Rocco Landesman

Rocco Landesman spoke for the first time in the role of the tenth chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts at the 2009 GIA conference, Navigating the Art of Change. The Brooklyn convening was subtitled “The Recession Conference,” which Landesman, stating the obvious, translated as “the news is bad.” Nonetheless, he urged us to be optimistic. “Art is the most optimistic of activities.… There is grandeur in art. There is boldness. There is even, to use a very loaded word, the possibility for change, and we mortals need that.”