Bill Ivey's Arts, Inc.: Cultural Rights and Creative Freedom

With an insightful analysis of modern economics and its impact on the state of art and culture in America, Arts, Inc.: How Greed and Neglect Have Destroyed Our Cultural Rights is author Bill Ivey's attempt to sound the alarm and preserve the artistic and cultural heritage that defines every great society. As the former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, Ivey is uniquely qualified to assess the crucial importance of maintaining a thriving cultural atmosphere, as well as the role of governmental policy and political influence in fostering an environment that promotes artistic expression.

The central premise posited by Ivey throughout Arts, Inc. is that the advent of intellectual property rights and copyright law, as well as the confluence between marketing and artistic viability, has weakened the foundation of America's expressive nature. He believes that a nation such as ours, founded as it is on the concept of free expression and the unfettered ability to produce and create, should invariably be among the world's leaders in cultural contribution, but that "our scattershot cultural policy has failed to balance the public interest with the marketplace" (Ivey, xvii). To address this failure, Ivey proposes the formation of a Cultural Bill of Rights, stating that "it is time to establish a new set of goals designed to reclaim art and culture for the American people" (Ivey, xvii). Ivey repeatedly contends that provoking public discussion regarding the plight of art and culture in America will inevitably reawaken the populace's creative faculties, while also allowing people to free themselves from the shackles of corporate control.

Throughout the majority of Arts, Inc., Ivey repeatedly expresses his concern over the emergence and subsequent dominance of intellectual property as a concept. He laments the tragic truth that Americans "have converted the shared memory embedded in our priceless cultural heritage into mere 'intellectual property,' which is bought, sold, abandoned or simply locked away in the vaults of giant media companies" (Ivey, 18). The inexorable process of commercialization, so rampant within the capitalistic structure of the American economic system, presents the greatest threat to free artistic expression because it seeks to exploit the creation of art for monetary gain.

Whereas in bygone eras painters, sculptors, musicians, and dramatists all created their various art forms simply out of the sheer desire to express themselves, today's culture is produced merely to enhance the sales of a particular product. Ivey proposes that, through the removal of "the profit motive and the compromises that limit risk," artists will be freed to explore their creative impulses, thereby "giving us art that isn't homogenized by the forces that plague our commercial arts industry" (Ivey, 208). America can restore its sense of artistic identity only by allowing art and culture to flourish without the limitations imposed by corporate influence. If art is produced purely to procure profit, the inevitable result can only be the degeneration of creative expression that America has witnessed during the latter part of the twentieth century.