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Stanford Business magazine

 
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On the Eighth Day God Created Diet Coke

The chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts has a recurring nightmare. He is in Rome visiting the Sistine Chapel. “I look up at Michelangelo’s incomparable fresco of the Creation of Man. I see God stretching out his arm to touch the reclining Adam’s finger. And then I notice in the other hand Adam is holding a Diet Pepsi,” Dana Gioia, MBA ’77, told Stanford University’s 2007 graduates at their commencement in June.

Don’t get him wrong. Gioia loves the free market. He spent 15 years in the food industry and, in fact, helped invent Jell-O Jigglers. “But we must remember that the marketplace does only one thing,” he said. “It puts a price on everything.”

Culture conveys value beyond price, and art is its most valuable expression, he said. “Art is an irreplaceable way of understanding and expressing the world. Art addresses us in the fullness of our being—simultaneously speaking to our intellect, emotions, intuition, imagination, memory, and physical senses. Art restores our humanity.”