Authors: Lewis Hyde
In instance after instance, public institutions have been encouraged to think of themselves as private businesses. The universities have set up “technology transfer offices” and tried to fund themselves by selling knowledge rather than creating,
preserving, and disseminating it, as their old mission statements once asked them to do. Grammar schools have learned that they can sell exclusive rights to soft drink vendors intent on creating brand loyalty in the very young. Public radio and television are now cluttered with advertising. Even commercial television has become more so: in the United States, the networks once limited their ads to nine minutes an hour; they gave that up in the last decade and ads now run eighteen minutes in prime time.
Natural abundance has been similarly commercialized, everywhere subject to the grid of artificial scarcity. Ancient aquifers, by rights belonging to all who live above them, are now pumped and packaged. Drinking water, once an essence of life, has become a resource to be sold in brand-differentiated packaging. Broadcast spectrum, one of nature’s richest gifts, has been parceled out to industry and then sold back to the public.
Our cultural abundance suffers the same fate. The ever-expanding reach of copyright has removed more and more art and ideas from the public domain. The Walt Disney Company happily built its film empire out of folk culture
(Snow White, Pinocchio)
but any folk who try to build on Disney can expect a cease and desist order in the next mail. Patents are now used to create property rights in things once thought inalienable—facts of nature, seed lines, human genes, medicines long known to indigenous cultures. A company that makes jam recently got itself a patent on the crustless peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich.
This period of market triumphalism has, in sum, seen a successful move to commercialize a long list of things once thought to have no price, and to enclose common holdings, both natural and cultural, that we used to assume no one was allowed to take private. All of which seems quite grim, but only, I think, if we forget that history brought these changes
and that history continues to unfold. As I said before, gift-institutions supporting the noncommercial portion of our lives will change as the times change. None of us wants to return to the days when a great scientist had to hope the king might make him Master of the Mint, nor—if we care for the arts and sciences as ends in themselves—should we pine for the days of patronage as propaganda. If we want our institutions to have the longevity they deserve, then the commercial side of our culture needs to be met with an indigenous counterforce, not a foreign one.
To close this excursion into matters topical and practical, then, let me point to a necessarily limited sample of places where the commercial and the noncommercial are found in better balance. A good number may be seen on the Internet, itself a post-Soviet surprise of history if there ever was one. Numerous projects on the Web have the structures and fertility of gift communities. There are many examples, from the free software movement to the donated labor supporting political blogs to the “NASA Clickworkers,” a set of over eighty-five thousand anonymous, untrained volunteers who helped classify all the craters on maps of Mars.
Or take the Public Library of Science. This Web-based publishing venture has protocols reminiscent of the scientific community as described in chapter 5. There I write that papers published in scientific journals are called “contributions” for good reason; “They are in fact, gifts,” as one theorist says, gifts to a community whose currency is the merit that a scientist acquires when her ideas are accepted and passed along.
This gift ethic never extended, however, to the actual printing and distribution of scientific journals. On the contrary, the cost of subscribing to these journals has been a growing problem for many libraries (the price of publications in science rose by about 260 percent during the 1990s). A one-year subscription to
The American Journal of Human Genetics
now costs over $1,000 and a good science library needs scores of such subscriptions. At current rates, poorly endowed colleges and, more importantly, the poorer nations, literally cannot afford to enter the scientific community, no matter its internal ethic of generosity.
Internet publication has provided a solution. In 2000 a group of biomedical scientists, including Nobel laureate Harold E. Varmus, began urging scientific publishers to make all research available for free distribution online. When the publishers resisted, the group simply worked around them and in 2003 launched a nonprofit Web publishing venture, the Public Library of Science. By now there are six online journals
(PLoS Biology, PLoS Medicine, PLoS Genetics
, and others). These are not Web logs or chat rooms or sites where people may post whatever they wish; they are well-edited, peer-reviewed journals publishing original research, as with traditional journals. The difference is that PLoS journals are “open access,” meaning that the authors grant to all users “a free, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual right of access” to their work. “Everything we publish is freely available online throughout the world,” say the editors, “for you to read, download, copy, distribute, and use (with attribution) any way you wish. No permission required.”
The Public Library of Science has added “publishing as gift-exchange” to the older idea of “research as gift-exchange.” Nor, I might add, is gift-exchange at odds with commerce in this case; the editors allow commercial reuse of their journals’ content. In the introduction to
The Gift
, I say that artworks exist in two economies, though one is primary; the same might be said of scientific knowledge in the Public Library model: commerce is not excluded, but it follows after contributions are made; it does not come first.
To present my second example of a new noncommercial institution I need to back up and describe a little-known piece
of the history of support for the arts. In modern times, young artists in need of help have traditionally received support either from public coffers or from private fortunes. The question is, might there be a third path? Might not the art world itself hold wealth sufficient to support emerging talents?
An interesting experiment in that line was initiated shortly after the Second World War when musicians in the United States began to worry that the popularity of long-playing records would cut into their performance income. What if every time the band goes to the recording studio all they are doing is playing themselves out of half of next year’s jobs? Responsive to such concerns, the musicians’ union worked out an innovative agreement with the recording companies such that a small percentage of the sale of each recording would go into a trust fund, the fund then being used to augment the income of musicians playing live performances.
After half a century this institution, the Music Performance Fund, still exists. It distributes millions of dollars annually, and supports thousands of concerts in the United States and Canada. It’s the largest sponsor of live, admission-free music in the world. In recent years it has also developed a Scholarship Fund to help pay for the training of young musicians.
