[introduction]

What kind of society are we? And what kind of society do we aspire to be? It's hard to begin a discussion on policy relating to the arts and culture without posing those contextual questions. We need to reflect on ourselves as a nation and on the extraordinary times we live in. To oversimplify—almost unforgivably—we are the world's oldest continuing democracy and the richest and most powerful nation in the world. Our aspirations are not unrelated to the rights deemed unalienable in the Declaration of Independence—life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. As for the times, in the past 15 years we have seen not only the collapse of communism and totalitarian and authoritarian regimes around the world, but also an exponential increase in our knowledge and in our communication capacities. The cold war is over. The old world order is gone. We are groping for ways to adapt to cataclysmic changes and take full advantage of the new sociopolitical and technological realities to make the world a better place.

For these historic reasons and because we have failed to a large extent as a nation to create cultural policies that measure up to the richness and diversity of our creativity, I would say this is a very good time to have this discussion. Former Librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin once titled a paper on creativity in the United States "The Fertile Verge." It is a most felicitous metaphor for the American here and now, always pregnant with tomorrow. And Robert Hughes, hardly known for his sentimentality, described America in The Culture of Complaint as "a collective work of the imagination whose making never ends."

Where the arts are concerned we have made enormous strides in expanding the number of media in which we express ourselves, developing a more comprehensive and inclusive aesthetic vision and vastly expanding the number, size and quality of cultural organizations, institutions and projects in this country. Does that mean that a renaissance is upon us? That depends on us—our vision and our capacity to translate that vision into enlightened public policy.

Not surprisingly, the new day has at least as many challenges as opportunities. New obstacles, one might even call them tyrannies, emerge to hinder our freedom to make progress. The dominance of the market and the culture of commodification and consumerism tend to dwarf us as individuals and as a body of citizens, as does the religious fundamentalism which rears its head from time to time.

How do these forces affect the life of the intellect and the imagination? In the context of our democracy, how important are the arts and culture? And in terms of strengthening democracy globally, what role does culture play? What are the implications of the pressures of commerce on the arts? What can we as citizens do to encourage government to take next steps in integrating culture into public policy?

In the best of all possible worlds and in the best of times, what would America's cultural policy look like? And more interesting, in our non-utopian, imperfect, perpetually unfinished democracy, how can we improve our cultural policies?

These are some of the issues that our distinguished panel will discuss today. We are fortunate to have three people who have done a great deal of thinking about culture and society from rather different perspectives. That should make today's conversation interesting and illuminating and at times provocative; definitely fertile.

After the panelists have had a chance for a lively exchange of ideas, I will invite all of you to join the conversation. Let me now introduce the panel to you.

Shalini Venturelli is Associate Professor of International Communication Policy at American University. Shalini is among the first scholars to examine the international dimensions of the information society, including the cultural, social, political and economic challenges of global and international development. She recently authored a widely discussed paper, "From the Information Economy to the Creative Economy: Moving Culture to the Center of International Public Policy."

Gigi Bradford is Executive Director of the Center for Arts and Culture, a national think tank on culture and public policy. Before joining the Center, Gigi served the National Endowment for the Arts in several capacities, as Literature Director, Heritage and Preservation Division Coordinator, and in charge of Leadership Projects for the Millennium. During her tenure as head of the Center for Arts and Culture, the organization has sponsored a number of excellent discussions and conferences, published The Politics of Culture, established a consortium of universities, and conducted extensive research focusing on new approaches to public policy.

Benjamin Barber is the Walt Whitman Professor of Political Science and director of the Walt Whitman Center for the Culture and Politics of Democracy at Rutgers University. Ben brings an abiding concern for democracy and citizenship to issues of politics, culture and education and consults regularly with top-level political and civic leaders in the U.S. and abroad. His books include the classic, Strong Democracy, and the novel, Marriage Voices, as well as the international best seller, Jihad vs. McWorld, a critical study of the corrosive effects of tribalism and global markets on democracy. His latest book, My Affair with Clinton: An Intellectual Memoir, will be published next year by W.W. Norton and Company.

I’ll start with a question for Ben. Ben, how important is culture to our democracy and to our efforts to strengthen democracy worldwide?

Let me be provocative. Democracy is not as important to culture and culture is important to democracy; which is to say, too often our discussions of the arts and culture treat the arts and culture instrumentally, as something there for the sake of something else. For example, it is very hard to get money unless you have an education angle, or you demonstrate how you serve audience development or the needs of young people.

But I would argue it's the other way around—that we create democratic free societies so that the arts can flourish. That is to say, the arts are the object and end, not a means to something else. In a certain sense, democracy needs the arts a lot more than the arts need democracy. We know that the arts have flourished under the most repressive regimes. Some people, Tom Stoppard among them, have even suggested that the arts flourish more under circumstances of repression where artists have a sense of being on the cutting edge, of being dissidents, of being resisters, and where art is appreciated in the odd currency of repression. Repression sometimes appears to foster a far greater appreciation of the significance of arts than do democratic lassitude and democratic indifference. We say, "Sure, say and do anything you want as long as you can sell it in the marketplace."

