Director, the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy, Vanderbilt University
Former Chair, National Endowment for the Arts
"The Fate of the Arts"
April 3, 2004

For me, fate denotes condition and assessment of condition, neighed by an apprehensive glance towards the future. How healthy is the system of nurturing and gate keeping that advances or constrains art and art making? Does the architecture of our support system really serve artists organizations and the public interest? As for the arts, I think the capital A gives away the sense of the Arts that unguards this meeting. I think we are expected to be talking about the refined art forms of European lineage, plus perhaps jazz and musical theater, a few American forms that have kind of nudged there way under the tent. It is pretty much the definition that was assumed and that I worked with in conversations in and around our federal arts agency, the NEA. “The Arts,” capitalized.

But be advised as a folklorist, I operate from a somewhat broader definition, one that encompasses many forms of America’s expressive life: hip hop to design, blue grass to bow house, pow wow drumming to a myelin monument. For me, questions of determining cause, questions of fate, will ultimately resolve in the realm of public policy as society engages norms and architecture in art systems and also engages the assumptions and the categorical distinctions the define the balance among the key ingredients of art making, which is artistic vision, economic vitality of the process, and some definition of public interest. So I am going to concentrate my remarks on the fate of arts here in the U.S.

Over the years, cultural specialists have viewed the complex U.S. arts system at times with disdain, with curiosity, and in recent times, even with a grudging admiration. Some observers have suggested that the absence of a cabinet level Ministry of Culture, style cultural officer in the U.S., constitutes an obvious sign that culture, at least Culture with a capital C, had somehow skipped our society entirely. That view is less prevalent today. In fact, early in my tenure as NEA chairman, back in 1998, I detected an emerging respect for the diverse, decentralized character of the U.S. cultural model, especially coming from actors in highly centralized European Ministry systems that had suddenly run up against hard times. The view can be expressed something like this, this is kind of a made-up quote: “The U.S. system is healthy because it combines modest government funding; a long tradition of charitable giving my individuals, corporations, and NGOs; and a vigorous array of for-profit arts companies. If any part of this system stumbles, other pieces can pick up the slack. Diversity and decentralization are sources of strength, not an indication of weakness.” That is sort of the argument.
Seeing only as a system for ensuring the flow of dollars into some part of the system, this generous assessment may to some extent be justified. However, in my view, absent, both the Ministry of Culture or even a similar central cultural policy authority, the U.S. has unwittingly advanced two incompatible concepts of value that poorly engage the larger public purpose. From my perspective, that is the perspective of someone that has worked in the non-profit sector and within a government arts funding agency, we have divided art in the U.S. into either the popular or the precious. I will argue that the first category identifies a huge sector in which the consequences of art as commodity and as corporate asset have in a sense run amuck. Well the second, the precious, defines a realm of uncritical acceptance of the supply-side demands of refined arts’ elites.

The interaction of the incompatible distinctions and assumptions of each view has handed the U.S., early in our new century, a dangerously incoherent art system. You have read about this in Times, Wall Street Journal, and so on. The pending merger of Sony Music and BMG will among other things bring together the two most consequential archives of recorded American music and spoken word assembled during the twentieth century. Bring them together under the ownership of a single non-U.S. corporation. The exact size of the two collections of master disks and tapes that will be merged has never been made public and its exact size is probably unknown to the companies that own these assets. But it is fair to assume that the combined archive will include at least 4 million recorded performances.

Now of course mergers and acquisitions in the media business have been commonplace for decades, but given the depth and size of these collections, it is significant that the placement of large blocks of heritage into a giant non-U.S. company, newly created by this merger, has generated virtually no public outcry. Sony and BMG have already absorbed such venerable U.S. record company brand names as RCA, Colombia, Victor, Blue Bird, Red Seal, and Colombia Masterworks. And these are brands that back to the turn of the last century, back to the early twentieth century. Their archival holdings include the blues of Robert Johnson, vintage performances by Enrico Caruso, jazz solos of Louis Armstrong, outtakes of Bob Dylan recording sessions and millions and millions of disks, tapes, and hard drive data points. The fact that original recordings could be bought, sold, bundled up; if so desired shipped beyond U.S. borders and potentially even discarded by new owners, constitutes a stark commentary on the cultural consequences of an art-valuing system that sees art only as asset and commodity. And these risks to heritage are not mere hypotheses. After all, in the early 1960s RCA, to reduce expenses, storage of assets, dynamited one of its own warehouses blowing the building along with thousands of recordings, master disks shelved in that building into the Delaware River.