What I like especially about the Music Performance Fund is its recycling feature, the wealth moving in a circle. That small percentage of the commerce that goes into the Music Performance Fund is a kind of self-tithing that the community has accepted so as to support its members, and to support musical culture in general (most of the performances are given for young people in schools). As a result, the recording industry is not purely extractive; the business side itself agrees to support the cultural ecology that nurtures musicians in the first place.
More to the point, I like the revealed fact that artists need not always go begging to taxpayers or private patrons;
the arts themselves produce wealth
and therefore, if we have the wit to organize
the needed institutions, the arts ought to be able to support the arts.
*
In the United States, the Arts Endowing the Arts Act was, in fact, the name given to a legislative proposal that—had it been realized—would have nicely reproduced the structure of the Music Performance Fund.
In 1994, U.S. Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut proposed a cunning way to use the value of past intellectual property to support artists and scholars working in the present. Dodd’s suggested legislation would have added twenty years to the term of copyright protection, and used the income from those extra years to underwrite current creative work. At the time, American copyright protected an individual’s work for his or her lifetime, plus fifty years; corporations with works “made for hire” (most films, for example) held rights for seventy-five years. Under the Dodd proposal, at the end of each of these terms, the rights to an additional twenty years would have been publicly auctioned, the proceeds going to build endowments for the arts and humanities.
Copyright has always had a double function. It encourages creativity and, because its term is limited, it brings creative work into the public domain. It treats such work as a private good for a term, and then as a public or common good in perpetuity. What the Dodd proposal would have done, in effect, is to add a middle term between the private and public, a transition period during which wealth generated by copyright would underwrite currently active creative talent. Or, to put it another way, for a limited period we would consider “the public” to be those men and women who are currently dedicating their lives to the arts and humanities, those who are most directly the aesthetic and intellectual heirs of the past,
and who will most directly be the benefactors of any future cultural commons.
The logic of Senator Dodd’s proposal, then, replicates the logic of creative life itself, in which the past feeds the present and the present will before long contribute to artists not yet born. It is all the more distressing then that in 1998, in another striking example of post–cold war market triumphalism, the entertainment industry in the United States managed to outflank Dodd and his allies and persuade the United States Congress to substitute for Arts Endowing the Arts their own Copyright Term Extension Act, one that has added twenty years (retroactively!) to all copyright terms without any provision for the public domain side of the old balance between private wealth and common wealth. The Walt Disney Corporation lobbied heavily for this law; their early Mickey Mouse cartoons would have entered the public domain in 2003. Thanks to the Mickey Mouse Protection Act, as it is now known, they are safe until 2023.
This sorry bit of statutory theft notwithstanding, the art-wealth recycling feature of both the Music Trust Fund and the Dodd proposal has been on my mind for a long time, and I tend to mention it whenever I am asked to speak to the question of how we are to empower the gifted in a world dominated by market exchange. On one such occasion, a 1996 talk I gave in Providence, Rhode Island, Archibald Gillies and Brendan Gill happened to be in the audience. They were at the time the president and chairman, respectively, of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and it turned out that the Warhol Foundation was just then looking around for new funding models. I soon joined them in a more sustained conversation about what initiatives might be undertaken, especially given the post–cold war loss of so much public funding for individuals in the visual arts. The result, after two years of brainstorming and fund-raising, was a new
nonprofit granting agency, the Creative Capital Foundation, that since 1999 has been giving direct support to individual artists in film, video, literature, and the performing and visual arts.
Creative Capital differs from other arts organizations in several respects. For one thing, we make a multiyear commitment to the artists we support, extending and renewing grants where we can, and providing advisory services and professional assistance along with financial support. We ask that artists make a budget for their projects, one that includes fair value for their time; we help them find and negotiate with galleries; we suggest they insure their studios, and so forth. One Creative Capital grantee, whose studio was destroyed during the 9/11 attack on New York, had insured her space only months before.
Secondly, in line with the hope that the arts might support the arts, Creative Capital grantees agree to share a small percentage of any net profits generated by their projects with Creative Capital, which then applies those funds toward new grants. In designing this give-back portion of the program we had in mind not only the models I have just described but also the ethic by which the producer and director Joseph Papp used to manage the Public Theater in New York.
Papp’s habit was to underwrite a great many theater productions and take a small ownership stake in each. Those that succeeded helped pay for those that came later. In the most famous example,
A Chorus Line
began at the Public Theater and then went to Broadway, opening in the summer of 1975. It ran without interruption for fifteen years, a commercial success that allowed Papp to support the work of less-established playwrights and companies. David Mamet, Sam Shepard, Elizabeth Swados, the Mabou Mines theater group, and dozens more received support during the years that Papp managed the Public.
Potential profitability is not a criterion for funding awards
at Creative Capital; as with other arts funders, we ask our panels to look for originality, risk-taking, mastery, and so forth; we respond especially to projects that transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries. That said, the principle of sharing the wealth is essential to the Creative Capital model. It makes explicit the assumption that all who have succeeded as artists are indebted to those who came before, and it offers a concrete way for accomplished practitioners to give back to their communities, to assist others in attaining the success they themselves have achieved.
Creative Capital is a small experiment with much that we would like to improve. In our first eight years we awarded more than $5 million to 242 artist projects, but we still lack an endowment that would make us self-sustaining (our seed money necessarily came from private philanthropy). We would dearly love to give larger grants, and more of them; we may well find that the give-back provision works well with some disciplines and not with others; and even if it works in a few cases, we may never find our
Chorus Line.