Culture Chronicle

Culture Club: Does The Nation's Culture Need Federal Protection?
The Boston Globe - July 25, 2010
By Drake Bennett

In 2000, two years before he died, the legendary television comic Milton Berle sued NBC for losing track of 130 film reels of his early shows. A few years later, the Supreme Court upheld the Sonny Bono Copyright Act, extending copyright terms to 70 years past the death of the author, or 95 years from the date of first publication. And in the last decade and a half, the ownership of the nation's commercial radio stations has become more concentrated, with the number of owners decreasing by 40 percent even as the number of total stations has grown.

These may seem like unrelated developments. But to Bill Ivey, they're part of the same story: American culture is being taken over by powerful private forces and, as a result, fenced off from public use.

Ivey served as chair of the National Endowment for the Arts under President Clinton, and he has thought as hard as anyone about how to protect and nourish American arts and culture. When he looks across the American cultural landscape, he sees a series of turf battles that pit private interests -- often huge wealthy entertainment conglomerates -- against a ragtag assembly of advocates representing particular interest groups. Nobody, in all this, represents the interests of the "culture" itself -- the vast, evolving collection of artworks, scripts, recordings, and texts that Americans are constantly creating and consuming in some way, or simply take patriotic pride in being aware of.

To remedy this state of affairs, Ivey has an ambitious proposition: create what he calls a "cultural EPA." His vision is not a European-style culture ministry, but a federal agency that would make sure no one gained too much control over the nation's cultural assets: Just as the Environmental Protection Agency was created to regulate any activity that exploited the nation's environmental resources, so would a cultural EPA regulate activities that affect the nation's cultural riches. Rather than relying on a disparate band of artists, First Amendment campaigners, local-radio enthusiasts, music historians, archivists, and the like, the nation's cultural life would have a defender with the weight of the executive branch behind it, and the power to discipline and compel corporate behavior: to hold up mergers that threatened to concentrate too many cultural resources in one company's hands, to weigh in on international trade deals and to reshape the way copyrights are awarded, and to regulate the airwaves with an eye on a broader sense of cultural vitality rather than chasing down foul language and the occasional bared breast. For the full article, click here