The End of Jimmy Kimmel and the Return of Cultural Gatekeepers

<![CDATA[    Jimmy Kimmel has been canceled. In his place should come a show that celebrates and showcases the best of America’s arts.    We need to bring back America’s culture gatekeepers, the shows and platforms that enrich the people. This doesn’t mean censorship - with the internet, people are allowed to read, watch, and write what they want - but it does mean returning to a place where we highlight the best our culture has to offer. Because I’ll let you in on a secret - American arts culture is vibrant, spiritual, impressive in its talent, and even patriotic. We just don’t see a lot of it because nimrods like Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert were hogging all the attention. It’s time to turn CNN into an arts channel. Give the dead late-night space over to shows about great American authors or live jazz concerts. Lift people up.    There once was a time in America when our media served as a gatekeeper between the people and art that would enrich them. In an illuminating essay for Commentary, social historian Fred Siegel explored how the American masses embraced the highbrow in the 1950s. Americans at the time “were sampling the greatest works of Western civilization for the first time.” The book Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America revealed that “twenty years ago, you couldn’t sell Beethoven out of New York. Today we sell Palestrina, Monteverdi, Gabrieli, and Renaissance and Baroque music in large quantities.” There was a 250 percent growth in the number of local symphony orchestras between 1940 and 1955.     In 1955, writes Siegel, “15 million people paid to attend major league baseball games. 35 million paid to attend classical music concerts. The New York Metropolitan Opera’s Saturday afternoon radio broadcast drew a listenership of 15 million out of an overall population of 165 million.”    Siegel notes that there were gatekeepers to get this great art to the people: “NBC spent $500,000 in 1956 to present a three-hour version of Shakespeare’s Richard III starring Laurence Olivier. The broadcast drew 50 million viewers; as many as 25 million watched all three hours.” Siegel observes that “on March 16, 1956, a Sunday chosen at random,” the viewer could have seen a discussion of the life and times of Toulouse-Lautrec by three prominent art critics, an interview with theologian Paul Tillich, an adaptation of Walter Van Tilburg Clark’s Hook, a documentary on mental illness with Dr. William Menninger, and a 90-minute performance of The Taming of the Shrew. Saul Bellow’s “The Adventures of Augie March,” a National Book Award winner, sold a million copies in paperback in the early 1950s.    John F. Kennedy famously supported the arts. “The life of the arts,” he said, “far from being an interruption, a distraction, in the life of a nation, is very close to the center of a nation’s purpose.”    Why can’t we fill the spaces of the cancelled with our great art? One of my favorite artists is the jazz singer Kurt Elling, whose album Nightmoves is a stirring American masterpiece that is inspired by everyone  from John Coltrane to Walt Whitman. Elling is currently appearing on Broadway - why not interview him on CNN? The play “Heroes of the Fourth Turning,” is an acclaimed work about Catholic conservatives attempting to negotiate the modern world - would Jimmy Fallon interview them? Great novelists abound, including Marlon James, whose work A Brief History of Seven Killings about the attempted assassination of singer Bob Marley, is brilliant. Composer Philip Glass is 85 and still producing astounding music. The theatrical release of Hamilton has made $15 million in a week and is still going strong. Not far from where I am typing this is the Glenstone Museum, an incredible arts space in Maryland that features some of America’s greatest painters. Why not feature them on a weekly arts show? Why not platform the recent and incredible concert for Mother Theresa? Why not fill out souls?    America is taking out the cultural trash, and we need gatekeepers who love America and her arts to step in.    America used to have people who served as conduits between the masses and culture. In a fascinating 2016 article in the Los Angeles Times, James Rosen noted that conservative founding father William F. Buckley appeared on The Tonight Show over a dozen times. Rosen: “Today, the regular presence on the leading late night TV shows of someone like Buckley, an aristocratic intellectual given to speaking in whole paragraphs, even other languages – he began one Tonight appearance with several sentences in Spanish – would seem, in a lineup dominated by actors and pop stars, glaringly out of place. Back then, however, Buckley fit right in and we were, as a nation, richer for it.” Rosen celebrates the America that was “a Warholian conflation of High and Low that placed entertainers, athletes, politicians, novelists, intellectuals, psychics and oddballs on the same TV couch.”    Again, I’m not talking about censorship. I love ribald movies and righteous punk rock and ranting oddballs who think America is controlled by Hobbits. Let them do their thing on the internet and free cable access platforms and yelling on street corners. Let’s just put forward our best on our TV screens, the face we present to our children and to the world.    Jimmy Kimmel is gone. Long live Philip Glass.]]>