cc  >> Andrew Taylor: Bill Ivey  is the director of the Curb  Center for Art, Enterprise,  and Public Policy  at Vanderbilt University.  He brings a lifetime of  experience in forming and  informing cultural policy in a  bunch of different ways.  He was the seventh chairman for  the National Endowment for the  Arts under the Clinton  administration.  Before that, he was the director  of the Country Music Foundation.  He is a folklorist.  And most recently, in addition  to his great work at the Curb  Center, he was the team leader  for president Obama's transition  team relating to the arts and  humanities.  So I think he's going to tell us  a little bit about many of those  things tonight and how they work  and how they don't work,  and how they might work.  So I'm extraordinarily thrilled  to introduce Bill Ivey.  (applause)  >> Bill Ivey: Thank you.  Andrew, thanks a lot. 

 It's great to be with you here  in Madison.  And the arts management program  here is nearly unique.  It's one of the very best in the  country.  And Andrew Taylor is really  one of the true leaders  around US arts policy.  I've got a number of old friends  here.  Ellsworth Brown who I used to  fly gliders with years ago in  Nashville, I mean really years  ago, 25-30 years ago.  And my folklorist colleagues  Richard March and Anne Pryor  and Ruth Olson are here  I'm not going to talk as a  folklorist tonight but  everything I say, everything I  think about, the way the US art  system works is influenced by my  training in Indiana University  in the field of folklore as a  graduate student.  I've also had the pleasure of  working with your Lieutenant  Governor, Barbara Lawton, in a  number of committee meetings and  at conferences, and I'm reminded  of the fact you see the Curb  Center, that's the name of our  center, Mike Curb is a music  entrepreneur of the first order,  the founder the Curb Records,  home to Tim McGraw, Lyle Lovett,  and Wynona Judd, and many  other acts, but he's also the  former Lieutenant Governor of  California, and the former  president of the National  Lieutenant Governors'  Association.  So there's a nice Lieutenant  Governor connection here between  the Curb Center and your  Lieutenant Governor,  Barbara Lawton.  So it's especially satisfying in  the advance of sharing my ideas  about the connection between art  and public purposes about the  ways we can use art and  art connecting with happiness  in a high quality of life in a  democracy. 

 It's especially gratifying to be  in this beautiful setting in  what is clearly a very fine  museum and a real asset to the  Madison community.  I want to, I'll start with this  quotation from William Morris  going back to the 19th century  just, I think, to remind us of  kind of the deep connection  between caring about arts  and cultural vibrancy, and  progressive politics which is  really a political movement that  can trace its sources to arts  and crafts thinking of the late  1800s.  And I think that idea still  resonates and not being actually  sure she was here, I also pulled  a quotation from Lieutenant  Governor Barbara Lawton, because  I think we do believe that the  arts are essential to civic  success.  The question is really how do we  achieve that central position  for expressive life.  Now many of the ideas that I'll  be talking about here are  contained in greater detail in  my book, Arts Inc.: How Greed  and Neglect Have Destroyed  Our Cultural Rights,  which was published a little  more than a year ago.  That concludes the commercial  portion of our evening but I did  want to get that in.  I want to accomplish a couple of  things tonight.  First, I'll quickly run through  key markers in the evolving  relationship between the Obama  administration and its cultural  agenda.  And second I want to put forward  a couple of new ideas that to me  seem essential if those of us  who care about cultural vibrancy  are ever to succeed in securing  a deep relationship between art  and a mainstream policy agenda.  Now the Obama campaign was the  first ever to embrace anything  like a specific set of promises  around the arts. 

 In response to a request from  the advocacy group Americans for  the Arts, which had actually set  up an office in New Hampshire  during the state presidential  primary, the Obama  administration presented a list  of objectives aimed at the  cultural community.  Those of you who are familiar  with arts issues will see that  these are mostly what I would  call the familiar chestnuts of  arts advocacy.  More money for the NEA, enhanced  arts education and so on.  The one new idea, something like  it had been tried in the '90s  but it's still basically a new  idea, was this notion of an  artist's corps.  The campaign issued its promises  in January of 2008.  A 40-member arts policy  committee was established the  next month.  And it was co-chaired by TV  producer writer George Stevens  and Broadway producer Margo  Lyon.  This committee what greatly  expanded in July.  That's when I was brought in as  a member.  I think it ended up with 200  people. 

