Something for everyone at Gold Coast Arts Center

It took me seven years to complete my psychology Ph.D.  at SUNY Stony Brook. I  may be slow but extremely dogged.  
My fellowship ran out after four years and so was forced to support myself in some other way as I worked on my dissertation.   
I always loved the arts and heard about the Performing Arts Foundation in Huntington. 
They had a thriving artists in the schools program and were looking for a grant writer and evaluator. I met the director  Clint Marantz, we hit it off and I was hired.  
My paychecks were written by Harry Chapin, who was a great supporter of the arts. The whole experience was  enormous fun.   
Since then I have always had a fondness for aesthetic education and was happy to recently discover the Gold Coast Arts Center in Great Neck.   
The Gold Coast Arts Center was founded by the remarkable Regina Gil who trained at  the High School of Performing Arts in Manhattan. That happens to be the high school which the  film and TV series “Fame” was based upon.    
Ms. Gil  has kept what she learned there alive by creating the Gold Coast Arts Center for the students and families of Long Island. It serves as a hub  for arts education and local performances including painting, sculpture, music, dance, dramatics, film, ceramics, fencing and chess.  
They also run the annual Gold Coast International Film Festival and the arts center is affiliated  with Kennedy Center in Washington and the National Gallery of Art.  
In other words this is a big booming buzzing operation.
I caught up with Associate Director Caroline Sorokoff at their building in Great Neck and she was gracious enough to give me a tour of the facilities. 
She walked me  through music rooms, dance studios, painting and ceramics studios, cartoon and illustration rooms, films screening rooms and more.  
I also met Sonia Arora who was in charge of the Artists in the Schools programs.  
Caroline told me that the value of an arts center like this is  how it adds a wide range of  culture to the town and draws people from all over Long Island, which benefits the town and the shopkeepers enormously.  
She said a cultural center like this adds to suburban life and makes it more than just  barbeques and backyards. 
I asked about funding and she said that nearly all of the budget comes from private donations and foundations. 
They rely on funding  from various sources such as the Town of North Hempstead,  JM Kaplan Fund, JP Morgan Chase Foundation, Douglas Ellimen Real Estate and LIU. 
There has always been  lack of funding for the arts. 
When Clint Marantz  hired me to evaluate all the artist in the schools programs in Suffolk County I asked what my salary would be and he told me “Oh no, there’s no salary. This is a voluntary job.”  
As a hungry graduate student I was in no position to donate my services for free and eventually Harry Chapin himself was the guy who paid me.  
 My tale is apocryphal and demonstrates how in America the arts are devalued, ignored and de-emphasized in education.   
Back in the ‘70s The Performing Arts Foundation produced great regional theater and pioneering programs in aesthetic education yet had no money. 
This is the way it is in America.  
But the arts can never be repressed and ought not be ignored.   
They provide the audience and the creator a chance to understand our humanity and our times.  They offer enormous emotional and visual pleasure.  And the truly great artists transform themselves into oracles.   
When Yeats wrote “The Second Coming”  back in 1919 he correctly predicted the anarchy that was about to be unleashed in Europe.   
In 1994,  Jeff Koons started producing oversized stainless steel balloon toy sculptures. 
His  “Balloon Dog (Orange),” sold for $56.4  million, the largest sum ever paid for a work from a living artist.  
His  works are usually hated by art critics but loved by the public.  They all look shiny, pretty and gay but have a quality of hiding something sinister on the inside.  
Koons himself described them as the Trojan horses of the 21st century.  
All of Koon’s  glitzy  bigger than life  art pieces  in some way predicted the emergence of  our shiny new larger than life cartoon like  new president.  
Very nice looking on the outside  but with an air of something sinister and foreboding deep within.    
Art looks into the future, predicts the future and foretells the future. 
Art is endlessly interesting and remains  one of the foundations of a culture. It should not be ignored. It should not be pushed aside. In fact it should be elevated to the highest status in our nation.   
Even higher than A-Rod, Mike Tyson, Kobe Bryant or the NFL.
So hurray for Regina Gil, bravo to  Caroline Sorokoff and congrats to  Sonai Arora and every other teacher and artist at the  Gold Coast Arts Center.  
And now dear reader get off of your couch, get out of your living rooms and go take some art classes or photography classes or poetry classes  after you enroll your kid in some dance classes.   
This will be the best decision you ever make. I promise.