Putting the Arts back into the Arts

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How can amateurs reclaim the arts?
The amateur scene is very vigorous and very much alive. It is served by for-profit industries that provide all kinds of training systems, DVDs to teach the guitar, programs that show you how to paint, magazines and books that are oriented toward craft and art skills. There’s no absence of amateur art-making. What we don’t have is an elevation of amateur artwork into public policy around the arts. We’ve elevated the professional and placed the amateur in the role of being a mere consumer of greatness.

Is that because art policy in this country is focused on nonprofits that mostly serve the “fine arts?”
It’s important that we think less about how the symphony or the art museum is doing and look at how families are making art at home. We don’t talk about making art as a route to a vibrant, expressive life that’s a public good; we have not paid enough attention to various contemporary craft training programs, community choruses, community theater, a whole range of activities that are vibrant but haven’t surfaced as part of a policy process.

It seems that even professional artists aren’t necessarily valued beyond their craft: We don’t place a high value on artists’ approaches to problem solving and creative thinking, in terms of how they could be applied across disciplines and to public problems.
To start with, we need to have artists working on important nuts-and-bolts projects in their communities. If we’re talking about a new sewage disposal system, there should be an artist on that panel; there should be artists on school boards and neighborhood commissions, not to make the project look pretty, but to bring a unique approach. Artists are very good at metaphor, at seeing less-obvious links, at right-brain thinking that might not be linear but that gets you to a good result by making an imaginative leap.

Why is the disconnect between public policy and the arts so much more pronounced in the U.S. than in, say, Western Europe?
The United States had government before we had a sense of cultural identity; ultimately, this should be an advantage for us. Countries like France and Germany, in which culture is presumed to precede government, have had problems integrating diversity into their model of national identity. But we can talk about culture and cultural difference in our expressive lives without getting caught up in some overarching sense of Americanness. The French ask, “Is this really French?” Americans don’t think that way.

You argue that copyright law, focused as it is on the interests of corporations rather than artists, restricts creativity by limiting our access to our own cultural heritage.
Artists need to be able to earn money from their work, but by the same token, an artist needs some access to the work of others, to find things that are existing and reconfigure them into something new—the mashup is a hallmark of 21st-century artistry. The challenge is to have a conversation not about what’s good for corporations that control movies or TV shows or sound recordings, or even what is important about copyright for artists, but really how copyright serves citizens.

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