We don't need to rely on billionaires for cool things
A short rant about Ed Bass and the Caravan of Dreams
Hello and thanks for reading.
It feels like American society is closer than ever to becoming an oligarchy. But we are not — or rather, not yet — required to actually swear fealty to billionaires. For now, any deference to the super-rich beyond what is necessary to keep yourself alive is voluntary. (Readers of Lost in Panther City probably don’t need to hear this, but I’m reminding you anyway!)
I was thinking about this the other day when reading about the Caravan of Dreams, the former jazz nightclub and performance arts space financed by Ed Bass. Perhaps the best publicly available resource on the Caravan, it turns out, is a quirky, three-part, 250-page, self-published book by local music historian William Williams. (It’s posted on his website, where you can download it for free.) It's an odd but undeniably compelling project that's less of a cohesive book per se and more like a collection of oral history interview transcripts, old photos, and archival documents all crammed together into a rough book-like shape.
I can't deny the book’s value, especially because Williams put in the effort to include hundreds of high-quality scans of what seems like every surviving photograph and ticket stub he could find. It’s an incredible resource.
But my enthusiasm for the project curdled a bit when I read the book's "acknowledgements and afterword," where Williams goes out of his way, not just to credit Ed Bass for his role in developing the Caravan, but also to valorize him in a manner that can only be described as cringe:
I’ve only spoken with Ed Bass once, and that was at the recent opening of the new Caravan of Dreams Gallery in downtown Fort Worth. In discussing this project, I underscored the fact that I was intent on making him out to look like the hero-saint of the arts that I truly consider him to be — and I’ve consistently taken the high road throughout this journey, as opposed to exploring any of the controversies that became sensationalized headlines.
It's one thing to point out the undeniable and unavoidable fact that Ed Bass funded the Caravan of Dreams and was instrumental in its creation; it's quite another to bestow upon him the label of "hero-saint" and also tell him this to his face!
This isn't even the only such moment in Williams's book. There's also this gem:
When the Caravan closed, exactly 18 years after it opened, one local writer lamented that “there’s not enough celebrating of Ed Bass’ crazy genius.” This work, and indeed the entire story of the Caravan, is a celebratory tribute to that “crazy genius” who miraculously brought this Mecca for the Creative Arts into being, and revitalized a desolate downtown in the process.
What really bugs me about this is that Williams’s book is, in reality, a decent tribute to the many other people who actually did the work of designing, building, and performing in the Caravan. His research is basically proof of exactly the opposite of what he says, and the book suggests that any magic in the Caravan was the result, not of Ed Bass’s singular genius, but of other people's prodigious creativity and talent.
The argument, such as it exists, for worshiping Ed Bass in this way is basically this: Fort Worth’s downtown was a barren cultural wasteland in the 1980s, and it took someone with a vision, eclectic taste, and a willingness to spend money to push through the city’s conservative passivity and create something cool.
Mitchell Schnurman, former business writer for the Star-Telegram and later the Dallas Morning News, made exactly this case in a 2001 column defending Ed Bass’s decision to shut down the Caravan, arguing that anyone who objected was, essentially, a whiner who just didn’t realize how generous Bass had been for so long:
Most investors never would have opened the Caravan in the first place, and almost nobody would have shown such staying power. Bass turned out the lights only after landing a big-name tenant, the Reata restaurant, that could add a distinct flavor to the downtown mix.
Perhaps people criticized the move because they saw the Caravan as a public project, except that it wasn't. Maybe it just seemed that way, because Bass and his brothers practically rebuilt For Worth on their own.
They created the landmark City Center towers, the Renaissance Worthington Hotel and Sundance Square renovation, and it’s hard to quibble with their judgment.
Especially when it’s been on their nickel.
But what Schnurman inadvertently pointed out was precisely the problem with relying on billionaires to provide us with good things, whether that’s art or music or newspapers or higher education or social media platforms that aren’t trash. The inevitable devil’s bargain of relying on them to subsidize our cultural institutions is that we aren’t permitted to object when they’re like, “actually nah nevermind lol.” Ed Bass funded the Caravan of Dreams during a period of time that was, in his own words, a phase of “adventure investing.” But billionaires get bored. Their adventures end.
In fact, there's no reason in the world that something like the Caravan of Dreams couldn't be a public project, especially if financed by taxing billionaires and their companies. I’m not pretending that public-funded art projects are perfect or utopian, especially in Fort Worth. You can look at the planned redevelopment of the Community Arts Center and see that much clearly.
But I would still much rather struggle over the fate of institutions in which we all, in principle, have a stake and a voice. Our city would be a whole lot better with weird and eclectic art spaces that can’t just be shut down and replaced by a steakhouse at the whim of one man.