 We'd do these huge conference  calls biweekly.  200 people on a conference call,  you can imagine.  Some people acted as though  there were only two or three  people on the line.  (laughter)  While policy was discussed  the committee predictably  zeroed in on ways in which  art and artists could advance  Barack Obama's primary campaign  and, then once he became  the nominee, his presidential  campaign and its goals.  In the late summer of 2008, I  think it was actually, I guess  it was in August of 2008, Bill  Clinton's former chief of staff,  my old boss when I was NEA  chairman, John Podesta, was  asked to organize a top secret  government review process.  And this was called the Obama  Transition Project.  The goal was straightforward  but hardly simple.  By examining public documents  we were to produce and 30-page  report that highlighted key  policy and personnel issues  in every agency of government.  This was before the election.  That 30-pager would then be  reduced to a two-page summary so  the president elect would have  on his desk a big fat notebook  with two pages summarizing key  issues around every agency of  government the morning after the  election. 

 That was the goal.  I was asked to review the NEA.  My boss in this activity  was a venture capitalist  in Washington, DC,  named Tom Wheeler.  We worked in total secrecy  because the Obama project  smacked of measuring the drapes,  presuming victory before any of  the votes were actually counted.  Now the Obama Transition Project  was conducted entirely by phone  and email, and each participate  pretty much worked alone with no  assurance that we'd be part of  the real transition should our  candidate in the end prevail.  Of course prevail he did, and  Tom Wheeler brought forward the  group addressing not only arts  and culture, but technology and  science, asked me to be team  leader for arts and humanities  and join the Obama/Biden  transition when the volunteer  staff met in Washington  on the morning of November 14.  This is one page from a fat  document that sort of outlined  how we were to work as a  transition office and how we  were structured.  It's there primarily just to  show that it was complicated,  but you can see we had a group  leader, right in the center:  Science Technology and the Arts.  That's where Tom Wheeler was  located, and that's where I  worked.  As team leader for arts and  humanities I had two official  responsibilities. 

 First, to supervise agency  review for the three cultural  grant makers; that would be the  NEA, the NEH and the IMLS.  Some of you may not be so  familiar with IMLS, that's the  Institute of Museum and Library  Services.  It gives grants to museums and  libraries exclusively, and  somewhat ironically, although  it's less known, it's actually  in terms of budget, the biggest  of those three grant makers.  Then my second task was to work  with colleagues and outside  advisers to come up with a list  of five or six good candidates  for the NEA and NEH  chairmanships, names that would  be passed to the White House  personnel office just before the  Obama inauguration in  mid-January.  Now I took on IMLS by myself.  A former White House staff  member from the Clinton  administration named Anne Lozada  did the NEA, and an historian at  Rutgers University, Clement  Price, did the NEH.  The agency review task had the  same goal as the old transition  project, the pre-election  project, a set of analytical  reports outlining key issues  that would enable the incoming  political appointees to, in a  sense, hit the ground running.  But this time we could work in  public.  We could interview agency staff,  ask them for all manner of  documents and host phone calls  and meetings with people like  you, outside advisers and  experts who were interested in  all aspects of the cultural  scene.  Now, we transitionites  were an odd cohort. 

 There was about 300 of us.  And the transition was part  government agency, part euphoric  successful political campaign,  part employment office.  I think about two-thirds of the  300, probably 200 actually went  into the government.  And I know more people working  in the White House and top  levels of the administration  now, having been in the  transition, than I did when I  was chairman of the NEA and  actually was the head of a  government agency.  We were in the top three floors,  seven through nine.  The President and the Vice  President had floor nine, we  agency review folks had floor  seven.  In between on floor eight were  what I would call the  medium-sized dogs, John Podesta,  Rahm Emanuel, David Axelrod, all  these characters who are now  dotted throughout the White  House staff.  They were all lined up in these  little small offices.  You could walk the hall and  visit them all in a single hike.  This office is on Sixth Street,  North West, which is 10 blocks  east of the White House. 

