UPDATE: We’ve just posted a 20-minute podcast interview with Bill Ivey online. The video of his public presentation will come later.
If you’re in or around Madison, Wisconsin, this Thursday, November 12, consider coming by the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art at 7:00 pm for a public forum with Bill Ivey on arts and cultural policy. I know, I know, ”arts” and ”policy” together often bring to mind dry and detached discussions of standardized test scores and economic impact. But Bill Ivey has an alternate and rather compelling view.
Former chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, and recent transition team leader in Arts and Humanities for the Obama administration, Bill Ivey is working to reframe the conversation about arts, culture, heritage, creativity, and policy, and reconnect them to the daily issues of expresive life. From his home base at the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise and Public Policy at Vanderbilt University, he is connecting the dots between the public sector, nonprofits, commercial entertainment, and community arts. And his recent book, Arts, Inc.: How Greed and Neglect Have Destroyed our Cultural Rights, blasts away at our traditional approach to the arts in American life.
The event is one of three public forums curated by the UW-Madison Arts Institute, and the special Arts Enterprise course I’m co-teaching with Stephanie Jutt. Should be a fascinating conversation. I’ll be facilitating the Q&A with Bill, and with our friends from the state, county, and city arts agencies. The event is free, and open to the public. Directions and parking information are available here.
Bill Ivey is indeed compelling, and I wish I could be there. He gave the keynote speech at an individual artists’ conference we were hosting at our warehouse performance space in Brooklyn a decade or so ago, and he did a great job.
It took a lot of guts to do that, given that the work of most of the people there had been seriously undermined by the NEA’s continued inability to find a way to fund individual artists. But the artists listened respectfully, and Ivey gave an excellent speech. I think some of our government representatives could have learned a thing or two if they’d been there…
I was especially taken with the way he contrasted Europe’s hierarchical social structure with America’s horizontal one, like circles of influence with the head of the cultural “tribes” (my word) at the center. He described the dynamics of how the edges of these circles bump up against and overlap with those of adjacent circles. His view was that the most interesting action and creativity happened along these creases, where there were so many more possibilities to mix it up.
I pressed a bottle of water into his hands in gratitude (it was a hot day, and in those days that neighborhood was still short of delis) but I’m not sure he ever drank it.
So, Bill, thanks again! And thanks also for your service on the transition team, it meant a lot to us.
Will the event be recorded and made available in some format? Thanks!
Yes, we plan to record the event and share it online sometime soon, in partnership with Wisconsin Public Television.
I recently read Bill Ivey’s book, and I was quite impressed by his ideas. His very idealistic, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but I think quite a number of his ideas are unrealistic in the United States. Think about establishing the cultural bill of rights Ivey proposes, and then think about how difficult it has been lately on healthcare reform. An issue that clearly affects everyone, and whose impact is immediately evident, can barely pass among those (the democrats) who supposedly support it the most.
We need idealists, they are the dreamers. But will also need realists. To be fair, Ivey doesn’t purport that all his ideas would be accepted. He is speaking merely in terms of a “perfect world” scenario and what he sees this country needs based on the current structures in place.