In Save Richmond’s previous installment of the Richmond Arts Flashback, we threw a spotlight on James Branch Cabell’s timeless essay, “Mr. Ritchie’s Richmond,” which traced the dysfunctional relationship between local artists and the city’s well-heeled arts overseers back to the 19th century.
In 2003, then-Richmond Times-Dispatch arts writer Clarke Bustard wrote an “accidental update” of Cabell’s screed that went even further back in time, evoking the words of Philip Dormer Stanhope, the fourth Earl of Chesterfield, who had offered this advice to his son in 1749:
“If you love music, hear it; go to operas, concerts and pay fiddlers to play to you; but I insist upon your neither piping nor fiddling yourself. It puts a gentleman in a very frivolous, contemptible light; brings him into a great deal of bad company; and takes up a great deal of time, which might be much better employed.”
To say that Bustard pulled no punches in this piece would be quite the understatement. As Bette Davis would say, “strap yourselves in.” Here is an excerpt from this incendiary arts column of May 11, 2003, titled, “The Earl of Chesterfield”:
What signals might we look for to see that… the downtown developers are really serious about a new emphasis on the arts?
How about these?
Through zoning, property purchases or other measures, city authorities actively recruit artists as residents, making sure that galleries, studios, and rehearsal and living spaces are retained when real-estate values begin to rise — rather than using artists like canaries in a coal mine, to see whether derelict neighborhoods can be made fit for high-dollar restoration.
The city begins to treat nightclubs, alternative galleries and other independent performance spaces as cultural assets rather than safety hazards, dens of iniquity or threats to public order.
Money, especially privately contributed money, begins to flow to performing artists rather than to buildings in which they will perform. How many of the people trying to raise $100 million for the Virginia Center for the Performing Arts would join a campaign to raise $100 million in endowment funds for the groups using the center — funds that would enable them to pay their artists truly professional salaries?
The city establishes, perhaps through the existing arts programs at VCU, conservatory-grade secondary and higher education in the fine and performing arts.
Unlikely? You bet.
About as unlikely as the male scion of one of Richmond’s better families, one of those fellows whose name begins with an initial and ends with a Roman numeral, making a name for himself as a concert pianist or a painter without being disowned by his clan.
The Earl of Chesterfield wouldn’t mind ponying up to build a theater, but he wouldn’t tolerate his offspring hanging out with all those artists downtown.
Yow!
I refer to this on-target essay as “accidental” because, after writing all of this, Bustard inexplicably became one of the chief apologists for the Virginia Performing Arts Foundation (VAPAF) — which, even today, under its current disguise as “the CenterStage Foundaton,” or “RPAC,” has few, if any, artists, arts professionals or arts administrators in positions of authority.
Two years after he wrote ‘The Earl of Chesterfield,” Bustard could be found inexplicably damning critics — forgetting that he himself was one of the earliest and most prominent — who dared to question an arts center plan that looked more like a real estate deal designed to boost the neighboring property values of rich Foundation board members than a worthy, arts-first initiative. It is a matter of public record that the original VAPAF proposal led to a $10 million hole in the ground, and wound up putting the city’s preeminent arts companies in a perilous financial situation.
Instead of righteously noting all of this, Bustard began penning unquestioning love notes to the Foundation, and forgot his earlier suggestions that the arts center’s well-heeled proponents (the “social descendants” of the Earl of Chesterfield) give their money directly to the city’s struggling arts companies. He trained his ire on critics of the Foundation, like Save Richmond, for daring to make the same arguments he himself had once made.
In the June 15, 2005 edition of the T-D, the man who criticized arts patrons “whose name begins with an initial and ends with a Roman numeral” wrote:
“Those who’ve made the debate over the performing arts center an exercise in generational and class conflict will come to regret this tactic.”
Uh-huh.
Click here and read Clarke Bustard’s original essay, “The Earl of Chesterfield.”
… and don’t forget the first installment in SR’s new Richmond Arts Flashback series, “Salvage Work.” With this series, we hope to provide some context for Richmond’s forthcoming Cultural Action Plan… because those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
Next up: Whatever happened to TheatreVirginia?