 In our first meeting on the 14th  we were photographed for Secret  Service ID badges.  We were issued BlackBerries,  phone numbers, were assigned  email addresses and escorted to  those seventh floor offices.  Now because Tom Wheeler's group  included science and technology,  I found myself in an office  cluster mostly housing Clinton  era political appointees who had  worked for agencies like the  FCC, the National Science  Foundation and the Department of  Commerce.  My officemate, Jim Nollenberger,  was actually reviewing NASA, not  the state arts agency but the  space agency.  From the beginning, I'll go  back, from the beginning there  was more in play than creating  the documents and reviewing  potential leadership.  The two sort of official tasks  of the transition.  Remember, the economy at that  time was in what, I guess this  quote comes from George W. Bush,  I don't know how I picked  it up, the economy was in kind  of a five-turn spin in  mid-November.  And it was obvious to me from  day one that the contents of the  looming and inevitable stimulus  bill would be assembled not by  Nancy Pelosi's democratic House  of Representatives but by the  transition team.  It's always amused me that it's  been called Nancy Pelosi's bill  when everybody was trying to get  their agency designated as a  recipient for part of what was  certain to be a huge allocation  of short-term government  funding.  It was a competitive process,  believe me. 

 It's a story that could fill its  own speech, but to cut to the  chase, after a fascinating and  slightly contentious process of  internal advocacy and  negotiation, I learned in  January, and this was just as we  were shutting down the  transition office, I guess the  Friday before the inauguration,  I learned that $50 million in  stimulus money was going to be  dispersed through the NEA's  very good grant-making process.  Now that $50 million, as you  remember, that $50 million  itself became a target of  republican attacks, and like the  means by which the allocation  was obtained, that very story,  that is the post-transition  story of how that $50 million  faired, that could be the basis  of yet another speech,  maybe two speeches.  But I must confess that I came  into the Obama transition office  with an agenda of my own.  Apart from getting money from  the NEA and doing the assigned  tasks.  As I argue at some lengths  at Arts Inc., during my tenure  at NEA chairman, I become  convinced that arts and culture  in general needed to  find a new way to connect with  the policy apparatus of the  White House.  Remember from as far back as  1965 back when the NEA was first  created, through every  presidency up through Bill  Clinton, the administration I  worked in, the George W. Bush  administration, through all  those administrations, our  cultural agencies have been  linked to the executive branch  primarily through the White  House Social Office and the  Office of the First Lady.  So I was advocating on behalf of  a move to the west.  After all, there are two wings  in our White House.  The west wing, I was anxious  that I had somehow photographed  the rear of the White House, but  this is the face that's on  Pennsylvania Avenue.  The west wing on the right is  made famous by the long running  TV series, but it's home to the  Domestic Policy Council,  the National Security Council,  the Council of Economic Advisers  and so on. 

 The east wing, where those of  you who have attended any White  House event where you were  screened through security, that  particular wing, the east wing,  houses the Social Office and the  First Lady's Office.  So if the west wing is about  public policy, the east wing is  more about social activities,  parties, events in the White  House.  Now although I hold America's  First Ladies in the highest  regard, I'm especially fond  of Michelle Obama.  Agencies that link to  the administration leadership  through the Social Office simply  don't acquire standing with  real west wing policymakers.    So with a thin connection to  policy actors, the arts and the  NEA have tended to remain an  amenity.  Albeit, one that can turn  politically toxic as we all  remember was the case when arts  controversies dogged the elder  President Bush during his second  primary campaign when fights  over Mapplethorpe and Cyrano  ultimately shrank the  endowment's budget and cost  chairman John Frohnmayer his  job.  So I hope to change things.  So even while I supervise  transition agency review and  assemble lists of potential  agency heads and lobby to make  arts workers part of the  economic recovery package,  I peppered my transition  colleagues with memos arguing  for something I labeled  an arts and culture portfolio.  Arguing that that should be  positioned somewhere in the west  wing, probably in the Domestic  Policy Council that was then  being assembled by Obama adviser  Melanie Barnes.  In addition, I continually  pointed out to other team  leaders around the seventh floor  the obvious fact that authority  and cultural matter was  scattered all across the federal  government. 