So I want to start our discussion by reminding us that most democratic theorists, from the ancients through to our time, see democratic societies as societies in which a space is created where people can be creative, imaginative, and loving, and can develop affinities for culture and relationships, and that that is really the point. If you understand it that way, that puts the arts at the very center of democratic society. We need to ask what would government policy on the arts be if we were to recognize the centrality of the arts to the lives of free men and women in free societies?

That puts the people at the center in a very clear way; too often, it seems that government isn't there for the people, that it’s there for other reasons, other power-wielding reasons.

A lot of people think it's unfair that artists have to sell themselves in the marketplace and make a profit from their work to justify it. There are times when governments and foundations and philanthropic policy also require that artists sell themselves, but as educators—as instrumentalists. It seems to me that that ignores or downplays the centrality and the critical role that the arts ought to be playing and asks artists to be something other than just an artist before they are allowed to be an artist.

Shalini, do you have a question for Ben?

I appreciate commenting on Ben's remark. I would not disagree, Ben, that certainly space is created in a free society where many things can occur, where all kinds of self-determination and all variety of expression can arise and should arise. That is our hope; that is our expectation. Perhaps the only issue I would take with your characterization of the relationship between art and democracy is that there is something more important in this relationship; it has to do with the fact that the state of both democracy and the arts is tied to underlying conditions of the public sphere. If we fail to look at those conditions, then we come up with what appears to be primary and subordinate types of relationships.

The same issues that affect the fate of the arts actually speak to the wider conditions whereby people in a free society can or cannot participate in the production of ideas. It’s not a question of some higher authority—the political elites, the oligarchs—coming in and making a safe space so that artists can be free to say what they want to. Rather, it is that the space itself is conditional on the participation of all in the defense of that space—which means a vibrant civil society. The fate of civil society is connected to the fate of the arts. If you do not have a vibrant, artistic, cultural, creative, innovative society, with all due respect, you don't have a vibrant, creative and dynamic civil society.

The cold war prevented us from looking at many issues that are important to the evolution of democracy, because the fate of democracy was considered to be something that was addressed by the cold war. But now the cold war is over, and we do have to pay attention to the evolution of this idea. This is not a static idea that happened in 1776 and therefore is inevitable and will go on. There is nothing inevitable about it.

Democracy will continue not because there is somebody in Congress legislating, not because there is somebody sitting on the Supreme Court, but because there are people in society that are actively engaging in the association, in the creation of networks, in the transformation of society, in the production of and participation in ideas.

What we should be looking at is the structural conditions whereby most people in a free society can participate in the creation, production, and distribution of ideas and all the resulting benefits. The fate of the arts is tied to that issue and not whether or not someone from above has given them a space to be free.

Thank you. Gigi, would you like to intervene now?

I would. I am in the happy position of having my fellow panelists in "heated agreement," but coming from different perspectives. This conversation is quite active at the Center for Arts and Culture, as many of my colleagues in the audience can attest. The Center is working in a project, Art, Culture and the National Agenda. We are going to give you our first issue brief, "America’s Cultural Capital," on your way out today. It’s the first of eight briefs examining the increasing connection between, and importance of, the arts, culture, and other aspects of our national life, such as law, education and access, community, globalization, and so forth.

These briefs look at the context for the increased importance of cultural issues now in an idea-based economy and an increasingly connected society. Why are cultural issues more important at the beginning of this century than they may have been previously, and why are they more compellingly interconnected within other policy areas of our national and international life? I think we are all coming from perhaps slightly different perspectives but looking at the same large elephant.

And why are they more compellingly connected?

We are positing that ideas, creativity and cultural heritage are the raw materials of our economy and are increasingly connected to society. These ideas are not only more economically important, but also more important to us in a globalized context. Cultural issues, artistic issues, creativity, innovation, heritage, memory, identity—become the raw materials of how we are looking to interact with each other in this new century.

I'm sympathetic with that view and politically it's indispensable to attempting to secure funding. I just worry because there is a certain trivialization, a certain reductionism at work. You talk about the production and distribution of ideas. That to me is the commodification of ideas and culture. I don't really want to talk about the production of art. Though it's possible to talk about it in economic terms, we constantly turn art and artistic creativity into a form of productivity. We turn art products into products and commodities in ways that I think endanger artistic creation itself. Yes, the creation of relationships; yes, the creation of communities; yes, the participation of all citizens in thinking and discoursing and some elements of imagination and creativity are important. But I don't want to say that's all art is. Because if we say that, in the end, art vanishes, particularly for those who dance and make music and poems and who do the creativity that is art.

So I worry a little bit. The problem is we live in a society where there are two choices: government patronage or market patronage. My view is neither is very conducive to the work that artists actually do or the role of art in the society. But if I am forced to choose, I will certainly take government patronage over market patronage because it does less damage to art.

What I worry about, though, is that in the contest between the two patrons, something happens to culture itself.

Shalini, in your work, you speak of a creative economy and are concerned with policies governing the production, distribution and exploitation of expression. Can you tell us more about the creative economy and it's implications, if any, for democracy?

