Bill Ivey, Arts, Inc. How Greed and Neglect Have Destroyed Our
Cultural Rights (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008)
Bill Ivey dedicates his new book, Arts, Inc. to his intended audience: “for all those who value the
art of everyday life.” The dedication also demarcates an unresolved deeper tension both within
the book and among many in the US—the perceived disjuncture between art and life. The book
is really a plaidoyer to make participation in art part of everyday life in order to change the
experience of daily life. Reflecting passionately yet critically upon a life of work in the arts, the
folklorist and former Chair of the National Endowment for the Arts offers a sustained and urgent
argument for a “cultural bill of rights,” something toward which he hopes all citizens will feel
compelled to work.
Why should we find this compelling? Because we are ultimately unhappy, Ivey argues, for our
expressive life is barely viable for those in a democratic society. And the arts, no longer in the
public interest (if they ever were), can help us out of our malaise. He points to the commonplace
that our common practice of consumerism leaves us not only incomplete but is patently not the
“pursuit of happiness” that the Founders had in mind for our independence. Ultimately, our
happiness is bound to a “life of satisfaction beyond materialism and consumption” (p. xix).1
Why are we unhappy? According to Ivey, because we no longer lead nurturing and expressive
lives. In both the introduction and repeatedly throughout the book, Ivey outlines systems of
cultural production, organization, and control, which are systemically responsible for the
deteriorating happiness of all (US) Americans. A share of the blame goes to the government,
whose legislation concerning ownership of cultural products favors rights of corporations over
rights of citizens. The effect, he argues, is that “our cultural rights are everywhere constrained or
directed by forces that control creative work” (p. 12). This condition has only worsened during
the past two decades with the scramble to control digital and digitized versions of culture.
Copyright and intellectual property law has become both an outright legal impediment and
1.1To name only three recent works, see Zygmunt Bauman’s poetic argument to this effect in The Art of Everyday Life
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008) or economist Robert E. Lane’s more empirically grounded study, The Loss of Happiness
in Market Democracies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), along with a quick classic, Robert Putnam’s much
lauded sociology, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster,
2001).
voiceXchange Vol. 3, No. 1 (Spring 2009): 70–73.
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bureaucratic red tape between the ailing body politic and the elixir of culture that can revive our
expressive life.
Ivey’s argument is founded in our inalienable rights. He asserts: “citizens of a mature
democracy possess a just claim to a cultural system that enables them to engage heritage and
expand individual creative capacity” (p. 21). The cultural works that constitute heritage are
denied by the ever-increasing and consolidating control over access and use. Ivey charges “us” as
“citizens-artists” to work to preserve and enable our “expressive life.” Although throughout the
book red flag terms such as “art,” “culture,” “heritage,” and the like work inexactly, vacillating
between conventional folkloric concepts to more recent cultural studies valences, Ivey’s notion
of an “expressive life…split between the culture we take in and the culture we create,” is a
potent formulation (p. 10). He further explains that expressive life is a “realm of being and
behavior…as distinct as ‘family life’ and ‘work life’…akin to tradition (a place where community
heritage interacts with individual creativity, maintaining the past while letting in the new)” (p.
23). This comes from, Ivey continues, a “gland or organ halfway between the mind and
heart…half a reservoir for heritage—religious and family traditions, acquired knowledge and
skills—a kind of cultural stock portfolio that connects us to history, shared values, and
community, giving us the strength that comes from a sense of belonging and place” (ibid).2
Ivey elaborates upon the keywords of his proposed cultural legislation over the course
of the book’s seven chapters (Heritage; Artists; A Creative Life; America, Art, and the World;
Art of Lasting Value; Strong, Responsible Institutions; and The Failure of Government).
Ethnographers, with their commitment to grounding theory and argument, will appreciate that
Ivey begins each chapter with a memorable “ethnographic” vignette to illustrate each of the
strands of the book’s larger purpose. The first chapter begins with the story of Ivey’s baptism as a
“guerilla warrior in the battle to save America’s cultural heritage” (p. 29). In each chapter, the
reader also comes to understand how Ivey’s personal position and experience informs his larger
views and ultimately his argument. Ivey argues that Heritage is an inalienable right that trumps
any legislation or legal measure controlling access, in spite of the fact that, presently, cultural
heritage is simultaneously often corporate assets (p. 31). His central contention is that most
forms of culture have become the property of corporate investment looking for returns on the
leasing or use of their musical or visual property. He demonstrates this by noting the cost to
reproduce images throughout the book.3 However, Ivy’s lament over cultural loss here seems
primarily over “official” expressive acts, which are legally sanctioned and within official forms and
outlets of culture. As so many studies of popular culture have shown, law and control/ownership
2.2See bell hooks, Belonging: A Culture of Place (New York: Routledge, 2009) for a nuanced take on these last two items.
3.3This situation is well known among scholars of popular music and culture whose work is often hampered by the
excessive fees to transcribe or offer other representations of a work in their publications.