The notion of culture as corporate asset and commodity has evolved over three centuries, but it was greatly accelerated in 1900 when film, sound recording, and broadcasting permitted the performing arts to be fixed as products to which multiple revenue streams could be attached. Now because so much of America’s cultural output is grounded in the vernacular in music, drama, and dance that in a sense encapsulates the character of our diverse democracy. It can almost be argued that America’s real sense of its artistic heritage could only emerge once commerce made possible vernacular arts products that were facilitated by these new technologies. But for the music, film, and broadcasting industries in the last century all devolved as product and heritage as asset.

Within the arts industries, it is all about commodity and what might pass for policy work consists in audience and market research, intellectual property protection, and arts asset valuation. This sense of art as commodity and corporate asset limits the scope of policy conversations within the for-profits slice of the U.S. art-making spectrum. Questions of the public interest are engaged only if a determined arts executive steps outside of the boundaries defined by the bottom line or if regulation or legislation constrains corporate practice. However, regulation and legislation affecting the arts industries often only address culture and the public purpose inadvertently. However, even as we fail to engage the possible sale of huge chunks of America’s recorded sound heritage, a very different notion of value in art simultaneously shapes that part of the U.S. cultural landscape that is what can generally be referred to as “the Arts.”

A quick hint: every year more than eight thousand musician’s graduate from American conservatories and schools of music. Each new graduate possesses the bachelor of music of the Bachelor of Arts in music degree that should be the ticket to credentialed performance career. But there are only about 350 symphony orchestras in the U.S. and of these only 65 are of consequence. Simple math dictates that the eight thousand plus musicians who enter the market each year constitute about a larger than the total players employed in all of America’s significant orchestras. Clearly in the education of performing artists, employment opportunity—demand—does not play a significant role. In fact, even a cursory examination of the workings of this segment of the U.S. art continuum, of the non-profit arts, uncovers a notion of value that is just as dysfunctional as the unrestrained commodofication that underlies policy in America’s for-profit arts industries.

I would state it this way, “Non-profit arts organizations, especially the museums, orchestras, theaters, opera companies, and dance ensembles that enshrine the refined arts of Western European tradition act without any regard for audience demand, assuming instead that the inherent virtue of non-profit arts justifies an ever-expanding supply.” Non-profit arts advocates are actually non-pulsed when demand rears its ugly head. Several years ago my friends at Americans for the Arts, many of you know it is the leading arts funding advocacy group in the U.S., that group was surprised by the results of a national poll on arts education. The poll indicated that an overwhelming number of American parents supported arts training in schools. But an equally large majority, the same respondents, felt that current levels of arts education were adequate-- not inadequate, but adequate. However in the face of evidence that demand had been satisfied, demand existed but had been satisfied, the association remained undeterred.
The new advocacy campaign went forward behind the slogan: “Art, Just Ask for More.” And you may have seen ads for this slogan in the New York Times and other outlets as recently as a few weeks ago. “Just Ask for More” could serve as the perennial battle cry for all non-profit arts because in the non-profit world, abstract assumptions about the intrinsic value of the non-profit arts, the precious, trumped a man, perpetuating a model that justifies continual expansion of the supply of symphonic music, exhibitions, operas, and so on. In fact, most policy work in the non-profit and arts and unfortunately, in arts policy generally a consistent in constructing arguments to justify increase supply. Art as commodity in the arts industries and the art-is-what-you-need-it-even-if-you-don’t-want-it view in the non-profit arts have generated unhelpful practices while raising thorny public policy questions.
But before addressing a few of the problems and some possible solutions, I think it would be useful to glance backward to get a sense of how these assumptions about U.S. for-profit and non-profit arts industries evolved. First, the for-profit arts. Beginning in the early twentieth century, advances in technology and the subsequent emergence of collaborative art forms accelerated the comodofication of the for-profit arts in the U.S. Well it can be demonstrated that art is property and related concepts of copyright work for higher and so on possess deep historical roots. The ability to transform fleeting musical and theatrical events into products that could be bought and sold was in 1900 something totally new. These collaborative arts products—sound recordings, movies, radio programs, later television programs— constituted a departure in the very character of art that dramatically elevated its potential value as a commodity. By way of contrast, in fact, if you look at the lives of painters and photographers, the relationship between art making commerce and public policy has pretty much evolved in a straight line over the centuries. These artists still today mostly survive in an age-old model of selling original works of art to collectors, sometimes through galleries and other institutions, but it is a fairly old model. But it is different in the collaborative arts that made the ephemeral performing arts permanent. This new technology suddenly offered up an unprecedented question: in an art work that embodies the efforts of many artists and technicians, where should ultimate ownership reside? The answer, quickly arrived at, was to treat the collaborative artwork—the movie, record or radio program—as a work for hire and place ownership of the final product, the art work itself, with the corporation that had financed or facilitated the creative collaboration. So beginning in the early twentieth century, corporate control of the copyrights of collaborative artworks set in motion a series of events that evolving to this day. Described most generally, the corporations that control the copyright to collaborative works seek to derive maximum value from these arts assets over time. A number of practices and policies follow from this goal. By the 1920s, innovative business leaders, such as record publishing executive Ralph Peer had determined that copyrights could best be exploited if they were in fact rented rather than bought or sold. And thus the development of a complex system of royalties and revenue streams within the collaborative arts was set in motion. Corporations work to protect rights and revenue streams through legislation, contract, and government regulation. By limiting public access to songs and recordings, films and radio and then television, corporations could maintain competitive prices. In general, corporate ownership of collaborative arts is works-for-hire, a technologically driven innovation of the early twentieth-century valued art to the extent that an art asset could generate income from revenue streams secured by contract law and regulation. And this approach flourishes today although new technologies threaten the ability control these revenue streams, and of course that has been much discussed.