Let me clarify a term that we might be quibbling over; our differences may be more superficial than we realize. When I refer to production, I am not talking about industrial production. The fact is that if you are engaging in the creation of a dance form or an operatic form or a symphonic form or a work of literature, there is an artist, a creative worker that is producing that work. What I am talking about when I use the term "production of ideas" is the creation of forms of expression.

The fact that they are commodified is a separate issue that comes down the road; that is the relationship between creators of ideas and the commercial system by which those ideas are then diffused in society. I just wanted to make that clear.

My argument regarding the creative economy has to do with my broader view of the structure of the public sphere. I firmly believe the arguments being made by Robert Putnam with respect to the declining participation in society; the arguments made by political parties about declining interest in democracy; and the complaints about the apathy of citizens within the social system in which they are invested largely because they may be satisfied. I believe there is something at the core of this disengagement.

The "something else" is a deformed, poorly functioning, almost dysfunctional public sphere. The public sphere should permit all the major social forces in society to have the opportunity to engage in deliberative participation, and not necessarily only about politics. It can be about many things. It can be about the fate of our society, the fate of our culture, the development of our social system, our economic system. To me a public sphere is not just a political sphere and the argument I make about the creative economy is just one part of that broader argument about the structure of the public sphere. We need to address it before it is too late—before we undermine our civil society and our democracy.

The malaise of the arts is part of the malaise of the democratic system, which can be attributed to a dysfunctional public sphere. And when we look at the public sphere, what are its components? Its components are not simply the debates that occur in Congress; it's the entire communication system by which ideas are exchanged.

What I find in our communication system is that very little of it—and I agree with Ben here—is actually devoted to non-commercial expression. Why is that so? A public sphere that is functioning ought to be well balanced: commercial ideas, non-commercial ideas, cultural ideas. But it seems to me that we produce very well in this society only one form: commercial expression. And everything is being assimilated into that.

Part of my argument about the dysfunctional public sphere, then, concerns its economics. We are moving into an economic system in which ideas are more important than raw materials that you mine from the earth, than goods that you manufacture, and more important, too, than plant and equipment, and workers who basically do what they are told to do on an assembly line.

As we move into an economic system in which the competition among economies is over which economy can produce and distribute ideas, we will be required for the first time in our history to pay attention to the intellectual and creative resources that we have been neglecting. It seems we haven't found an instrumental justification in terms of the market mechanism for the world of ideas, expressive forms and artistic forms.

For the first time, we are going to have to pay attention to creativity. I know that people will say that artists don’t exist so that they can be creative for the economy. And there is no doubt about it—they shouldn't. The function of art itself is much larger than that. It's not just simply to get people jobs. It is to question, enlarge, expand our perception, to challenge the prevailing view, to think of simply something different or something new in a different form. Nevertheless, we will need to find ways to include more people in the creative process, and for that we will need to pay attention to access to information, to access to cultural resources, access to creative resources, to the means by which people acquire the capability to produce ideas.

Until now, we have thought of art as simply something that belongs to those who are highly motivated and/or who can afford to pursue the artistic professions. We will have to think of ensuring that more and more individuals have opportunities to engage in the artistic life of the society as a way of enlarging the non-commercial, public sphere. This is where government can play an important role—not to select which art to support, but rather to ensure that we have a participatory public sphere. We must look at our entire information system. Why do we not have a digital media environment, a large portion of it, preserved for non-commercial, educational, cultural public opinion formation purposes?

There are three areas the market cannot serve. It cannot serve the kind of enriched educational system we need. It cannot serve the cultural needs of society in terms of a vibrant and dynamic artistic community. And, finally, the market cannot serve broad and widespread public opinion formation which permits people to engage in informal discussion of the public issues that are important to our society.

So that's what I am arguing for the role of government.

Am I to understand the creative economy is an economy that is government supported? When you use the term "creative economy," what exactly do you mean?

I don't think that we can separate the fate of the arts from the fate of civil society and democracy. If we want an enriched public sphere, if we want a dynamic civil society, if we want a very creative, innovative, and evolving democratic system that is open to more and more voices and social groups over time, we can't just quarantine the arts in one corner and say let's address the arts. That has been our strategy until now, and it has been the strategy in other countries as well, because what they want to do is to protect, draw a line around some notion of legacy, some notion of an essentialist version of culture that has been handed down. They are not paying attention to how the fate of culture is linked to the number of people and social groups that participate in producing new ideas. They are only looking at the preservation of the past.

In America, we have the obligation to enlarge the debate. The defense of culture is not just about legacy. It is about the conditions under which new ideas can be created.

I know that the Center for Arts and Culture has been doing research and focusing a good deal of its attention on public policy ideas in the past year. Gigi, would you talk about that now?

Thank you, Sondra. Shalini is one of nearly 100 people who contributed background papers to this effort. I am pleased she could join us today; we have found her work rich and thought provoking. I want now to reference one of Ben's original comments. I have long valued and honored the distinction you make between instrumentalist and intrinsic art. I think that has been very important for the cultural sector at large.

