Aug. 12 (Bloomberg) -- After the U.S. Senate confirmed Rocco Landesman’s appointment on Friday as chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, I wondered how long it would take Broadway’s favorite cowboy to shoot himself in the foot.

One day.

The new chairman hadn’t even moved into his Pennsylvania Avenue digs when he told the New York Times’s Robin Pogrebin, in an article that appeared Saturday, that he will “focus on the potential of the arts to help in the country’s economic recovery.”

Landesman, 62, has run Jujamcyn Theaters, Broadway’s third- largest theater-owning and producing company, since 1987. He now inherits an agency he regards as pathetically underfunded. The NEA’s current annual budget of $155 million is $21 million less than it received in 1992.

President Barack Obama described Landesman as a “game changer” when he announced the surprise nomination in February. Landesman is an intellectual and a sometimes visionary producer (with a Yale doctorate in dramatic literature for his bona fides) who loves to make noise. He’s a brilliant choice to revivify an agency whose greatest achievement in nearly two decades has been merely to survive.

Which is why Landesman’s opening salvo left me feeling so deflated.

He told the Times that he has a new slogan for the agency: “Art Works.” The phrase, he said, is “something muscular that says, We matter.” As in: We matter “as an economic driver,” the Times explained.

Dubious Argument

Those words make Landesman seem less like a game-changer than someone versed in a tired and dubious argument that goes like this: The arts should be funded because they generate income by providing jobs and supporting ancillary businesses, as when people attending concerts or Broadway shows hire babysitters, go out to dinner, park in garages and so forth.

If that’s the criterion for funding, however, the NEA should just support the Broadway producers and movie studios that employ the most people and sell the most tickets. They “work” on an economic level. Even there, however, it’s a flawed argument, because the numbers will never match those of businesses -- legal, financial, service -- that also provide customers for garages and restaurants, and in much greater numbers.

Creativity Rules

Market-driven culture is all well and good, but it’s not what John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson had in mind when they laid the groundwork for a federal agency dedicated to the arts. They supported creativity that isn’t beholden to a bottom line. Not every artist will be Isaac Stern or Meryl Streep or Jennifer Bartlett, but for each one who makes it into the mainstream, a hundred more are struggling to move the form forward, creating a cultural identity. The payoff for encouraging them will rarely be measurable in economic terms.

So here’s a different strategy for the arts endowment. Take a leaf from the Broadway producers’ playbook. Create a public- private alliance to fund the NEA so it can really begin making the arts central to the lives of all Americans. Commercial producers pay publicly subsidized companies to get new shows on their feet before taking the plunge on Broadway. Such commingling used to be verboten; now it’s business-as-usual.

I say, do it on a grand scale. Just three commercial cultural industries -- Hollywood studios, the recording industry and Broadway -- together generate $20 billion in domestic sales annually, according to their trade associations. A minimally invasive tax of one-half of 1 percent would instantly add $100 million to the NEA’s coffers.

Most to Gain

These industries have the most to gain, in the long term, from the development of artists at the local, funded level. And with all that new dough, the NEA could begin creating a culturally literate society. One that makes being an artist as attractive a dream as becoming a captain of industry or the nation’s president.

In 1965, Johnson chose as the endowment’s first chairman Roger L. Stevens, a real-estate mogul who had owned the Empire State Building and become a fearless Broadway producer.

“The Federal government cannot, and should not, be expected to carry the total burden,” Stevens presciently said of the new NEA. “This must be a cooperative effort, to include private enterprise.”

Stevens’s producing partner, Robert Whitehead, once described him as “a little bit the old American gambler.”

Just like Landesman, who rather emphatically believes he should be chowing down with “the big boys” at the president’s table. If he doesn’t want to be hooted out of the dining room, he needs to forget about making an economic case for the arts.

Drop the motto, Rocco. Art matters, period.

(Jeremy Gerard is an editor for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer of this column: Jeremy Gerard in New York at jgerard2@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: August 12, 2009 00:00 EDT