Now the most significant and lasting consequence of the capture of collaborative arts by corporations was to restrict public policy debate to issues of business regulation or business practice. For example, the notion of a national patrimony in relation to historical film, music, and broadcasting, the idea of a public interest or a public purpose in either preservation of or even more importantly, in access to historical film and music scarcely shows up in U.S. public policy conversations. With the exception of regulations directed at the content of public spectrum broadcasting, now generally on the wane despite the recent floury derived from the exposure of Janet Jackson’s breasts in the middle of the Super Bowl. But the collaborative arts are addressed by public policy, basically like any other industry that trades in any other commodity: through regulation of their business model.

Now in a sense, by restricting the scope of arts policy debate, the U.S. non-profit arts, the precious, have unwittingly helped arts industries in a sense have their way with art produced under the auspices of corporations. While the seeds of art as commodity can be traced backed to emerging arts technologies of one hundred years ago, the underlying non-profit concept of unlimited value assigned to the refined arts system in the U.S. system in its full incarnation recent, shaped by NGOs and government dating really only from the middle of the last century.

U.S. federal income tax, implemented in 1913 and then modified in 1917 memorialized two important principles essential to the non-profit cultural sector. First, educational and charitable organizations were exempt from corporate income tax in the 1913 law. Second, in 1917 relief was provided to individual and corporate income tax payers who donated money to these not-for-profit organizations. Through the 1920s, the refined arts forged important links with urban financial and social elites and private giving to museums, orchestras, dance, and opera companies facilitated by the tax code was generally sufficient to sustain non-profit arts institutions.

However, the Great Depression shrank the supply of donated funds. The New Deal responded by providing direct support to cultural institutions and to individual artists. Although WPA arts programs are often cited as a kind of toe in the water for federal support of the arts, generally, depression era arts funding was principally intended not to support the arts but to provide employment. But there were indicators of things to come, attitudes to come. Many WPA projects lacking the cache of refined Europe-oriented, big city arts institutions were criticized first as populists—popular—then as unprofessional or as too political, definitely harbinger of things to come.

Later, America’s premier NGOs, the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, had begun to fund major arts institutions; some of that funding went back into the 1930s. By 1954, Rockefeller had in place an official program of institutional support for the arts, directed primarily at orchestras and theater companies, non-profit. By the mid 1960s, the Ford Foundation had accumulated an investment of more than 30 million dollars in support for the non-profit arts. Drawing upon knowledge gleaned from successful interventions in the field of welfare, education, and health, the foundation community generated a number of reports intended to justify an increased investment in America’s cultural life. The 1965 Rockefeller study, the performing arts problems and perspectives argued on behalf of funding by private industries.

