Monk at the White House

At the White House today, President Obama bestowed a National Medal of Arts on Meredith Monk. Something about the picture above gives me great delight. Monk is an internationally celebrated artist, but she has never come close to achieving the sort of mass-market stardom that now seems required for, say, the Kennedy Center Honors. The National Medal committee, which this year also honored George Shirley and the University Musical Society, is less driven by pop-culture triumphalism, even if a bestselling author and a movie star were on hand to collect prizes and dominate the media coverage.