Little Rock is a little city. Or a big town, depending on your point of view.
Officially, there are just under 200,000 people in the city itself, but the better measure takes in surrounding municipalities and unincorporated areas. Pull back a little and the best guess is there are more than 740,000 people in what's called the Central Arkansas Metropolitan Statistical Area. Pull back a little more and there are more than 900,000 in the Combined Statistical Area that includes Little Rock.
And 3 million or so people in Arkansas.
Maybe that sounds like a lot, but it's not. It's the 78th largest of 390 MSAs in the country, the 61st largest of 174 CSAs in the country. There are 32 states with more population. For a lot of our fellow Americans, and maybe for some of us, this makes us negligible.
I know because I used to argue with movie publicists about our market size. They'd tell me that because we weren't in a Top 50 market they couldn't grant us an interview of a director or give us a screening of a given movie; I'd counter that we were a statewide newspaper with the largest circulation of any publication in their territory. Sometimes that worked, but most of the time they'd go back to their scripts and tables: We weren't worth their time. They couldn't find us on a map.
They'd usually say it more politely than that, but that's what it came down to.
I suspect you know the feeling--just about everyone, no matter where they're from or where they live, knows the feeling. We have to shrug that off because it's one of those things we can't control.
What you can do is the best you can. It doesn't matter whether other people think you've got no business pursuing excellence. You pursue excellence. You try to run that dragon down. You might be as good as anyone.
Visit Bentonville or El Dorado, stand in Thorncrown Chapel or read The Choiring of the Trees. Listen to "The Weight," or better yet, "Growin' Trade." While there are plenty of people willing to tell you mediocrity is as much as you can hope for, there's always the option to keep your head down and work hard. After a few years, look up and see where it got you.
Then work some more.
. . .
I'm looking at Studio Gang's renderings of what the Arkansas Arts Center is to become. Naturally, they are handsome visions of the future, an idealized dream of what applying $128 million to renovation and new construction might realize. A corridor of light, glass and green, a 5,500-square-foot "Cultural Living Room" and a restaurant opening into a MacArthur Park repopulated with 250 new trees.
It will probably cost more than that, and the planned opening might get pushed back from early 2022, and there will likely be some controversies attached and legitimate questions raised about the nature of our priorities. Already people are lamenting this money will not be spent on schools, that the City of Little Rock--which has committed more than $31 million to the project via a hotel-tax revenue bond--should find some more practical project to back, like preserving the golf loop at War Memorial.
(From an aesthetic view, if we were to save a golf course, Hindman Park would be the one to save; it's by far the most interesting and challenging layout of Little Rock's municipal courses. It's a hardscrabble course with good bones, as compared to the enjoyable but rather featureless Rebsamen. The goofy charm of War Memorial--the favorite track of some of my friends--aside, it's not a real golf course. And notwithstanding its origins as a philanthropic project, I'd like to see the First Tee continue its mission, which has more to do with producing good citizens than junior golfers. It's a worthy project and, while we might have a discussion about the best way to go about it, we clearly ought to support it.)
My feeling is a city needs both green spaces and cultural loci--parks and museums--and that, if a choice needs to be made, golf courses can be supplied by entrepreneurs. Not that we ought to feel particularly validated by the arrival of a Topgolf franchise, or a Trader Joe's. While some of us might welcome these amenities (though Two Buck Chuck is neither very good or $1.99 anymore; last I checked it was $3.99) they're not what makes anywhere a great place to live.
A well-curated arts center is different, and can serve as both an engine of economic development and civic treasure, a repository of aspirational notions and tokens of self-measurement and discovery. Our drive to create, to make things and imbue them with mystery and meaning, is what separates us from other creatures, what makes us human and our temporary time in this realm not only bearable but beautiful. We need the stories that art supplies as surely as we need food and shelter, and if a government has any purpose at all it should be to better the lives of its citizens.
Not that the Arkansas Arts Center's renovation is to be publicly funded--of the $118 million it had raised for the project as of last week, more than 75 percent was from private sources, from rich people and rich people's corporations and companies. Which is probably how it should be, given that it's become very difficult for wage-earning people to accrue the sort of capital that allows them to subscribe to more than a handful of worthy causes. Most of us have to weigh carefully what we will support and how we might support it; no wonder that a lot of institutions we once took for granted now seem vulnerable.
But while a financial elite might reinvigorate the AAC, it's important that the AAC not be--or be seen as--an elitist institution. It's important that it be a hive for its community, an unintimidating and inviting place for locals, not just another rentable space to host business casual fundraisers. Not just another country club alternative.
I'm not worried about that; the AAC has always had strong bones, with an estimable permanent collection, solid educational programs and a children's theater that's as ambitious as it is freewheeling. It's mostly had its head down, seeming not to know--or care--it's in a Double-A city in a state some otherwise smart people can't find on a map.
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Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.
Editorial on 05/21/2019