But other studies by the Twentieth-Century Fund and the Federal Council on the Arts supported the idea of direct government investment. The clear intent-- the long-term intent-- again in imitation of NGO work in social services was to first use foundation support to initiate positive social change and then engineer a kind of hand-off of a cultural funding agenda from private institutions to the federal government, a kind of hand-off that mimics similar transitions in education, welfare, and health. The language of these reports invoked deceptively democratic notions of art and culture. The Rockefeller study intoned, ”the arts are not for the privileged few, but for the many.” However, as NEA chairman Michael Straight observed back in the 1970s, “the Rockefeller Panel held that the arts were for the many but could not be entrusted to the many.”

It was assumed that knowledgeable elites would determine what arts should be nurtured and made more available. Noticeably absent from these seminal studies and the policies that emerged from their publication were any discussions of what art in fact should be nurtured, discussion of the range or character of American art worthy of support in an expanded funding system and whether or not that system would eventually be implemented by the government or private industry. Absent such debate from the outset, the Arts, again capitalized, were assumed to refer to the European refined arts as they had found a home in America.

Although there has existed a persistent interest in nurturing American plays and American compositions, there was little thought given to the notion that an arts funding system might engage from the outset vernacular, popular folk, and commercial sectors so uniquely reflective of the nations diverse democratic heritage. In short, arts policy leaders at mid-century exhibited no interest in the collaborative, mostly vernacular American arts forms that had been steadily evolving within America’s arts industries. Thus it should come as no surprise when this mid century floury of cultural policy research helped to launch the National Endowment for the Arts, the assumptions and policies developed by these NGOs found there way into the governing principles of the new federal agency. The NEA was tried with supporting art that was only non-commercial, professionally led, and of high quality and was not to exercise direction or control over the projects it funded. Thus the agency was prohibited from engaging the for-profit industries and could only fund art of high quality. Quality and excellence, terms that in my experience, then as now, often serve as coated surrogates for the refined arts.
There probably was, in 1960, a need to increase the supply of refined arts. But today the U.S. arts funding model stands as a system dedicated to preserving and advancing the grand narrative, art of intrinsic value. It is irrationally expansionist and irrationally contemptuous of the popular commercial sector that is so much the engine of America’s creativity. By the mid 1960s, the central mechanisms of valuation were in place within the non-profit sector. Investment would first consist in making grants directed exclusively toward not-for-profit organizations. The process would be aimed at a broad audience but managed by knowledgeable elites. The grants would be matching in their character, the money would have to be raised from the private sector, and the process would take for granted the higher value of refined arts of European lineage.

Because sophisticated leaders in the arts business and government assumed the inability of the general public to make discerning arts investments on their own, demand never invaded discussions of funding priorities. The effort to create a federal cultural agency had engaged foundations, arts experts, concerned patrons, and policy leaders, but their attentions were directed to a narrow segment of the spectrum of American art making and so it would remain. Although democratic political pressures gradually forced both NGOs and more importantly, or more obviously, the NEA to reluctantly adopt a more expansive definition of art, embracing jazz, folk arts, design, independent film, and so on, disdain for the commercial sector remained a cornerstone U.S. official arts patronage in the public sphere.

The constricted engagement with U.S. art resulting from the non-profit funding model has in my opinion produced significant negative consequences. First, as I eluded to earlier, most policy debate about the arts in the public interest has centered on the supply-side needs of refined arts organizations. Public intellectuals caught up in battles over congressional support for the NEA or the appropriateness of one museum exhibition or another have not raised a voice in such culturally significant debates as copyright term extension, the deregulation of broadcasting, or the sale of valued cultural assets through corporate acquisitions and mergers. The profile of the U.S. cultural landscape will ultimately be advanced only by the willingness of leaders to engage and soften the hard edges of America’s poorly articulated dispirit and ultimately extreme mechanisms for assigning value to art.

So a final word about the fate of the arts. The system is not working; too many decisions are made by the wrong people, in the wrong places, for the wrong reasons. The likelihood of an inevitable and adverous outcome, that second sense of fate, is great and perhaps is most likely in the thoughtless way in which our expressive life engages not only populations in other societies but threats to heritage—our own heritage-- and to contemporary creativity are also very great. We must together begin to build a policy community and a policy system in the arts, which unites the unjustly segregated sectors of America’s expressive life. We need to bring the precious and the popular into a single conversation.