SORRY TO TELL YOU THIS, BUT THE "ATHENS" OF AMERICA IS NEW YORK, NOT NEW ORLEANS

Malkin links to a terrific piece in the WSJ about the corruption inside the South in general, with a magifying glass focused on Louisiana, and on New Orleans in particular. Go there. You might like to know that Mississippi is actually more corrupt than Louisiana and I don't think it's an accident that both are in the guts of the "Old South," an area manifesting no idea of the future other than what can I steal today. One huge disagreement I have with John Fund is this statement contained in the middle of his piece

The area has given the country so much--in music, in cuisine, in style.

Permit me to differ with this statement. Other than Tennessee Williams, who wrote some of his stuff there, New Orleans and Louisiana are both artistic and cultural zeros.

Here's an ammended rundown that will show anyone that New Orleans is not an area that has given us much of anything but corrupt politics. It is a cultural sewer and as far from the "Athens of America" as it is possible to be.

First, ART: you know like in real painting and sculpture from American artists who have lived and worked there. Here is a list of the ten best painters as selected by American Artist. I won't list them all, but none are from Louisiana or Mississippi.
Edwin Ahlstrom who was educated in Chicago and now paints in Maryland; Lani Browning who was educated in D.C. and also teaches in Maryland; Ed Cooper who paints in Virginia. Then we can go to the famous Robert Motherwell from New York; Georgia O'Keefe educated in Texas, Chicago, and South Carolina and worked mostly in New York. In fact if you do a Google search you will not find a single outstanding painting or painter from New Orleans OR Louisiana.

Sculpture: Augustus Saint-Gaudens; you might think that an artist with a French sounding name would have to be from Louisiana. Wrong thought. Again, he did his work in New York. You can search and search and find nobody of stature from Louisiana.

Music: one might think that New Orleans is a source of marvelous composers from Louisiana, but that thought is wrong as well. Only Jazz has a connection with Louisiana, but you can search and search and you will find that almost none of the great jazz artists wrote their music there. Instead it is once again New York, Chicago, and a little bit of Kansas City.

In point of fact, New Orleans has produced zero in dance, plays (none of Williams plays premiered there and the city offered no opportunity for him), movies, novelists or photographers. William Faulkner was born in Mississippi and did all his writing there; Tennessee Williams was born in Mississippi, went to the University of Missouri and then graduated from University of Iowa. He did his first work in St. Louis, his first "break" came in Memphis, but it was the Group Theatre in New York that first awarded some of his early work. Williams actually did settle in New Orleans later in life and wrote from there (the nature of playwriting dictated he live in New York) as well as Key West in Florida. His He did his main writing in Key West and New Orleans. Movies were made of most of his plays.

Any claim to a cultue in Louisiana or New Orleans is bogus. Instead, The “Athens of America,” if you need one, is obviously New York or Chicago.

Once again I say that New Orleans is just another culturual sewer, more a Sodom and Gomorrah than a Paris, Rome, or New York. Bury it.