The UW Madison Arts Institute brought former chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, and recent transition team leader in Arts and Humanities for the Obama administration, Bill Ivey to Madison last week to talk about arts policy. Bill Ivey was the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts from 1998 through 2001, was director of the Country Music Foundation from 1971 to 1998, and was twice elected Chairman of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences.
Bill Ivey
Bill is now director of the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise and Public Policy at Vanderbilt University, where he’s connecting the dots between the public sector, nonprofits, commercial entertainment, and community arts. And his recent book, Arts, Inc.: How Greed and Neglect Have Destroyed our Cultural Rights, challenges our traditional approach to the arts in American life.
In Madison, Bill noted that President Obama was the first Presidential candidate to develop an arts policy, aided by national arts leaders and organizations such as Americans for the Arts. After the election, the arts became a policy issue for the new administration. He described his exciting involvement in the Obama transition process as the leader of the arts team, which involved analyzing the work of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS), and, making recommendations for the new directors of those agencies. He noted that the new NEA Chair, Rocco Landesman, a former Broadway producer, was a “non-mainstream” choice who should start to shake up things at the agency and in the arts – a good thing. He also noted that President Obama made an “Artist Corps” part of his campaign platform, and that the new Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act includes an Artist Corps among other provisions aimed at expanding national service. The Act took effect on October 1, 2009, with many details to be determined, but there is great promise in the idea.
Bill is working to reframe the conversation about arts, culture, heritage, creativity, and policy, and reconnect them to the daily issues of “expressive life.” He called for a new investment in arts, artistry, and cultural heritage—the expressive life of America, as he calls it. He challenged many long-standing assumptions and traditions about the image of the arts in America, and asked that we not be afraid to make cultural vibrancy a cornerstone of public policy. These traditions support the idea that the arts are an amenity, something that is separate from the rest of “real” life. This is reinforced through much of the language we use to describe the arts. Terms such as “fine arts” create an atmosphere of elitism and exclusivity that only serves to separate the arts from the rest of life.
Our stale assumptions are especially evident in the policy arena. The accepted infrastructure for the past 50 years has included artists, nonprofit arts organizations, state/regional/local agencies, National Endowment for the Arts, K-12 school systems. Bill challenged us to think and work in a bigger policy playing field and add to that existing framework. Doing so would expand opportunities for the arts sector and its audiences, including ways to access our cultural heritage, integration of the nonprofit and for-profit arts worlds, and a more entrepreneurial mindset. Bill also envisions a “cultural portfolio” for the national scene, which would bring together the arts and cultural agencies, including the NEA, NEH, IMLS, FCC and the Smithsonian Museums.
