Wilde’s first season with New York City Ballet was its London debut in the summer of 1950. Reviewing the season, Arnold Haskell wrote in his Ballet Annual that NYCB had done more “for the artistic prestige” of the U.S. “than a carload of crooners, ten years’ run of musicals, a high powered comedian and a million reels of Hollywood celluloid together.”
To reiterate: does anyone in the U.S. gov’t even give a thought to our artistic prestige abroad? Or give a thought to whether it might be nice to export something else besides perpetual war, our ever-dwindling manufacturing sector, and Apple lap tops? If a politician got up in Congress to talk about our artistic prestige, why, Marco Rubio would be lumping him together with the art historians! And you know what that means.