Peter Gelb’s admission to Michael Cooper in the The New York Times that he’s open to selling naming rights to the Met is appalling but not unexpected.
But why doesn’t Gelb decide to make the oligarchs really pay? After all, what they’re giving to get their names all over these major cultural institutions and facilities is–for them–chump change. Let’s get real: these people have TENS of BILLIONS of dollars. They don’t feel the slightest pinch from $100 million. The fact that the institutions are willing to undersell makes them look like saps–and who wants to give to a sap?
And why doesn’t Gelb, in every interview he gives, mention the fact that our government gives almost nothing in arts funding. The small amount that our national government was giving basically went down after one of the GOP’s habitual sting operations, this time on the National Endowment for the Arts, in the early 1990s.
Perhaps if Gelb did keep insisting that be part of the conversation, we might find a single national politician willing to advocate for the arts in a muscular way.
And if Gelb wants full houses, the first and main thing he needs to do: get those ticket prices down.