 And it would just be good public  policy to find a way for the  Obama administration to  consolidate its work with many  different agencies that deal  with culture, many different  cultural issues, in one west  wing office.  So what has happened since the  transition ending?  And these various threads, the  threads of campaign promises and  stimulus money, new appointments  and the ultimate organization  of the Obama/Biden White House  have all begun to get knitted  together, I guess knit together  is the right verb.  Well, the news is mixed.  Now the NEA itself, just as I  expected, did a first-rate job  of distributing its small part  of the stimulus package.  I've heard that the Office of  Management and Budget cited the  agency's approach as a  government-wide model.  And in Rocco Landesman, the  president picked the least  mainstream candidate on our  transition list, and he was one  of the five that came out of the  transition, but the one that was  certainly least known to the  nonprofit cultural community.  And I'm convinced that Rocco's  strong stance on the value of  art and the value of the  endowment will ultimately  significantly advance the NEA.  And the Interior Appropriations  Bill that's now awaiting the a  president's signature sets the  NEA budget at $167.5 million  for fiscal 2010.  Which is really spitting  distance from the $176 million  that was the agency's all-time  high back in 1992.  And the idea of an artist corps  or arts corps seems to have  real legs. 

 Not so much in the White House  right now but certainly with  congressional leaders like David  Obey and Norm Dicks.  And I think it's important that  we pay attention to that  initiative to make sure that for  one thing that it's part of  something like Teach for America  rather than a volunteer program  where artists would be  in communities,  but wouldn't be paid.  I mean I like the paid kind.  So I think we'll see solid  incremental progress in growing  the NEA budget.  Rocco Landesman is willing to  take strong positions on behalf  of the arts.  He's got his own theme that he's  developing right now, Art Works,  and that theme might just bring  in White House support for money  for a special initiative.  And it feels to me as if the  timing is right for a bolder  message and perhaps even a west  wing policy connection for the  endowment.  Rocco may end up proving by kind  of taking on some of the right  wing forces that there's more  bluster than bite in complaints  about the agency.  But it's really not all  sweetness and light.  Some of you followed this story  in the news even before Chairman  Landesman was confirmed by the  Senate. 

 An over-enthusiastic, newly  appointed communications  director on a conference call,  again probably had 200 people on  it, and used political  campaign-like rhetoric to  advance a perfectly reasonable  idea that artists and arts  organizations should help  government policy improve the  quality of life and communities.  But here you had Glenn Beck  posturing, and Yosi Sergant  ultimately lost his job.  And faced with a thoroughly  predictable Fox News --,  the White House seemed really  disappointingly eager to kind of  back away from supporting the  agency.  As to my dream of a coordinated  west wing link for the NEA and  other government cultural  activities, I don't know how  promising it looks.  I was told, not directly, but I  was told that Mel Barnes had, in  fact, placed an arts and  cultural portfolio in the  Domestic Policy Council in  something called the Office of  Civic Participation and Social  Engagement, run by an economist  named Sonal Shaw, who was in an  office a few doors down from me  on the seventh floor in the  transition.  But at least in the short-run  other forces seemed to be  positioned to block arts and  culture in their journey west.  So what can arts policy leaders  and cultural advocates learn  from the Obama campaign  transition in the first months  of the new administration?  Well, one thing for sure  a collapsing economy undermines  even the best intentions when it  comes to new domestic policy.  Especially programs related to  government activities addressing  issues perceived to be second or  third tier like, unfortunately,  the arts.  So we started with campaign  promises February of 2008.  By the time I was in the  transition all the sudden these  became campaign objectives, a  little bit softer, and then by  the time of the inauguration  they were campaign goals,  something out there we'd like to  get, a goal. 

 And in the big picture,  long-standing assumptions about  how government interacts with  culture have proven to be  remarkably sticky.  Really something of a surprise  to me.  There are three places where the  White House can place its  relationship with the cultural  agency.  Metaphorically, these go from  east wing to west wing.  You've got the Office of the  First Lady, directed by Desiree  Rogers; the Social Office; the  Office of Public Liaison and  Intergovernmental Affairs,  Valerie Jarrett and Kal Penn,  actor Kal Penn; and then finally  the Domestic Policy Council,  headed by Melanie Barnes.  And I think we're stuck right  about in there.  Somewhere between the First  Lady's Office and Public  Liaison.  And there have been a number of  really interesting cultural  events in the White House  outside expertise in the NEA and  in other places complain that  no one has really been consulted  about what those events should  look.  In other words, the White House  at this point is really doing it  all by itself.  So arts seems stuck between kind  of one and two. 