The conversation must move from patronage to policies. You talked about public patronage and corporate patronage. We have been working on making recommendations to the federal government as a springboard for making them throughout the public and private sectors. Government might begin to look at integrating its policies for culture within government as well as through other policy areas in American life.

We must move the conversation past patronage into issues—for instance, communication policy, tax exemption, tax deductions, 501(c)(3) issues—so that policies are seen as interrelated and as opportunities to look at the cultural sphere as an increasingly important part of the American experience.

Our issue brief "America's Cultural Capital" makes four structural recommendations for the national government. Please note that we are not talking about what kinds of policies government should put together, but rather how government might look at ways to structure its examination of policies toward the cultural sector, ways to think more cohesively about cultural issues.

The first recommendation is that the President establish the position of cultural advisor, not as someone with a portfolio but as someone who can integrate cultural activities within government. Just as economic issues that are threaded through government programs, agencies, regulations, and activities are addressed by the Council of Economic Advisors, so we believe that cultural issues should be addressed in a coherent way within the executive branch.

We are also recommending that the Department of State establish an Undersecretary for Cultural Affairs, because there is no one in government with whom to discuss cultural issues. Shalini talks about how trade is now increasingly about ideas and not goods. We feel that there should be someone who acts as the switching agent for culture, to send cultural conversations to the appropriate agencies and departments.

Our third recommendation is that Congress evaluate ways to integrate its cultural matters. There are over 200 separate federal programs and more than two dozen congressional subcommittees that deal with cultural issues.

And the final recommendation is for a national forum to examine cultural issues.

Again, we believe that culture is a national resource, the accumulated capital of American ingenuity and creativity. We're not recommending specific policies, but rather a context in which we look at policy.

Thank you. Ben and Shalini, would you like to comment?

I don't mean to be intractable and stubborn about this, but I nonetheless feel there's an air of reductionism, particularly about the notion of the creative economy. We can't just talk about the production of ideas and the creation of ideas as the same thing as art. Art occupies a very special and particular place, which is why it is so endangered. It is extremely fragile.

My wife started a dance company two years ago. In two and a half years, she's raised $18,000 from the private and public sectors to pay a company of eight. Anyone would laugh at that amount, any other nation that supports the arts. Let's not talk about the role of the arts as some metaphor for creativity. Look at writers, look at dancers, look at performers, look at young musicians who are trying to learn to play the oboe and use that knowledge. Where do they go in this society to see that nourished? That's not part of the creative economy. That's not the import/export business around culture. That's a separate set of issues. How do we assure that those young people who care about a particular art form, who are gifted and want to develop their gifts, have the opportunity to do it?

The tragedy is that in the most prosperous society in the world, a country that has an extended civic sector as well as an extended private sector, artists have fewer opportunities to develop their gifts than in any other country I know, including the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, which were countries where art flourished. We might not always be happy with the kind of art that flourished. In many cases, it was dissident art. In some cases it was state art. But artists have done well in many societies that are not democratic. Oddly, democratic capitalist societies have served the arts less well than more dogmatic and orthodox and dictatorial societies. And that to me presents a puzzle that I'm not sure how to solve. However, I don't think talking about the information economy and its demands and turning culture into a kind of source is really going to address an extremely important issue. That is that most young artists in America— writers, poets, and dancers—get paid a pittance, while a young person who wants to do something else can make a lot of money.

I come from a theater family, and in the early days I was a playwright and director off- Broadway in New York. I had a choice to make in the 1960s—to pursue a professional career as an academic or as a playwright. I made a prudent and wise choice, to be sure, but a rather sad choice in a sense.

My son started out as an actor. He is now a Hollywood producer and lawyer and making more money than I do. He made a prudent and wise choice. But it is a pity that we force so many young Americans to make the choice to become a lawyer or perhaps a teacher of the arts, and only a teacher of the arts, because that's the only way an artist can make money.

I appreciate the broader discussion. I understand it. But we also have to narrow the discussion and talk about art not as metaphor, culture not as a symbol for other things, but about the arts and culture in their own right—and how it is that we do so badly with regard to them in one of the richest, most creative countries in the world. [applause]

There are things that you have said that I would not disagree with about the fate of the arts in terms of dance, music, theater, and especially literature and writing—because of the devastation of the publishing business. That to me says a great deal about what is happening to the arts.

However, there are some things here that are counter-factual. First, you say that arts flourish in all kinds of political systems, authoritarian, dictatorial, democratic. I think that conclusion can only be arrived at if one looks at one novelist or one painter or one poet or one dissident. I think it's a real stretch to say that in authoritarian systems like the former Soviet Union or China or Singapore that the arts are widespread, that lots of people are engaging in them, or that there is an artistic vibrancy that's occurring despite the denial of political speech and political freedom. That to me is a real stretch.

By the way, I meant because of not despite, which is a different argument. Because of the denial—the denial of speech shows its value and its worth both to those who make and to those who receive it, which is why the underground markets in books and plays and the arts in the totalitarian world have always been so vibrant; the very repression tells people books matter. I have many friends who are writers in East Germany, and during the period of East German repression, they said, "my books are valued." Now they can write anything and no one reads it.

