In Art News

It’s the 11th hour in an election season. Do you know where your
cultural rights are? No, you do not. Because you don’t officially
have any. Bill Ivey wants that to change. The Clinton-era chair of
the National Endowment for the Arts has a new book out called Arts,
Inc.: How Greed and Neglect Have Destroyed Our Cultural Rights, and
in it he proposes a Cultural Bill of Rights.

Ivey’s inside knowledge combines with his love for grassroots
culture—art that comes up through the people and becomes
representative of them. He sees American culture as essential to the
American character, and he sees it slipping away or perverted in
the exporting or encountered only passively.

He details the 20th-century shift away from participation in the
arts and toward consumption. He wonders why schools continue to teach
clarinet and tuba but haven’t introduced piano and guitar, the
most popular instruments. He explores the lame politicking and
herd-mentality media-publicizing that leads to widespread
self-censorship. He looks at the stultifying rhetoric surrounding old
art (including the NEA’s current motto, “A great nation deserves great
art,” which makes art sound like a vegetable: good for you,
inert).

How much can be attributed to the profit motive? Corporate
image-banks (like Bill Gates’s Corbis) own and control millions of
images, doling out accessibility according to what will make them
money, leaving millions of images just as important but less popular in
the dark. In his captions, Ivey includes the fee he had to pay and the
restrictions he had to abide by for every photograph he uses in the
book. In a section that stuns, he details the monster that has become
American copyright practice—seemingly everything is “protected,”
almost always so that money ends up in executive pockets. Ivey
wanted to include a stipulation in the book allowing certain portions
to be reproduced for classroom teaching, but UC Press stopped him,
“invoking fears of dangerous ‘precedent’ and lost licensing revenue” in
“a real-life example of what Michel Foucault calls
‘governmentality’
—self-imposed constraint based on
internalized rules—rules that end up being more
restrictive than laws or regulations.”

Nonprofits that act like for-profits (Krens’s Guggenheim Museum, for
one). Why there aren’t any truly bad movies anymore (because nobody’s
taking risks). The amoral trade bloc of for-profit culture, including
the way that Baywatch—which only ran for a single season domestically but now airs in 140 countries as the first American
series primarily produced for an overseas audience—has shaped
the cartoon of the American character abroad. Ivey ties all
these disparate elements together and calls for a U.S. Department of
Cultural Affairs or a White House cultural council to address them as
comprehensively.

This should be required reading for anyone involved in any
kind of art. Oh, and for Barack Obama, should we be so lucky.