All Artistic Things Considered

It’s a show about culture, but it is neither a dusty monologue from some museum docent nor “ ‘Entertainment Tonight’ for the radio,” according to the host.

Instead, Public Radio International’s “Studio 360” tries to draw connections between fine art and pop culture, demonstrate how high-concept design filters to everyday life, and expose, as the show’s motto says, “where art and real life collide.”

“This stuff is not just something that’s in museums, it’s not in concert halls, it’s on TV and in our bathrooms,” said Kurt Andersen, the voice behind the weekly program--the fastest-growing show on public radio--which airs Fridays at 3 p.m. on KCRW-FM (89.9).

“The goal for the show is to demonstrate that culture is a kind of continuous panorama,” Andersen said. “We think of culture as being balkanized niches. It’s a disparate fabric, but it’s all one fabric.

“The way we’re trying to look at it is not in some ivory-tower, abstract way,” he said. “Everybody is welcome.”

Andersen, 47, said he sees the typical listener as someone who would attend a Moby concert one night and go to a museum the next day, or watch a Spanish art film as well as “Men in Black II.”

The hourlong magazine show features a guest and a broad “cover story” topic each week, such as drugs, outer space, animals or repetition. This week’s program, about toys, features cult comic-book artist Gary Panter, who was also set designer for television’s “Pee Wee’s Playhouse.” The show also talks to a virtuoso musician who has moved from grand piano to toy piano, and has a segment on an artist who portrays Bible characters and stories in Lego bricks.

Other guests have included Woody Allen talking about the influence of jazz on American culture, musician Steve Earle talking about prison life and art, and usually silent magician-comedian Teller talking about “the artistic urge to create, keep and reveal secrets.” On that same show was a story about coded messages stitched onto quilts that aided slaves trying to escape through the Underground Railroad.

“Art and culture programming has historically been kind of stiff,” said Dean Cappello, vice president of programming at New York’s WNYC, which co-produces the show with PRI, the Minneapolis-based public radio network. But on “Studio 360,” “there isn’t this separation between high and low. We’re trying to look at the interesting, profound ways people are expressing themselves. It’s sort of ear-catching, but it’s also substantial.”

In a piece about Shakespeare and how his words have infiltrated every aspect of culture, the show played a clip from an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie in which he says to the bad guys, “To be, or not to be? Not to be.”

“And then he shoots everybody,” Cappello said. The point of the excerpt was that Shakespeare has “seeped into a lot of different areas of our lives and is more pervasive than people are aware of.”

A recurring segment is “Design for the Real World,” which deconstructs the logic behind everyday items, such as the baseball cap, the light switch or the telephone ring. For example, according to a Museum of Modern Art curator, a Post-it note looks the way it does for two reasons: square, to keep the user’s message focused and concise; and yellow, for urgency.

In addition, Andersen’s weekly commentary has examined topics ranging from contemporary composers--”Who are our Brahmses and Tchaikovskys, the historically important composers of this time? Why don’t we even know their names?”--to the covering of the breast on a statue at the Department of Justice.

“It doesn’t sound like college professors talking to us,” said Eleanor Harris, senior vice president of syndication at PRI. “Public radio has done incredibly well at providing really good, objective information about news and covering things in depth. But sometimes it can sound dry to people.”

That’s why public radio has continually tried and failed to create successful programs about art and culture, she said, and why PRI spent five years developing “Studio 360.” They tinkered with the title and the format, and tapped Andersen a full year before the show debuted, in December 2000.

“He’s really bright. His intense curiosity is something that speaks to listeners,” Harris said. “He is both well versed in ‘high’ art and popular art, and he’s really interested in how it all works together.”

Nevertheless, Cappello said, “When we started out, I had some trepidation: ‘When so much before us has failed, why do we think this is going to succeed?’ It’s more emotional. It has more impact.

“We have listeners who have these big appetites for big ideas. There’s a sort of standard boilerplate idea of culture--fine art, opera and those kinds of things,” he said. “The difference for us is to take it and bring it into a new form and make it fresh.”

That approach has helped make “Studio 360” the fastest-growing program on public radio, he said. After the show debuted on WNYC, it went national in March 2001. Now it’s heard on 134 stations around the country by more than 400,000 listeners a week.

“The audiences we have in public radio are smart and engaged and don’t want things served up in the simplest form,” Cappello said. “Where the rest of media is faster, more digested, more wrapped up with a bow, this show tries to explore the messier things in life. It really does help you look at the world in a different way.”

KCRW was the first station outside New York to carry the program, in January 2001. The reason, according to station general manager Ruth Seymour: “Him.”

Andersen started his journalism career at Time, winning awards as a criminal justice and national affairs reporter. He spent eight years as the magazine’s architecture and design critic, and also wrote a weekly column about culture and the media. He worked as a cultural columnist for the New Yorker and has written for the New York Times, the Atlantic Monthly, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Architectural Record and others. He was editor in chief of New York magazine and Spy, which he co-founded, and he also co-founded Inside.com.

He’s produced TV shows for ABC and NBC. He authored a satirical novel, “Turn of the Century” (1999), and is working on another. He wrote a book of essays, “The Real Thing,” and co-wrote an off-Broadway revue, “Loose Lips.”

“I knew who he was and just figured--there are some people you meet, they have a body of work behind them, and if you figure you’re running a station like KCRW, these are the kinds of people you want to have on the air,” Seymour said.

Andersen said that even though he’s never hosted a radio program before, his previous work gives him insight into diverse subjects.

“I try to draw on all of my experience. I feel I have a little bit more standing to get under the skin of artists and writers than if I hadn’t tried to do what they do,” he said. “The attempt and the wish every week is to make the connections. And to not make it like homework.”