Why the A in L.A. Does Not — But Should — Stand for ART.

I wrote this in 2004. Frustratingly almost 20 years later very little has changed. Our dismissal of aesthetics — both organized and spontaneous — has only hindered efforts to build strong communities and develop healthy humans. Instead we face a downstream crisis of millions falling into charity, poverty, or incarceration. We face amplified police budgets and panicked nonprofits who know they are only putting a bandaid on a cut vs healing the whole human. I challenged leadership two decades ago to do better and yet, shockingly, in a city whose core economic asset is creativity we still have a poorly funded Cultural Affairs department and zero innovation in our city around weaving powerful aesthetic experiences into our city’s infrastructure from tourism to neighborhood revitalization, mental health, housing and poverty abatement to job development.

A look back at what I wrote almost 20 years ago in 2004:

Several years ago, I heard a Los Angeles city politician suggest that the A in L.A. stood for Art. This moving idea has stayed with me, but it is, of course, not literally true. The A in L.A. is the first letter of the Spanish word for “angels.” I know what an angel looks like not because I have ever met one, but because I have seen visual representations of them in paintings, drawings and animation. Symbolically, the fact…