I think that is a very broad generalization. Certainly you can point to the one or two or three or four prominents who achieved some recognition in the West and who had a defining role to play in the dissident movement opposing totalitarian authority, but that's a very different thing from saying that arts are widespread and available to the groups, the minorities, the citizens. That is not the case in China or authoritarian Korea in its former days, North Korea now, or Singapore.

I do agree with you on the issue of art for art’s sake, on creative process itself. It cannot be served by the market, there is no doubt about it. And we do not want to have governmental support for art forms, especially when they are so highly controversial.

However, I think we can take a slightly different approach. If we say that government is not supporting a particular exhibit or dance or project, if we talk about government ensuring that we do have a non-commercial sector and provide a multitude of ways of funding that sector, either directly or indirectly, without actually funding particular expressive forms, that to me is the key challenge. As I said earlier, that is part of the issue of the public sphere. We need to have non-commercial voices in the public sphere in all areas, and especially in the arts. The arts are, of course, one of the most important because they teach us to question the way we see the world. Unless we have that innovation allowed, we are going to get only recycled forms.

In television, for example, you have a 500-channel universe, but you can count on your fingers the number of particular modes. There may be just four of them. It just shows that we don't have a diversity of ideas. It is the greatest irony in a democracy that has a vast diffusion of technologies of information and a government that does not control our speech. If anything, it is restrained from doing so politically and legally. And yet we have a scarcity of ideas. It's the most ironic historical circumstance and largely because our entire public sphere, our entire information, educational system ends up producing just one or two forms of expression.

We need to ensure that children from a very early age have access to the materials to create artistic expression, something we have totally neglected in our educational policy in this country.

I can't agree that there is a dearth of ideas in this country—and particularly in this room. I don't think that we suffer from a lack of ideas; but I do think we need to come up with more enlightened policies.

I agree with you. And I think what you've argued for so passionately is the question at hand. How do you create the conditions for culture to flourish without repression? How do you do that? And that's what cultural policy is about. All the issue briefs we will release look at the same elephant from one point of view. How do we as a society and as a nation create the conditions that allow the arts, humanities, creativity, culture and heritage to thrive?

I would like to open the discussion to the audience now; so please, someone, start the ball rolling.

First of all, I want to thank all the panelists. It's been such an interesting discussion. My name is Ann Goodyear. I am currently working at the National Gallery. I'm finishing a dissertation on the 1950s. I am an art historian, and so it has been very interesting to me to hear your ideas and to think historically about the development of art and how art has been supported at different moments in time.

I am sure that everyone in this room is aware that art has always been supported, certainly from the time of the Renaissance, by a combination of public and private patronage. I would argue that it's done quite well under those conditions.

I agree, too, that there is a need for our government to address the problem of supporting the arts. It's very interesting to me that the NEA was born in the 1960s during the cold war and that it is suffering now that we no longer have the cold war.

That brings me to the point: Are we suffering from the lack of a perceived need to support the arts? And does this come out of the fact that we live in a society where we are privileged to have freedom of expression?

So I think the question is how do we communicate to the large public, not necessarily to the choir, that there is a need to support the arts? Unfortunately, I do think that economic arguments work very well. I think unfortunately there is a shortage of altruism. And I think that demonstrating to business that culture and education have economic value is not necessarily a bad thing.

I just want to make a distinction between the government and governments, because the National Endowment for the Arts is one thin, thin sliver of the kind of money that comes forward for the arts from governments. State governments are giving more money to the arts. Local arts agencies are giving more money to the arts. So if we think in terms of governments, state, and local as well as federal, the picture really changes quite dramatically. The American citizen is by and large in support of the arts at many, many levels of government. We have to worry about the NEA. That's important. But it's not the only side of the picture.

Can I piggyback on that to say that economically, the most important U.S. government policy for the arts, the humanities, and many other non-profit organizations is the tax exemption and the tax deduction? It is by far the largest governmental contribution. That's a cultural policy, but it's not a patronage. It's fundamentally democratic because it moves the decision away from government level to the individual.

Maybe we should start talking about artists as what we are really trying to support. I recommend Michael Brenson’s new book on the NEA—Visionaries and Outcasts: The NEA, Congress and the Place of the Visual Arts in America.

I wonder if the panel might talk about the extent to which the 20th century will impact the 21st. It seems to me that much of this discussion has been framed by the realities of the cold war, the ideals of the civil rights movement and other movements that have shifted the discussion.

However, when you look at the 20th century, what seem to loom above all other things are the profound and growing social inequities between social classes and between parts of the world.

I come back to the essential task for policymakers in the public and the private sectors: to create the conditions for artists and the arts and the humanities to flourish, both in terms of production and in terms of access. That is a real policy role.

I'm Michael Bass from Fort Lauderdale I think we have to look at the arts as an industry. It's an industry. The arts industry doesn't cost; it pays. In a community where you have good arts, that community makes money. Artists are making money and they are paying taxes. It's good government sense to support the arts.

When we talk about the arts, we talk about that sector of the arts known as the not-for-profit arts. By some calculation 7 percent of the economic activity in this country is generated by arts.

