Campaign Calls Americans to Arts Action
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

CALL TO ACTION
At a Midtown press conference yesterday, Americans for the Arts Action Fund officially launched its national citizens’ membership campaign. The campaign will enable and encourage individuals to champion the arts and arts education. The organization hopes to mobilize more than 100,000 citizen activists to promote arts-friendly public politics at all levels of government.
Before introducing playwright Wendy Wasserstein, the president of Americans for the Arts Action Fund, Robert Lynch, recalled his early deliberation in choosing a career. As a child, his father hoped he would pursue law, and his mother thought that dentistry would be a prudent choice. Mr. Lynch went another way: He chose creative writing and specialized in poetry – “where the big bucks are.”
He continued, to audience laughter, that when he graduated he found that all the poetry jobs had been taken, so he turned to arts management.
Mr. Lynch’s tone turned more serious when he spoke about how the environmentalist movement channeled citizens’ energy to achieve its goals and mentioned the Sierra Club and the League of Conservation Voters as organizations that have been particularly successful at a grass-roots level. The arts campaign, with its new Web site, hopes to have a similar impact.
Stepping up to the microphone, Ms. Wasserstein also spoke of career choices. She said that when she graduated from Yale’s drama school, she took a physics course at Marymount Manhattan College with an eye toward becoming a doctor.
Ms. Wasserstein said the arts protect an individual voice and vision that is critical to democracy – in an age, she said, of pollsters and spin.
The arts are a place where people can come together and look at a problem together. She told of a program in which she, Frank Rich, and other mentors each take eight children from public school to plays throughout the year. To the person who says arts are elitist, she disagrees: “Arts become elitist unless they are open to everyone.”
Among those in the audience were Theodore Berger of New York Foundation for the Arts and the president of the Alliance for the Arts, Randall Bourscheidt, whose organization has curated an online Gallery of Olympic and Sports Art geared toward New York’s bid for the 2012 Olympic bid.
The chair of Americans for the Arts Fund’s board, Ann Sheffer, said that in a country where many people “think Martha Graham is a snack cracker, the citizenry really hasn’t had a voice. One group the campaign will try to reach, she said, were not just grass roots but “grass tops,” that is, influential local leaders who sit on arts boards and local school education committees.
He said, “If we do it right, we get a better people and a better America.”
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OXFORD DON
New York Review of Books contributor Timothy Garton Ash spoke recently at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and at a special “on the record” conversation at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Mr. Ash, a slim, youthful-looking man with a close-cropped beard and mustache, is a senior research fellow at St. Anthony’s College at Oxford and author most recently of “Free World: America, Europe, and the Surprising Future of the West” (Random House).
In a manner befitting his Oxford background, Mr. Ash displayed flashes of wit coupled with analytic depth. He spoke of four great problems of the future that require an American-European partnership to reach a solution and challenged the audience to find any difference between America and Europe in their long-term interests: modernizing the Middle East, adjusting to the rise of China as a world power, rescuing the half of the world that lives on less than $2 a day, and alleviating global warming.
Of the strained relations between America and Europe, he said that the rise of China as a superpower reminded him of a remark by Princess Diana: “There are three people in this marriage now.”
Mr. Ash said, “We are told that Europeans and Americans make up two different worlds.” Of some who have held that “America is from Mars and Europe is from Venus,” Mr. Ash said his work finds that assertion to be “baloney.”
But it is true, he said, that we “now have two divided continents. As the election just showed us, the U.S. is deeply divided between red and blue in cultural preferences and values.”
“On whether using military force is the best way to wage war on terrorism, for example, fewer Democrats said yes in a poll than the French.”
Mr. Ash said he hoped that America would come to Europe with an agenda broader than the fight against terrorism.
In speaking of a direction for future trans-Atlantic relations, Mr. Ash told a humorous anecdote about the man who is standing at a fork in the road. He receives the advice, “If I were you, I wouldn’t start from here.”
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EXPLORER’S ESCAPADES
Friends and family of photographer and conservationist Peter Beard gathered at the Explorers Club for a reception to celebrate the publication of his new book, “Zara’s Tales: Perilous Escapades in Equatorial Africa” (Knopf).
The book is a memoir that Mr. Beard dedicated to his daughter, Zara, which includes photographs and drawings that capture the wonder of the wilderness.
During the reception, Mr. Beard offered remarks about “the horrors of mismanaging the ecosystem.” Mr. Beard spoke about giving a series of talks about the environment at colleges and universities.
After delivering these “doomsday lectures,” Mr. Beard recalled the students, who were between the ages 18 and 20, saying that they know all the bad things being done to the planet but few ever speak of it.
Mr. Beard said “what we’re doing globally” is “horrendous,” and it is absolutely criminal how “we have abused our habitat.” Then, to audience laughter, Mr. Beard said in deadpan, “But putting that aside, thanks for coming.”
Seen were Anthony Haden-Guest; Ivory Serra of the Peter Beard Studio; Arne Zimmermann of Kastner & Partners in New York; and others.