By Kay Cattarulla, KERA 90.1 Commentator
http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/kera/local-kera-532798.mp3
Dallas, TX –
The cleansing of most of the top culture writers and critics at the Dallas Morning News is depressing, and people I talk to find it worrisome as well. What a setback to Dallas's ambitions to become a great city.
To begin with, there's the Performing Arts Center, our attempt to move, culturally speaking, into the big leagues. There will be stunning buildings in the Arts District, and facilities equal to any in New York or Chicago. But it takes a big league audience to sustain a southwest Lincoln Center. Are we up to it? And after the first flush of excitement, will we even fill the seats?
I'm talking about the complicated, long-term interaction between culture and community that forges a viable arts scene. The press is a big part of it. We depend on educated writers and critics to help chart the course and create the buzz. They prod artistic directors to take risks. They keep up with the national scene - which we need to know about if we're going to be big league. Critics validate what's important, so that funding follows - and they show us how to become the wide-awake, involved audience that elevates the artistic experience and helps makes the magic.
Now, of all times, we need experienced, knowledgeable press and media to keep this process going. And not just for the sake of the Performing Arts Center. We need it for our museums and galleries, large and small. And the non-mainstream arts as well. Dallas/Fort Worth is home to highly talented artists and groups of all kinds, but they're always fighting off economic disaster. The paper promises continued attention to "local arts," and that's commendable, but I fear that what remains of a good cultural staff will be stretched thin. And I wonder if we'll get replacements equal to what we've lost in the arts, architecture, and that hallmark of a city's intellectual vitality - books.
That's for the News to ponder, and in doing so I hope it won't forget its own history. As co-producer of the KERA documentary Sweet Tornado: Margo Jones and the American Theater, I learned that it was the Morning News itself that created culture in Dallas, decades ago, through the passions and pronouncements of its great critic John Rosenfield. For 40 years, this short, fat, dynamic and brilliant proselytizer banged out columns and reviews that gradually turned a cultural desert into a regional capital of the arts. He tyrannized artistic directors and did other forms of over-reaching, but he was determined that Dallas would have a symphony, professional theater, opera, and all the attributes of a city of culture. And he knew, as his lifelong friend Stanley Marcus told us, that "you have to build slowly, but very surely, to get people educated enough to want to support something, and not just support it as a matter of civic pride."
And that's something for us all to think about. Yes, the new buildings in the Arts District will feed our civic pride, but in the long run, they will only succeed - artistically and financially - if there's a discriminating public to support what happens inside. I worry that the whole complex process won't gel without a group of experienced writers and critics. And I hope that the paper of John Rosenfield - and the community -- will worry about this, too.
Kay Cattarulla, a writer and producer in the arts field, lives in Dallas.
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