Reply: Bill Ivey responds to your questions

We invited readers to set questions for Bill Ivey, in response to his article, Freedom of Expression, in the Spring issue of the Journal. Here are your questions and his replies in full.

1. You make a compelling case that the arts should be rearticulated as ‘expressive life’. Do you think it is possible to expand the definition of ‘the arts’ so that it refers to expressive life? Otherwise, if ‘the arts’ are just a constituent part of expressive life, isn’t there a risk that they remain narrowly defined by both arts professionals and policy?

I appreciate your fear that ‘the arts’ will remain narrowly defined if we shift our policy focus to expressive life. However, I am sceptical about the suggestion that we expand and retain ‘the arts’ as an umbrella term, since the designation is already burdened by multiple meanings and connotations. Broadening our definition of ‘the arts’ to include craft, political speech, cultural heritage and other components of expressive life would likely be (to invoke a US entertainment franchise) mission impossible.

At the same time, I do not feel that defining ‘the arts’ as an important component part of expressive life means that the category will be neglected by policymakers or that arts professionals will in some way be slighted. If one likens the broad arena of expressive life to another domain of policy, such as ‘the environment’, a term that has been fleshed out over the years by activists who care about clean air and climate change, ‘the arts’ would be metaphorically equivalent to environmental-policy subsets such as ‘wetlands’ or ‘clean coal’. While there are proponents of wetlands preservation who are passionate about this single issue, it is quite obvious that there exist sharp limits determining how far such a narrow priority can be advanced purely on its individual merits. Wetlands preservation clearly benefits from its standing as a constituent part of an overarching policy field possessing global reach.

Similarly, I am convinced that, decades ago, ‘the arts’ went about as far as they could go on their own. By defining, developing and advancing expressive life as an essential ingredient of quality of life in a post-consumerist democracy, and by including ‘the arts’ as a key component of expressive life, their value in the public mindset will be enhanced, and both art and artists will benefit from increased attention and support from the apparatus that converts public enthusiasm into public policy. If expressive life is embraced by policymakers as an appropriate realm in which to advance social justice, many boats will rise, including ‘the arts.’

2. Historically, ‘the arts’ was a very broad definition that conjoined the liberal and mechanical arts. As historian Celina Fox says of the Enlightenment era: “A general distinction was made between theory, observation or speculation, thought of as ‘science’, and practice, action and application, considered ‘art’.” It was with this conception of ‘the arts’ that the RSA was founded. The arts were related to science and described the practical action of making change happen – they were the dynamic aspect of social progress. The ‘fine arts’ were a constituent part of these activities but they did not occupy the whole of the category, nor were they separate from everyday life, which is how we tend to understand them today. With all this in mind, how would you recommend that we respond to the assumption people make that the RSA is an arts organisation, rather than a social progress organisation?

Just as ‘the arts’ conveys multiple meanings in a contemporary setting – sometimes referring to painting, sometimes to a range of fine arts and sometimes to film, television productions and folk or popular music – the term has obviously meant very different things in the past. The Enlightenment sense of ‘arts’, as memorialised in the RSA’s name, is close to the concept of ‘the useful arts’ enshrined in the ‘copyright clause’ of the US Constitution. Although it is frequently assumed otherwise, ‘the useful arts’ do not, in that context, refer to what we think of today as artistic practice, but rather to the work of artisans skilled in a manufacturing craft. From a policy perspective, it appears somewhat unfortunate that ‘the arts’ have gradually come to mean something far different and much narrower than what was embraced in the Enlightenment.

While not a perfect fit, expressive life comes closer to what is intended in the RSA’s name and in the US Constitution than do any of our modern definitions of art or artistry. My argument divides expressive life into two halves: ‘heritage’ and ‘voice.’ I believe that ‘heritage’ stands quite clearly as an essential link to the past and a critical source of the human stories that provide a sense of identity, continuity and community. Inherited values, knowledge and practices are clearly essential starting points for social progress. If I were to delineate ‘voice’ more sharply, I would divide it into ‘political speech’ and ‘personal creative practice’. Political speech is an obvious essential element of social (and political) transformation, and personal creative practice possesses essential value as a path to autonomy, personal achievement and distinction. I have argued that heritage and voice – the first emphasising continuity and belonging, the second independence and distance – are always in tension and sometimes in conflict. However, if the two are in balance, the combination can be a powerful source of security, satisfaction and meaning for both communities and citizens. I think a strong argument can be made that public policies that advance access to heritage and the tools of voice – creating a vibrant expressive life – can be viewed as important instruments of social progress.

Your question suggests that a misreading of the historical meaning of ‘art’, hinting that the work of the RSA is somehow about our contemporary understanding of ‘the arts’, represents at least a minor irritation to RSA insiders. This is understandable, as most advocates for political and social reform gravitate toward ‘hard,’ measurable outcomes. In the US, mainstream think tanks and policy shops pursue work on social progress by focusing almost exclusively on subjects that influence material wellbeing, such as income, housing and jobs, or on areas that build wealth and employment as a secondary effect, such as education or affordable healthcare. To the extent that the arts are engaged at all, they are defined in the modern sense of artistic practice and viewed as an amenity, or as something to take up after issues related to material scarcity have been resolved (which, of course, they rarely are). By ignoring expressive life and considering art as an amenity, I feel that today’s social democrats, old-style liberals and progressives have ignored a valuable arena in which social justice and social progress can be analysed and advanced.

