THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, August 21, 1996 TAG: 9608210001
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A17 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Opinion
SOURCE: By Glenn Allen Scott
LENGTH: 72 lines
The Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk is having a busier summer than usual. ``Myth, Magic and Mystery,'' a unique exhibition of illustrations for children's books, and ``Orchard With Peach Blossom,'' a privately owned painting by Dutch artist Vincent Van Gogh on loan to the museum until September, are generating a strong flow of visitors.
The Chrysler is heavily promoting the children's-book-illustrations show and the visiting Van Gogh, which explains why attendance was significantly higher in July of this year than in July 1955. The increase is especially noteworthy because admission to the museum was free last year, as it had been since the institution's founding more than 50 years ago, but now admission is free only on Wednesday.
Fees ($4 for adults, $2 for seniors and students age 5 and up) were imposed earlier this year after the cash-pinched Chrysler dismissed seven employees - a tenth of the staff - an unexpected, painful effort to cut costs. In addition to admissions revenue, the museum is also earning more from its gift shop; this July the shop took in $21,670 compared with $13,530 last July.
Van Gogh is a super star of the arts, not only for the intensity and drama of his greatest paintings but also for his tragic life, which ended in suicide. Because of ``Lust for Life'' - a movie, starring Kirk Douglas, based on the best-selling book of the same title, Van Gogh and his paintings entered the consciousness of legions of people who otherwise might never have learned of them. In the 1980s, some Van Gogh paintings commanded megamillion-dollar prices at auction.
Meanwhile, ``Myth, Magic and Mystery'' has attracted widespread notice. A ``CBS Sunday Morning'' team recently photographed the show for broadcast soon. The catalog prepared by Trinkett and Nick Clark, curators of the exhibition, is selling briskly.
The Chrysler art collection's range and quality are unmatched in the Southeast and, indeed, in much of the United States. That is sufficient to make the museum a major cultural asset unique to Hampton Roads and Virginia. But to keep people coming through its doors, the Chrysler, like museums generally, must mount special exhibitions and schedule other events that arouse public interest - no small challenge in an age in which movies and television pile sensation upon sensation, shock upon shock to catch the eye of jaded masses.
In their competition with popular culture for public favor, the arts are hopelessly outgunned. The market for the arts - visual and performing - embraces tens of millions, but it is a dwindling percentage of the population.
Baby boomers are less likely than their parents to go to the theater, classical-music concerts, ballet performances, the opera, arts museums. The baby-bust generation that followed the boomers - Generation X - is even less enchanted with the arts. Meanwhile, reports researchers for nonprofit organizations, private giving to the arts, no less than public appropriations, is falling; it dropped 47 percent between 1988 and 1993.
The trends are troubling. Lynne Cheney, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, foresees continuing shrinkage in audiences as well as dollars for the arts. A prominent critic of the federal funding of the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, which she once headed, Cheney links diminishing political support for the arts to the decline in public involvement in the arts.
That's certainly plausible. But the arts bring grace, beauty and inspiration to communities. They refresh the spirit. They are worthy of salvation. And because they are, I believe that lovers of the arts in community after community will contrive strategies to keep them alive and healthy.
In South Hampton Roads, the Business Consortium for the Arts' gives more and more each year to arts groups. Its example may stimulate more private giving. Hope so. A Hampton Roads with an anemic arts scene would still be habitable, of course, but many residents and outsiders looking over the region would find it depressingly sterile. MEMO: Mr. Scott is associate editor of the editorial page of The
Virginian-Pilot. by CNB