MacNeil Comments on MacDowell Artist Colony

ROBERT MACNEIL: That covers a lot of bases.

JEFFREY BROWN: Yes. "Can regular folks like myself who have yet to achieve artistic greatness visit the MacDowell Colony? Thank you in advance for you response." Let me read one more along the same lines. This is from Barbara Bianci of Clinton, Iowa, "I have just discovered heaven in the form of an artists colony in the heart of nature, no TV, internet, phones. Unfortunately I have only seen it through the eyes of PBS. Now how do I get the attention of the panel so that I can be one of the over 6000 artists who have lived at the retreat?"

ROBERT MACNEIL: Yes. You, anyone can apply and they show a sample of their work. They show a couple slides of a painting, or a piece of music, manuscript or a recording or a piece of writing manuscript, a play or a poem, or whatever. And they submit that to the MacDowell Colony and the work is reviewed by little admissions committees made up in each discipline of well established people in that discipline who are good judges of the talent of the person.

It is not necessary to have accomplished a lot. It is necessary to show to these people who judge it and try to judge fairly that there is real talent there and that the work is coming from someone who's serious about making that his life.

JEFFREY BROWN: So there's no categories of expert of . . .

ROBERT MACNEIL: No, no, no.

JEFFREY BROWN: . . . or established.

ROBERT MACNEIL: Nor are there criterias of education levels achieved. Some people are great artists who have never developed or never graduated from high school. Anyway, the sole criterion is talent and a sense that this person is serious. Now, when the work is evaluated by these committees, they then award points on a scale of 1 to 5, 5 being what they think is the most promising or accomplished, and then on the basis of those points, the Colony awards fellowships as they're called, time at the Colony, starting with the most deserving in terms of where they stand on that scale of 5. And then it allots spaces depending on which studios are vacant and when the person who's applied can come. Some people who are teaching all year can only come in the summertime.

Others prefer to come in the New Hampshire winter, when it's very cozy and there are fewer colonists there. But it's all year round and so then they're notified that either they didn't get in or that they did and then they negotiate about when they can come and how long they can stay. Some people, we get about 1,600 applications a year, we did last year and we accept 250, roughly speaking. So that's about 1 in 6 which is, I suppose, less competitive than the most competitive universities, but still competitive. And they come from all parts of the country and from around the world.

One of the nicest stories that I know is of a Japanese woman artist who had lived in this country for 20 years and she married here and continued to work at her painting. But she never wanted to become an American citizen. And finally, after three visits to MacDowell, she told us she decided to become an American citizen because she wanted to be a citizen of a country that could offer a place like this. Which is a story I like very much.

JEFFREY BROWN: Well, while you're talking about artists you met there, I have a question along those lines. It's from David, no last name, Hamby, Texas, "Of the artists you have come to know or observe during your tenure with the MacDowell, would you mind giving an example of one or two of the artists you have found awe inspiring."

ROBERT MACNEIL: Well, I think as a writer myself, I think Michael Chabon is pretty awe inspiring. You know the author of a number of books, most famous of which is "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay."

JEFFREY BROWN: He won the Pulitzer and many other.

ROBERT MACNEIL: He won it indeed, yes. And National Book Award and so on. He has been a number of times at MacDowell, in fact he wrote a lot of "Kavalier & Clay" there. You stuck me a little bit. Paul Marovec who is a composer, a very prolific composer, who won a Pulitzer Prize a couple of years ago for his "Tempest Fantasy" and who has been named a composer in residence at the Woodrow Wilson Institute at Princeton University. Those were a couple of examples. There are the great names some of which you mentioned.

JEFFREY BROWN: In our piece.

ROBERT MACNEIL: The most produced play certainly written in the 20^th century produced more than Shaw and more than Shakespeare, any one play by Shakespeare, was Thornton Wilder's "Our Town" which is written sort of set in this fantasy set in the town of Peterborough of which MacDowell is a famous part.

ROBERT MACNEIL: That's a very good question and a lot of artists are intimidated at first by it. And some of them, the first thing, in each studio you saw there are some boards about a foot and a half long and a foot wide with a curved top and they're called tombstones and each artist who has worked in that particular studio signs his name. So the names of some people can be quite intimidating and often a newly arrived artist will go in and turn the tombstones to the wall.

In fact, four MacDowell filmmakers made a film this year called "The Seasons of MacDowell", one for each season; spring, winter, so on, and one of them is a little drama that lasts about 13 minutes and in it the young woman writer alone in the studio grabs all the tombstones and throws them out into the snow. And finally she retrieved them, but yes, it's an issue. But look, artists have, like all creative people, they have moods of great ups and downs. At its most extreme it can be manic-depressive as people like the late Kirk Waldheim was, or Kirk Vonnegut was. And Bill Styron, the author of "Sophie's Choice" was. And that's not to say all artists are manic-depressives, but many artists feel these moments of excitement and elation when they first conceive or get the germ of the idea and then can sink to the depths during the often long and hard process of trying to make the actual tangible work, come anywhere close to what they imagined when they first got the inspiration. So yeah, a lot of . . .

