Beyond Piss Christ

Busy legislators tend to forget about the arts. During a Congressional debate on the importance of renaming French fries or the need to keep America pure by building a chastity belt across its southern extremities, there isn’t time to discuss the democratic value of self-expression. Not surprisingly, people who care passionately about the arts have little idea how to join the public dialogue.

Bill Ivey shines a helpful spotlight into these murky issues in his new book, Arts, Inc.: How Greed and Neglect Have Destroyed Our Cultural Rights. It’s difficult to imagine anyone more qualified to write this thoughtful, even-handed and often witty survey. Beginning in 1971, Ivey spent more than a quarter of a century as director of the Country Music Foundation. He left in 1998 for Washington to chair the National Endowment for the Arts, where he undertook the daunting task of reminding Congress of the relevance of artistic expression after the just-say-no policies of both the Great Communicator and Bushdaddy.

(You remember the NEA—that favorite punching bag of cultural leaders from Jerry Falwell to Jesse Helms. As early as the 1970s, Helms was complaining about the NEA’s encouragement of artists he didn’t like. He was outraged that Erica Jong had thanked the agency in the acknowledgments of her novel Fear of Flying, in which a young woman says bad words and samples extramarital sex but forgets to commit suicide, thereby breaking tradition with Flaubert and Tolstoy.)

Ivey has also been president of the American Folklore Society and chairman of the board of the National Recording Preservation Foundation, which is federally chartered and connected with the Library of Congress. He has even been nominated several times for a Grammy for best liner notes. Nowadays he directs Vanderbilt’s Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy, a research center for U.S. policy toward the arts that has another office in Washington. It is this breadth of experience that makes the book so clear-headed and provides its range of issues.

“The Cultural Bill of Rights,” with which Ivey opens the book, is an idealistic six-point document proclaiming our right of access to (which requires preservation of) America’s artistic heritage; the right to have the arts represented in public life; the right of access to skills training in the arts; the right to have our national arts accurately represent American diversity and democratic values; the right to learn from and enjoy “art of the highest quality”; and the right to “healthy arts enterprises” that support and can survive risk and innovation. Such a bill of rights may be a hard sell to American consumers (formerly known as citizens). Therefore Ivey sets out to explain why he thinks it’s important, what stands in its way and what actions might move the country in this direction.

Ivey doesn’t waste time in rants or theory. Throughout, he bases his argument in personal anecdote. It’s interesting to watch him learn how government works—how, for example, a senator may deliberately lobby for more money than a worthy organization could possibly be allocated, in order to speak out from the noble position of having been defeated by the status quo. Ivey recounts run-ins with lobbyists, corporations and voters. He describes a disappointing encounter with Bill Clinton, who often joined his predecessors in sidelining culture as almost irrelevant to policy.

“Of course,” as Ivey himself observes, “personal anecdote doesn’t go very far in justifying public policy.” But for those who want to learn how to better articulate a sense of the crucial role of the arts in a satisfying life (because of a radical suspicion that a larger number of satisfied lives might add up to a healthier nation), Ivey’s own experience helps bridge the gap between personal and political. With very little time to learn the ropes before a new presidential administration comes in, an appointed director of a federal agency must hit the ground running. Ivey describes how he immediately needed his lifetime of engagement with the arts to fuel and inform his advocacy on their behalf.

Ivey provides a lively examination of intellectual property issues, ranging from the disproportionate influence of multinational corporations to why shorter periods of copyright might be better for a nation in the long run. As sad as anything else in the book is his account of how the U.S. sidelined cultural diplomacy after the Cold War, when, as he quotes William J. Holstein saying in The New York Times, “we decided that history was over and we had won.” Since then the U.S. has been represented abroad only by whatever American corporations can sell. Therefore it’s depressing to realize that, as Ivey documents in detail that would be funny if it weren’t sad, America’s values are being represented abroad not by Toni Morrison but by Baywatch.