Employers of the majority of artists are in advertising and television. Look at some of the best art captured in commercials. Dancers, singers, costumers, flat-cleaners, photographers, choreographers, etc., are employed in making them. If we are talking policy we do ourselves a disservice to focus almost entirely on the nonprofits. Let’s talk about where the artists work; where are we training the artists to work? If we train them only with the narrow view that they're going to work for a not-for-profit, then we are doing a disservice to the field.

I'd like the panel to comment on that, please.

We need to look at our social and economic and political system in a new way. We need to see human beings as very important resources, not just as workers. Wherever there are human beings, there is a capacity to create ideas; and we have to make sure that all individuals, especially in a society as wealthy as ours, have access to the means not only to come up with ideas but to implement them, to achieve them, and share them with others, because that's part of art. I think it's something that we have not talked about. It's not just support of the artists. It's creating a climate in which artistic expression can be enjoyed by a community.

Supporting artists is fundamentally related to the kind of community infrastructure that allows artistic expression to be shared and invigorated. Art doesn't exist in a vacuum. It exists as a network of ideas. All ideas build upon each other, and they have an acceleration capacity. The more ideas you have, the more ideas that leads to. So creating a dynamic community environment in which art can be supported is crucial. For that, I do believe public policy is essential, because it will not be provided by the private sector.

We must look at new ways to do this. Some countries have explored structural funds to support the arts. This is different from having an NEA or an NEH. This is a structural fund supported by a portion of taxes—for going to the movies or buying certain products in the marketplace. A certain percentage of that goes into a structural fund to support artists and to support community enjoyment of the arts.

There is nothing that I can think of in our constitution or legal system that would be inherently opposed to that.

We have such taxes in various states and localities on hotels and tourism.

We need to expand them. That model is a very important one.

There is more art contributed and there is more artistic exposure through commercial means than through all the orchestras, dance companies, and not-for-profit theater companies in the country. It's cheaper to turn on the television for many people, particularly people in the country that has been increasingly divided. Talk about digital divide. The socioeconomic divide is just as bad.

Let's talk further, because the way you've talked about it is disempowering. It’s true that advertisements are better than MTV. MTV is better than mainstream television. Mainstream television is probably better than a lot of movies; movies better than a lot of theater. But does that mean, therefore, that we should just put all the artists in America on ads?

There is a tremendous price paid for that. What happens is that people like Michael Weller who write for the theater find it makes more sense to write for Hollywood. They make more money. Even when their stuff doesn't get done, you get paid not to have your scripts developed in Hollywood and actually shot. You get paid whether or not it's distributed.

And then you find out it's better and more wholesome to work for television than for film. So Arthur Penn, for example, the president of the Actors Studio, is now a producer of a mainline television show. He's left the theatre and he's making his living now in his late 70s on television. And television directors find it makes more sense for them to work for MTV or to make advertisements.

So you're right, the talent is drawn there. It is drawn there because it is following the dollar. Not because it's following its spirit, its muse. It's following the dollar, and on the way to following the dollar, it's leaving behind its muse, its creativity. It's bringing its craft, which is what we see, and we say that's good! Those dancers are superb. Those voices are great. Those lyrics are fabulous advertising Pepsi Cola.

But what if they were doing something other than advertising Pepsi Cola? You are creating an instrumentalist art which subordinates itself to something else, and that's the death of creativity and imagination. In the end, craft gets paid, people make a living, and that's how we force artists to live. But I don't think that's the solution. That’s the puzzle. That's the challenge. That's the dilemma.

I have to disagree. The Alvin Ailey School is filled with kids sweating 8 and 10 hours a day who pay their rent by dancing for MTV.

And when did they dance for the Alvin Ailey second company? You see, once, twice a year they have a two-week season. They shouldn't have a two-week season. They should have a 40-week season. They should tour every city around the United States. Why do those kids have to make their living on MTV or in advertising? Why can't there be ten companies churning them out? There are enough talented young African American and Latino dancers to fund, if we had the funds, dozens and dozens of original companies with original choreography all over this country. Instead, you're right: the only way they can make a living is to go and dance in the advertisements.

I sit on the board of the Center for Arts and Culture, and I am at the Smithsonian. Let me suggest that the panel and the audience consider two terms that I think we're getting close to but perhaps not close enough.

One has to do with the sociology of our discussion. We quickly got to the artists and then we wonder why the artists can't be supported. In my view we have not talked about fostering the artistic in every human being, which goes to the heart of democracy. Although we don't foster this development in the school system, we expect magically that those people who decide to formalize and to professionalize themselves with this inherent human capacity will readily receive or respond to the affirming response of their fellow human beings. Well, their fellow human beings think that art exists outside of them. It's a rarified individual that does not exist inside us.

One of the policy issues to address is looking at the major socializing institution in every society, and that is not the family but the school system.

The other thing that I would comment on is our use of the term "policy." We think about policy as something that government does, rather than think about policy as the normative values, the philosophical dimensions of what we're talking about? We must address this, whether in relation to a tax code, a discount, or through some kind of governmental policy.