 These events have occurred,  but they have not worked in  cooperation with the  Smithsonian, the Library of  Congress or other sources of  cultural expertise.  So it looks to me like art is  stuck in its well-established  traditional role in relation to  the federal government as an  amenity with value, but value  restricted to social events,  while the area, while arts still  possesses sufficient political  toxicity to encourage real  policy leaders to kind of keep  things at arm's length.  So I would call it an amenity  that can suddenly turn  radioactive.  So as I conclude my remarks  today I'd like to step back and  talk about what arts leaders  must do if we are to create and  sustain a more meaningful  connection between art and our  American democracy, between art  and civil society, between art  and civic life, as Lieutenant  Governor Lawton expressed it.  First I think we need a bigger  policy frame.  We staked out the boundaries of  our research and advocacy  playing field 50 years ago,  in the early days of foundation  and government spending on the  arts.  The frame basically surrounds  four or five elements.  The well-being of artists,  especially those who work with  or have meaning for the  nonprofit community.  Nonprofit arts organizations,  mostly those focused on the fine  arts.  Standing community grant-making  agencies. 

 K-12 public education, again  mostly music, mostly band.  Policy questions about the arts  have been posed within this  frame.  So we strategize about ways for  nonprofits to connect with  minority neighborhoods.  Study the impact of arts  facilities on real estate  values.  Advance claims that music  instruction improves in-school  test performance or that the  presence of a vaguely defined  creative class will increase a  city's appeal as a sight for  industrial relocation.  Now on this point, I wrote this  parenthetically for myself, on  this point I suspect I differ  with many in the room.  I'm not so much a fan of the  many instrumental arguments that  have been advanced to justify  greater investment in arts  education and the nonprofit  frame.  I think too often they feel like  straws that are being grasped at  to justify increasing supply in  the face of very, very limited  or relatively limited demand.  And in fact, some of the claims,  this is from Project Zero at  Harvard, that's looked at claims  made for the instrumental value  of the arts.  Now the work of arts  organizations within our frame  constitute what Richard  Musgrave, an economist years  ago, labeled merit goods. 

 They're products and services  that government believes should  be more widely available than  would be the case if these goods  were left to market forces  alone.  Merit goods.  There's nothing wrong with  viewing the arts as merit goods.  The problem is that our merit  good frame is weak when compared  to others.  Subsidized public education,  subsidized healthcare, housing  for the poor, protected wetlands  or subsidized antiviral drugs  for AIDS victims in sub-Saharan  Africa.  And I go back to look at this  slide and the Gates Foundation,  which is the big dog of  foundations with Gates' money  and Warren Buffet money,  has certain priorities.  They do small projects around  the margins, but these are their  primary priorities, and the  arts really don't fit in, and  this sets so much of the tone  for the work of other funders.  So arts leaders need to pull  back and construct a more  encompassing policy frame around  more compelling issues to create  a stronger, a more robust  merit good.  And I've argued that while arts  policy must address issues  affecting nonprofit arts, it  must absolutely also take on the  public interest impact of things  like copyright law, trade policy  and cultural goods, mergers and  acquisitions in the media  industries and access to  cultural heritage and to the  tools of online creativity and  learning.  And I think of a policy  arrangement more like this, and  actually to make this diagram  accurate you'd have to stretch  the fat line out horizontally  and dangle many more issues in  sectors under it, while our  traditional frame, our nonprofit  frame would stay there and be an  important part of what we  advance, I think there are many  other issues that need to be  encountered. 

 And that means thinking about  how for-profit art galleries  interact with young painters.  What Clear Channel Communication  and its ownership of so many  radio stations means to localism  and local content in radio.  Thinking about the rights of  citizens to engage icons of  cultural heritage like old  movies and recordings when  heritage today, so much of it is  owned, priced and policed as  corporate asset.  In short, if we are to achieve  the close connection between art  and civic life that Lt. Governor  Lawton and others advance, we  must think about a broad system  in which art is created,  distributed, learned and  preserved, analyzing and  improving the ways that that  system intersects quality of  life in our American democracy.  And I think we need a new name  for this broader frame.  The terms art and culture are so  weighted with hierarchical  presumptions and multiple  meanings.  Culture is almost not useful as  a term because it has so many  meanings.  Each holds very little value  today in a public policy  context.  Now in Arts Inc.  and in other places, I've  advanced the idea of expressive  life as the broad term that  would denote an area of knowing  and doing that links artistic  practice, access to tools,  connection with the past and  engagement with novelty and  innovation in a broad frame that  possesses powerful implications  for quality of life. 

