the cultural scene downtown will take on a flat, government-subsidized tone unworthy of the emotions that are attached to the site.