We have to go back to a radical rethinking, first about ourselves, that we are art. Each and every one of us is art, and each and every one of us is sense-making, intellectual. Everybody in here makes sense, has a sense—an inherent sense-making capacity. Some people decide they will become formal intellectuals, but that does not mean that the rest of us somehow are not intellectuals. Or those of us who decide to become artists, it does not mean that the rest of us are not artists. It means that we have determined that we will formalize, specialize, professionalize in some other area.

If we get back to those two fundamental issues, we may be able to deepen this conversation and get away from the instrumentalist view that if the NEA or NEH put up more money somehow the arts would flourish. It does not suggest what the audience would be, because the audience doesn't have any appreciation. A lot of us don't come to the Kennedy Center because we are not quite sure what the decorum should be, how we should dress. Have we been socialized properly to feel comfortable here and any other institutions basically?

I'd like to hear how you would consider those propositions. [applause]

As always, Mr. Early is right on the mark, and I think the education issue is particularly vital. We can talk about it in two ways. One, why is it that arts education is always the first to go, that it's discretionary, that it's an elective, whereas, say, football is an obligatory program. Whenever there is a shortage, they get rid of the arts. In the absence of a perspective in which young people see themselves as both creators and appreciators of art (and the lines between those two are very small), it's impossible down the line that there's going to be an audience for the arts. We old white guys who go to the arts institutions in this country notice the aging of the serious arts audience at the Kennedy Center, the Met, etc. The fact is that the audience is actually the same as Bob Putnam's audience. Bob Putnam's "good citizens" who fought World War II, they are the ones who supported the rep companies and the opera houses. They are aging and graying fast, and there is no sign right now of a younger audience in their teens and twenties and thirties that's beginning to support those institutions. There are some other arts that they are responding to, and we have to look at those.

How we bring new generations into the circle, both as creators and people who care about and appreciate what the arts are, is a fundamental question; we certainly won't do it when we make the arts a discretionary elective that’s the first to be defunded every time there is a crisis in the schools.

I also would like to respond to your very important intervention because I feel you have gotten to the heart of the problem. That is why I say that addressing the issue of the arts cannot be isolated from the other issues which have to do with the knowledge foundation of society which begins in school. And your suggestion, Gigi, about structural change with respect to government policy is important. If we did, in fact, have in the President's office or in Congress or in the State Department or in a national forum, the ability for injecting some dialogue on how we can look at these issues in a new way, it would not be long before we found that what we are doing with education is going to affect the arts. What we are doing with education is going to affect our democracy. It's not just a question of training a workforce.

Ben is absolutely right, we don't have an audience for the fine arts because we haven't cultivated that audience. We haven't "acculturated" that audience. We haven't socialized that audience. The taste is not there, and what we need to think about here is that the reason why that is true is the same reason why artists have to go to Madison Avenue to work for the ad agencies or to Hollywood to work on the production line of script writers. We have assumed that the only form of expression that dominates in the marketplace is the expression that most people want and, therefore, that it is a fundamentally democratic argument.

This is a fundamental fallacy, because the marketplace actually censors expression. It selects certain forms of expression and rejects other, more complex ideas—for instance, complex philosophical tracts. There aren't any commercial publishers out there for that sort of thing; or for funding novels, innovative avant-garde dance forms, etc.

They are both linked. We have assumed that the function of art in education doesn't have anything to do with work, doesn't have anything to do with our economy, doesn't have anything to do with our political systems. So if we have to make cuts, let's make it there first. And what I am saying is that we need to think about this in terms of the fundamental creative capacities of our young people.

The arts and humanities are fundamental to that. By undercutting that, we have undercut their ability to express themselves in artistic, innovative and creative ways. And the intellectual challenge that we give to children must include this. When we talk about raising our standard of education, it's not just a question of testing them for things they have memorized. It's a question of how we can challenge our children intellectually and creatively. I think that in the United States we have the ability to do that better than in any other part of the world, and we have not seized this great potential that we have. We do in fact put a value upon individual expression, and when we look at our educational system, that's what we need to do for all children. If we don't start there, we're not going to have a marketplace of ideas, diversity of ideas. We are not going to have artists arising. We are not going to have an artistic audience.

I’m Rich Kurin, from the Smithsonian. I have two points. One is the strategic choice we make in terms of whether we call this cultural policy or arts policy, but it seems to me that most of what we talk about is really policy. I don't know what language people in the United States speak in classrooms and communities. Is that part of cultural policy? That seems on the edge of what's been discussed today in terms of art, in terms of language, religion, values in public life.

I remember a few years ago at a similar discussion someone said that when we talk about culture, what we really mean is the arts, the fine arts. And what we really mean by the fine arts is a certain type of performance, sculpture and visual art, and that's what we're really talking about.

In terms of the issue of the marketplace and commerce, commerce has gone on for over a million years. It goes back to a very early form of cultural exchange, in marketplaces all over the world. Sometimes the commercial world—indeed in our own society—opens up the forms of cultural expression and people that were previously left out of certain cultural and artistic institutions; so I wouldn’t write off the commercial sphere entirely as a way that downgrades artistic or cultural expression.