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actually do much to inspire creative circumvention of “official,” mainstream, or hegemonic arts
through creative “piracy”—cultural disobedience, if you will.4
His discussion of artists points to the pragmatic challenges for those seeking to make a living
as such and how their labor is not valued in sustainable ways. He links this to the refusal of
Americans, unlike many nations throughout the world, to see “artists as potential sources of
leadership and political wisdom” (p. 66). He also moves beyond conventional traditional culture,
as in A Creative Life, to projects like Raw Art Works based in Lynn, MA, which involves at-risk
youth housing projects in visual arts. The story of his site visit as NEA Chair also spotlights an
immense area of neglect in the cultural service programs of this country: “What are we doing for
the elderly, poor, or older citizens in general?” (p. 96). He points to all forms of “amateur”
participation, as in sports, as a way to combat the attitude that “most Americans are afraid to
take art casually” (p. 119). Art of Lasting Value is art that “arm[s] us for selfhood and
citizenship” (p. 157) and is drawn not only from our inherited European art but by access to and
engagement with the whole world, as manifest in diverse forms expressive culture. Because “art
doesn’t find its way to audiences by itself” (p. 187), our institutions stewarding art and
incubating culture must operate with the expressive life of the public as their ultimate concern.
Ivey concludes by reiterating areas for action; among these, he points to the importance of
creativity to the new economy and thus expressive life for workers in a post-information age. Ivey
states the following as the challenge: “The exclusionary character of US cultural participation is
the direct result of a bloated intellectual property regime; our cultural divide exists because
copyright has enabled a growing, high-priced permission culture” (p. 281). Whether aligning
corporate practices with public cultural interests will be remedied by government through
appeals to common sense about fair use or indeed perhaps recent rise in corporate social
responsibility mandates remains to be seen. At the moment, it seems that what is necessary is a
resolved government intervention that aims to bail out the public from the free market
consolidation of culture by key players in the marketplace. This might be accomplished,
following Ivey, by a recognition of his thesis—the centrality of arts to robust democracy which
would be manifest in both federal monetary investment in the arts as well as federal intervention
into the legislation that has enabled a corporate privatization of the public good.
Charting a series of assumptions and long-held values about culture—among cultural brokers,
academically-trained workers, and the public—the map of these assumptions would be richly
detailed if test driven through the public by an ethnographer or two. This might be a wonderful
project aimed at a grounded needs-assessment, which would nuance and, indeed, localize many
of the common sense progressive arguments of the book. A series of focused projects might be a
powerful tool for informing cultural policy decisions, whether locally or nationally. Ultimately, a
cultural bill of rights needs be realized as a local practice within individual communities. What
4.4Its seems useful given the tenor of arts as rights argument, to validate popular resistance to legal control as justified by
Thoreau or even more recently Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi, or Vaclav Havel, Disturbing the Peace: A Conversation
with Karel Huizdala (New York: Vintage Press, 1991).
Usner, Review of Ivey | 73
national policy can hope for, at best, is to provide the impetus and, perhaps, funding for cultural
development work. Furthermore, as the environment is sustainable only through biodiversity, so
too is a robust and fecund democratic life dependent upon a healthy and diverse cultural ecology.
Certain ghosts haunt this call-to-action. As a call, Ivey’s tale may not serve to rally grassroots
action to exorcise these on a national front, though it may be instructive for those nurturing and
incubating diversity within local ecologies of expressive life. Still, we veterans and students of the
culture wars and multiculturalism will be left with nagging anxieties about the manifestations of
official culture that such programs endow. The “we” and “our” terms remain uncomfortable,
unproblematized, and unsituated, and have certain resonances with the mono(ethno)cultural
collective pronouns of conservative critics, which progressive cultural agendas must combat.
Appeals to a dominant, common, and normative “we” and a general national “heritage” are
somewhat unnerving, especially when the one monolithic common culture is exactly the mass
mediated kind that supplants the more engaging and participatory culture, for which Ivey is so
admirably advocating.
Indeed, this is a book about the “official” state of music, art, and conventional expressive life.
Using benchmarks from folklore and conventional arts, Ivey sees the absence of these
conventional forms as reason for the present disaffected state of the everyday American. It also
nostalgically looks to the past, a time when the arts, Ivey believes, really worked to build and
bond community. The book does accomplish what it sets out to do, which is to “reframe the
picture, stepping back to take a fresh look at how the arts can best participate in a culturally
vibrant democracy” (p. xvi). Whether this is truly a realistic and realizable goal for a national
institution in the US is unresolved. Ivey was offered a brief chance to steward his bill in the
Obama administration by heading the transition team. Though the NEA did receive funds in the
American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, and we finally have a new NEA Chair, there
is yet to be a real appointee to oversee a much-talked about position for a cultural administrator
based in the West Wing.
Throughout his book Ivey engagingly grounds his arguments in a lifetime of personal
experiences with the many folks peopling the arts, weaving a folkloric tale of the state of the arts
in the present union. Arts Inc. is an autobiography of a life in the arts, of the practice of a
folklorist, and, as such, a deeply useful documentation of praxis for anyone considering this work,
or indeed, anyone concerned with the (creative) life and happiness of everyday America.
Eric Martin Usner
University of Chicago