Center for Urban Studies Will Help In Year-Long Study of Boston Arts

The Harvard-M.I.T. Joint Center for Urban Studies will participate in a year-long study of the arts in Boston.

A $30,000 grant from the Permanent Charity Fund of Boston will finance the effort to make the city "a new Athens."

At a meeting in Boston earlier this week, several panelists discussed the study, which is sponsored by the Cultural Foundation of Boston. Among them was Daniel P. Moynihan, director of the Joint Center.

Moynihan praised Boston's citizens for their "sense of love for the city." But he deplored the "compartmentalization of the arts, the elitist culture that exists here."

People of all classes must mingle, Moynihan said, in a "community culture." And a necessary first step for providing that culture is the creation of proper facilities for the arts. For example, he said, Boston should build an opera house.

But other panelists disagreed. Eli Goldston, president of the Cultural Foundation, said that education of the public to appreciate art was needed before new buildings. The committee for Winterfest, which his organization began, has discovered that the public is not interested in art unless it is "popularized," Goldston said.

But such differences of opinion will be settled by the findings of the survey, the panelists concluded.