Dana Gioia, Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, visits Zócalo to discuss the impoverishment of American popular culture and “the need to reopen the conversation between our best minds and the broader public.” He argues that the real purpose of arts education isn’t to produce more artists but to “create complete human beings capable of leading successful and productive lives in a free society.” Something happens, he says, when an individual actively engages in the arts—be it reading a novel at home, attending a concert at a local church, or seeing a dance company perform at a college campus—that awakens both a heightened sense of identity and civic awareness. He warns that America’s cultural decline has “huge and alarming economic consequences.”