Remember, the critique of industrial capitalism that energised early Arts & Crafts activists such as William Morris advocated the restoration of craft and the wholeness of engagement with handmade objects as an antidote to the corrosive influence of industrial production on society and family. As economic realities bring the excesses of consumerism and negative social impact of post-industrial capitalism to the fore, the RSA’s titular commitment to ‘art’ affords an opportunity to craft a neo-Enlightenment arena of inquiry and action. I am convinced that expressive life, with its subsets of heritage and voice, constitutes a useful but unexplored policy domain for think tanks in the US. All seekers of social justice and social progress will be forced to rethink strategy over the next few years. As economies contract, and as our collective ability to subsidise jobs, education, housing and healthcare subsides, we will need to conceptualise social progress as something other than wealth and its enablers. To me, using expressive life to bring the RSA’s definition of ‘the arts’ closer to its Enlightenment roots opens an opportunity to explore and lead in an exciting, critical but underdeveloped realm of public policy.

3. Is it possible to research and/or prove the relationship of arts to wellbeing in a way that would convince people who are sceptical or dismissive about the value of the arts?

It is all too true that, in valuing art as a contributor to quality of life, arts advocates have been ‘anecdote-rich and evidence-poor’. This weakness is exacerbated by the fact that we are often only arguing on behalf of art galleries or orchestras, rather than advancing a broad engagement with cultural heritage and personal creative practice. In the US, proponents of support for the arts have frequently turned to arguments of secondary impact in an effort to convert sceptics, arguing, for example, that the presence of artist colonies in downtown districts enhance real estate values or that training in music improves student performance in maths or science. I consider these justifications to be ultimately inadequate. As I have argued elsewhere, I think the case for the arts is strengthened if they are part of a larger frame, expressive life.

In addition, we must engage brain scientists and sociologists to conduct experiments that actually measure positive results in perceived quality of life based on a full range of art engagements, both amateur and professional, with an emphasis on doing, rather than simply observing or consuming. Unfortunately, such research is necessarily long-term and expensive. Our Curb Centre at Vanderbilt University began an exploration of these issues in a small conference three years ago. We invited a range of experts (not specifically ‘arts experts’) to the Pocantico conference in New York, operated by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, to discuss the relationship between art engagement and quality of life. Guests included sociologists, psychologists and neurologists. While their conversations were tentative and informal, there emerged agreement that the arts have potential as a pathway to a high quality of life. Once the public benefits of art engagement can be demonstrated (rather than assumed, as is too often the case), we need to introduce mechanisms through which the effectiveness of various cultural programmes can be accurately and convincingly assessed. Only then will the sceptics come around.

The publication summarising the Pocantico conference in New York can be found online at www.curbcentervanderbilt.org/high-quality-of-life

4. How would you go about getting arts professionals more alert to the effect of policy on their work? For example, how might you engage people’s interest both in arts policy and other relevant areas of policy, such as changes in legislation around temporary international visas and intellectual property rights?

When I was chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, I moderated a panel discussion on art education that included the dean of the prestigious Juilliard School in New York City. When asked whether he had a responsibility to train his students to navigate the financial and legal system that would inevitably frame their creative work, he answered: “No, my job is to make them the greatest players, actors and singers in the world.” This attitude reflects a cavalier and unhelpful conceit, for all artists need to be made aware that their work is created, distributed, consumed and preserved within a complex web of property rights, contractual obligations, systems of payment, internet policies, union rules, corporate practices, laws and government regulations. Likewise, managers of cultural organisations must learn rules of taxation and employment, as well as the effective practice of board management and fundraising.

In the US, there has been a tendency to think that copyright, media ownership and union rules somehow only apply to the for-profit entertainment industry and that the nonprofit sector and the fine arts exist in a protective bubble. This assumption has recently begun to give way, especially in the training of arts organisation managers, but less so in the education of painters and musicians. It remains essential that practitioners of all the arts gain a working knowledge of the very complex environment that surrounds professional creative practice. This knowledge can only be conveyed effectively if it is a required component of graduate or conservatory-level training.

5. In your ‘Cultural Bill of Rights’, you list as an objective ‘the right to be represented to the rest of the world by art that fairly and honestly communicates the democratic values and ideals of America’. But can the reception of arts ever be controlled by its originators, and if so, should it be?

Of the six cultural rights advanced in my book, Arts, Inc., the citizen right to art that accurately conveys values and ideals is the one most grounded in the idiosyncrasies of the US situation. Since the end of the Cold War, the sponsorship of the movement of American culture abroad through the offices of entities such as the department of state and the US Information Agency has significantly declined, with the latter actually being eliminated. At the same time, the growth in the influence of the US trade representative and the availability of technologies such as cable and free-to-air television transmission has greatly accelerated the export of American entertainment. Without exaggeration, this has meant that, over the past few decades, the flagship bearers of US culture abroad have been, in succession, the television shows Dallas, Baywatch and Sex in the City. While each series can be mined for nuggets of democratic practice or lasting truth (Baywatch, for example, presents men and women working together in an atmosphere of equality and professional respect), the average American citizen cringes when confronted with the fact that, for much of the world, such programming constitutes a primary window into American society.

While the way in which art is received can never be controlled by its originators, creators of art do have a particular effect in mind, and can at least try to help viewers to separate those elements of plot or character that are representative of larger realities from those that are eccentric, exaggerated or entirely made up. Such a framing process raises huge, perhaps unsolvable, conflicts with the US constitutional commitment to free expression. However, I have long advocated a meeting between the US secretary of state and the eight or ten major exporters of American entertainment to see if some mechanism could be developed that would protect artistic licence, while creating at least the opportunity for those on the receiving end to experience real insight and understanding.