JEFFREY BROWN: Well I was just thinking the best answer I got to this when I was there was with Alvin Singleton, the composer. And he's sitting in a room there Copeland and Bernstein and other, many others on those tombstones, many famous names, and he said basically I'm aware of it, but I just have to do what they did. I have to sit here and do my work.

ROBERT MACNEIL: Yeah, well, Alvin Singleton is a very talented composer and well recognized composer so he has at least passed the first, many of the first hurdles.

JEFFREY BROWN: You're right, he doesn't have to, he comes with years of experience. He's not going to be so intimidated.

ROBERT MACNEIL: No, I mean it's like watching the US Open and some people who are there for the first time are obviously a bundle of nerves. It's such a forum and then so nervous are also some of the accomplished ones but they get over it.

JEFFREY BROWN: Now let me throw a curve ball at you cause people want to know about, here's a personal what's life like at MacDowell. This is from Bill Stott of Santiago, Chile. "What is the most conspicuously successful marriage to have come from artists meeting at MacDowell?" How much do you know about the inner life?

ROBERT MACNEIL: Well, I've heard it said that the sex is better at Yaddo but the writing is better at MacDowell. I mean, of course, of course, any institution where there are healthy and sexually active adults of both, of all sexual persuasions present, sometimes people are going to hook-up. You know it's inevitable.

And so it happens. There have been marriages. There have been liaisons, there have been everything that you would expect if you had a group of artists or any creative people or any just very active people together. There's hardly an office anyone knows where this doesn't happen, so it's not surprising.

JEFFREY BROWN: I didn't manage to get it into our piece, but I remember in reading and preparing for it, reading that Mrs. MacDowell had policed the precincts in her years. She'd walk around with a flashlight.

ROBERT MACNEIL: And they also kept the men and women, cause remember this is 1907, they kept the men and women in separate quarters in those days. Well, we're a long way from that now. But I think the fundamental point is they have worked so hard to get there, to be accepted as a MacDowell fellow, gives your work a kind of impremonter of seriousness which is going to make it more impressive to other people looking at; the gallery owners who might want to put on a show, you know, for new painters and so on, and/or for a new composer to have a piece of work presented in concert.

The fact of the MacDowell fellowship is a considerable, a boost, not only to their own confidence but acceptance in the wider world and so having got that, it would be a very unusual artist who was going to throw it all away and spend all his time in . .

JEFFREY BROWN: Careful.

ROBERT MACNEIL: I'm trying to put it delicately. . . So but yeah.

JEFFREY BROWN: I think we know what you mean.

ROBERT MACNEIL: Of course it happens and it's life.

JEFFREY BROWN: Let's turn to this kind of bigger picture here. I know this is very important to you. There were a number of questions about the larger, MacDowell, but the larger role of arts in our culture. Let me read you a couple. Will Holliday from Seattle, "I really enjoyed this segment. I'm only 25 but it seems to me that the general public undervalues most aspects of intellectualism and artistry. Do you think that this has always been the case? How do artists change their values when they're so much in the shadows of society?"

John Whiting of Okemos, Michigan, "Other than the retreat and support offered by an organization like MacDowell, do you have any additional ideas about encouraging the arts and artists in the larger community of the general culture? It often seems as though the general population is determined to deny and make impossible any concerted attempt in allowing the artist and her muse to be heard or to be thoughtfully interacted with."

ROBERT MACNEIL: Well, there's a lot to say about this, far too much to say in one answer. But I'll tell you what I'll do. I will email you an essay I wrote on this which was included as a chapter in the book we published for the centennial. And if you want to, you can put that on the website. I think there are a couple of things to say. One I think, as I said in the piece with you at MacDowell, art is a very visible expression of the American ideals of freedom. No people are freer than artists. They're beholden to no one, they do what they think is right to do, a few of course aim only for the commercial market, but most of them are following their own inner sense of what to do. That is the ultimate freedom and that kind of creative freedom is being more and more watched by American industry, who knows that America should stay intellectual in the world, has got to cultivate creativity here because other countries are breathing down our necks all the time.

And great masses of people in India and China and Brazil and elsewhere are very creative. I'm talking about every kind of creativity now. So a lot of industry is looking at the way artists create and how they, what goes on in their minds and what's the sort of wavelength that they get on that makes them do things that other people haven't done before? That's one way of looking at it. Another is I think art is a national value. This was recognized by successive governments during the Cold War when we felt at such peril with the threats we perceived from the Soviet Union.

