Ninth Annual Nancy Hanks Lecture on Arts and Public Policy, presented by the American Council for the Arts, at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Eisenhower Theater, Washington, D.C., March 19, 1996.

Carlos Fuentes is one of Latin America's most distinguished novelists and a one-man international cultural and political force. An internationally renowned writer, he has been honored for his work. Carlos Fuentes not only serves as a statesman for his country, but as a world advocate for arts and culture.

This is shocking to me, this willful insistence on the expendable nature of art, these short-sighted policies that perpetuate the gap between the majority of the people and the culture that, after all, the people themselves created. What is often forgotten when public support for the arts and humanities is discussed is that apart from giving talented men and women the chance they would not otherwise have, they give the audiences, the public itself, the chance to become active discoverers of their own value and dignity as bearers of the culture that we all share. (p. 3, 4, 13)

Ninth Annual Nancy Hanks Lecture on Arts and Public Policy, presented by the American Council for the Arts, at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Eisenhower Theater, Washington, D.C., March 19, 1996.