 And you see expressive life is  divided roughly in half.  Part of it is all about  belonging, connecting, the past.  The other part of it is about  your autonomous voice.  And to me if those things are in  balance, you have the  opportunity to possess  a high quality of life.  When Tom Friedman writes about  the Lexus and the olive tree,  the olive tree is heritage,  the Lexus is voice.  When Anthony Appiah complains  about the fact that heritage  keeps people from becoming  engaged in a global dream, he's  complaining about the idea that  heritage has too much weight.  The heritage piece is very  familiar to my folklore  colleagues.  This is an area that folklorists  have worked in for years, and  folklorists emotionally tend to  love the heritage side more than  the voice side, but I would  argue that both have to be  advanced if we are to really  engage in policy that advances a  high quality of life.  These are some of the things,  the specifics, that I think  would have to be addressed, and  I say only some of them,  if we are to really think  about cultural vitality  as a public good, expressive  life as a public good.  Some of these are being  addressed currently. 

 Others are very much on the  margins.  And I think you get a sense of  what the content of this new  broad frame might look like.  Now, because I know Madison is  thinking about a cultural plan  for the community, I went back  earlier this evening and pulled  a couple of slides from another  presentation and just added  them.  If you were to think about what  would be surveyed in terms of  determining the cultural  vitality of a community, I think   these are some of the things you  should look at.  They're very similar to this  list.  What areas you have to address  in order to have a robust policy  regime.  One that can stand proudly next  to education, healthcare and  then actual environment.  But if you find out how many  foreign films are on multiplex  screens, do you have the kind of  access to software and hardware  that would allow even the  poorest neighborhood to be able  to create on the Internet.  How many art galleries do you  have in the community?  Are they successful and are they  successful at nurturing new  visual artists?  Locally owned independent  book stores.  How many?  Do you have any?  What about locally owned  broadcast entities and so on. 

 This expands the number of  indicators, expands the range of  indicators that we would use to  talk about cultural vitality.  So we're really talking about a  community cultural plan that  would be a kind of new kind of  plan because it would really  take in so much more than is  usually addressed when we're  talking about cultural vitality.  Now, as I conclude here, this  is, we have a new president who  really is an artist.  He's a fine writer, he conveys  an authentic understanding of  the meaning of culture to  community.  His campaign took the arts  seriously.  And I think for that reason the  short-term prospects for  incremental improvement in our  federal investment in the  existing nonprofit frame, those  prospects are very good.  But the long-standing  assumptions about where art fits  or doesn't fit in public policy,  I think still in a sense stand  in the way of reorienting art  and its relationship to west  wing work and the core work of  government.  By constructing a broad frame  around our cultural system and  by advancing the value of  expressive life in democracy,  arts leaders can lay the  foundation for a fresh and  robust policy sector.  Back at the beginning of the  Obama transition when the  economy did appear to be  collapsing, there was talk all  around the country about a new  age.  A kind of post-consumerist  democracy in which we would have  an opportunity to reconsider  core values in our democracy. 

 In a way, although I knew I and  others might suffer, I felt that  that change, that challenge,  might in a sense be a good thing  if we had a chance to rethink  consumption as a core value of  success and quality of life.  I don't think we quite got  there.  In other words, we came right to  the brink and now we find  ourselves back in the same boat  with banking bonuses and the Dow  rising, and we seem to be in  a different game, at least in  the short-run.  But I think somewhere down the  line our society will be forced  to confront the emptiness of a  quality of life based only on  consumption.  And I think those of us who care  about art and culture, broadly  defined, as a core value of  quality of life that doesn't  take wealth to achieve are in  a perfect position to lay the  groundwork and present the road  map for the successful future  of America's communities  and our democracy.  So thank you, very much.  (applause)