The federal government spent a lot of money using art as a weapon in the Cold War, promoting a jazz program on the Voice of America which was heard all over the world. The host of that program became a great star in the Soviet Union, it was on for 30 years, even though they listened clandestinely. American artists, musicians, theater companies were sent abroad at American government expense to express the freedom of the ideas that this country stands for. Arthur Miller is almost more celebrated a playwright in Europe than he was in his last few decades in the United States. Because they saw "The Death of a Salesman" as a free expression of opinion of some of the darker values of competitive American capitalist society. His film on, sorry, his play on "The Crucible", was a marvelous expression of during a time of enormous restraint on political thought in this country during the McCarthy era when many artists, particularly from Hollywood, were blacklisted because their scripts were not towing the line that the McCarthy supports felt they should.

Arthur Miller's "The Crucible" about the Salem witch trials was seen as a metaphor for freedom of expression against pressure from government. And the CIA and other organizations funneled money into publications that through the Congress for Culture, Freedom ... in other words, it was regarded even by conservatives as very important to put this face to the world which was, ultimately, while there was a standoff militarily, ultimately it was a battle of ideas and the freedom to express those ideas.

ROBERT MACNEIL: Well, I think poetry has never been in America, despite having produced some great poets, it's never been the mass appeal sport that, for instance, it was in Russia in the 19^th century and particularly in the Soviet era and beyond.

JEFFREY BROWN: As a real moral voice.

ROBERT MACNEIL: Yeah, when a person like Vigny Yevtushenko could fill huge sports stadiums declaiming his poetry. It's never been that way in the United States although the recent surge in poetry jams and poetry readings and everything and the attention that the National Association of Poets is creating by promoting poems, the institution of a poet laureate in the United States, a relatively recent development.

The fact that John Kennedy used one of the great current poets, Robert Frost, in his inaugural; there is a level of recognition of poetry and I think that's growing. The NewsHour is certainly helping that by paying the attention that you pay to poets.

JEFFREY BROWN: Well, let me end then by asking you how you look at the future. We had a few questions along those lines for MacDowell, for the arts, for your own participation in those.

ROBERT MACNEIL: Well, I think we've come through a period when the arts became a kind of convenient whipping boy in the so-called culture wars. There was a time in the late '80s and early '90s when people in Congress took exception to some vigorous and very, to many people, unseemly art.

For example, a crucifix standing in a thing of urine, for example. A sort of collage representing the Virgin Mary with hunks of elephant dung. Anyway, some members of Congress took umbrage at all this and forced the National Endowments for the Arts, at first, to require artists to sign a pledge that if they got money from the endowment it wouldn't be used for anything that might later be considered obscene. Well, these battles over obscenity and local standards and what obscenity is, we thought it was all solved in the 1930's when the Supreme Court ruled that James Joyce's novel Ulysses was not pornographic or not obscene and put a standard of a sort of artistic or redeeming value on it, then they become controversial again and again and again and that will always go on.

I think we're sliding away from that extreme controversy right now. The culture wars seem to have calmed down a little bit, but I think the future of art in this country, if you consider everything in the arts, the most popular arts of television, of films, popular music, dance, as well as the more traditional paintings, sculpture, serious classical music and so on, I think they're great. It may be that we're in for a period of danger for classical music, CD sales of classical music go down because the people who were brought up in those old, in the canon, the Beethoven, the Mozart, Bach thing are getting old and moving on, and people like Singleton and Paul Moravec struggle against that.

But I think there's a healthy appetite in this country for the creative. And it is a huge market abroad. American exports of creative work from Hollywood films to independent films to music of all kinds and to literature, they totally add up to more than any other single export of this country including the huge aerospace industry. And moreover, the arts in this country, profit and nonprofit, employ more people than many other forms of work like accounting, for example, or computer programs and so on. So I think it's healthy. It's quite a struggle for a lot of non-profit groups to stay level. You asked about MacDowell, I think we're going to be fine.

JEFFREY BROWN: You're looking for the, you're ready to start the next 100 years.

ROBERT MACNEIL: Well, we started the next 100 years and this will end this year of our celebration but the Colony's in better shape than ever and of course if anybody wanted to give it any money, we wouldn't object, but I hope you will include, which I don't have right in front of me at the moment, the address of MacDowell, both the New York and Peterborough offices with this program because I'd like any people who think they might want to go there, to know where to apply.

JEFFREY BROWN: OK, that's great. We will certainly do that. Alright, well Robin, thanks so much for answering some of the viewers questions and talking to us again.

ROBERT MACNEIL: It's a pleasure.

JEFFREY BROWN: Robert MacNeil is the chairman of the MacDowell Colony. Thanks very much. Nice to talk to you.