First, I want to thank Mr. Early for making his wonderful statement. There are two very quick points I might stress and that is that bringing the idea of children and the arts to the table really requires a very long term look at this. What we are suffering now is leaders in government who did not have that very training in the arts and therefore did not have that kind of appreciation.

The other thing that I would love to stress is that it is a fallacy that unless you're talented and professional, art is of no use. That is just wrong.

Richard Kurin touched on my point, but I will just touch on it briefly again. I think we have a tendency to fall into negative statements about the marketplace and about the private sector, and I worry about that. Richard's comment about the marketplace as a cultural arena is important and profound. Several speakers did allude to the necessity for maintaining a multiple system in our cultural domain so that we're not putting all our eggs in the marketplace or all of our eggs in government, but rather maintaining multiple systems, all of which have art in them.

The key thing about the marketplace to me that's worth thinking about is centralized versus decentralized, and decentralized marketplace functions are at the very core of how culture works. I'll give you a contemporary example. I am now out of my life as a federali and I play the fiddle and so I play house concerts around the country. House concerts are a phenomenon of the last few years. They are very decentralized, very low cost, and yet they are all managed through the Internet. It's a whole new cultural arena that has developed and that has totally no support from any government, local, state or federal. It's a very important cultural development. We need to keep our eye on decentralized marketplace cultural development. Decentralization is important to our culture.

I am formerly with the State Department. I ran the international arts program and I am a private art dealer. I think the issue we need to address is financing. We need to look at the tax program, which works so well in fighting crime. We need to look at what the benefits are that people are getting from funding culture. I think that's what has been stressed here: the reason people are engaged in the activity of the arts is that they are getting something back from it. There are some very interesting reciprocal models that we should start to explore in terms of the public and private sectors and in terms of what businesses and individuals in those businesses are getting back when they engage in the arts. I think we need to look at the tax bill as an example of something that has worked very well and try to replicate it.

Thank you all. And now, last words from our panelists. Ben.

The marketplace, whatever it does for the arts, doesn't require our encouragement. The people who are in the arts for money and profit will go there because they think they can make money. We don't need to give them an incentive; they've got their own incentive. My fear is that their incentives are so good that they'll buy the whole thing out and there'll be very little left, which is why so many artists end up in advertisements rather than in theatres. But I agree with you that they have a role to play.

A lot of people here have said, "But what about culture and what about language and what about audience versus the artist? What about the popular arts versus the fine arts? We haven't really talked about that. What about diversity?" And the reason we keep bringing these up is that we all share this tiny pot of crumbs in this extraordinary prosperous nation. So we are set at each other's throats.

Does the Defense Department says shall we have a Navy or an Army or Air Force? I don't think so. Nobody talks about throwing money at problems in the Defense Department. They agree money alone won't make a first rate army, but they put plenty of money in it. Then they say, now, you've got plenty of money, let's see what else we need to do to get a first rate defense force.

I want the arts to be treated as is defense. I want a lot of money to be put up there, more even than it needs. But we need a lot more than just money. I agree money won't solve problems. You can't throw money at the arts, but let's start by throwing money at the arts [applause], and then we can argue with one another and then maybe we won't be at each other's throats about whether it should be for the popular arts or the fine arts, for education or artistry.

If we can start there, then maybe we are on the way. What we want to remember is every one in this room, though we disagree on some things, all care deeply about the arts and many different understandings of them. And for that to work we need to get more support. We need to have a place at the table. European societies and most free countries give far greater percentage of their budgets to the arts than we do.

The trouble with the NEA is that money gets counted twice. It gets counted at $90- or $100- million and then it's recounted at the state level because they give to the states and the states re-give that money and it gets counted again. We give terribly little, so if we do nothing else as we argue about all these important issues, let’s throw some money at the arts. We'll be way ahead of the game.

In terms of throwing money, patronage, policies and value, I hope you all pick up a copy of "America’s Cultural Capital," the first of eight issue briefs on the intersection of cultural issues with other policy areas. I want to thank my fellow panelists and the audience, the Center's Research Task Force, and the Center's Board. This has been personally and professionally very nourishing. And also thanks to ArtTable and the Kennedy Center for working with us on this program. It’s good to have a discussion with so many people. We hope this will be one piece of a national conversation.

I certainly would not argue with throwing money at the arts. Why shouldn't the arts be as important as defense? After all it's the defense of the richness of our civil society. Without culture there is no civil society.

More than at any other time in history, creativity has become a strategically important concern, and any country that continues to evolve its public policy in the mindset of the industrial age, where it sees culture as simply the icing on the cake, is going to be seriously left behind. We need to look at how we can enrich and strengthen the creative foundations of our society in all sorts of ways. And we need to begin to understand why this is important.

And, of course, we need the money. Absolutely, we have to have the money, but we need to know how to put that money to intelligent use. In conclusion, I want to reiterate that more than at any other time creative capital, intellectual ideas and artistic expression are as important as producing cars and automobiles and designing roads and other kinds of infrastructure. It is the future intellectual and creative vigor of our society.

I hope this discussion will continued, because I think that it has been fruitful and enjoyable. Thank you very much for coming. [applause]