Pluralism and Public-Private Relationships in the Field of Cultural Production

2020 ◽  
pp. 75-98
Author(s):  
Michael Sy Uy
Keyword(s):  
Federal Government ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Tax Reform ◽  
Rockefeller Foundation ◽  
Economic Capital ◽  
The Other ◽  
National Endowment ◽  
Institutional Practices ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Philanthropic Organizations

This chapter explores the coordination, cooperation, and competition between the federal government and private philanthropic organizations. As a federal agency, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) was mandated to serve broadly the interests of all citizens, groups, and communities. Private foundations, on the other hand, could decide to uniquely tailor their chosen missions. Regardless of differences in institutional practices and operation, however, the NEA, Ford Foundation, and Rockefeller Foundation collectively served as weathervanes in the field. Their “seals of approval” guided the decision making of individual patrons, smaller foundations, state art agencies, and corporations. Furthermore, their matching requirements concentrated winners and excluded losers because most often, grantees already possessed other sources of social and economic capital. After the Tax Reform Act of 1969, foundations and the federal government found even more reasons to communicate and cooperate with one another, including at high-powered gatherings like Rockefeller’s “How Can Foundations Help the Arts?” meeting in 1974.

Thinking Otherwise About the Arts in Education—A Rejoinder

2013 ◽  
Vol 83 (4) ◽  
pp. 636-643 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Arts Education ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Harvard Educational Review ◽  
National Endowment ◽  
Washington Dc ◽  
Arts In Education ◽  
The Arts ◽  
New Vision

In this essay, Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández reflects on the comments made in a forum convened to reflect on his article “Why the Arts Don't Do Anything: Toward a New Vision for Cultural Production in Education,” published in the Harvard Educational Review (HER)'s special issue entitled Expanding Our Vision for the Arts in Education (Vol. 83, No. 1). Participants in the forum (published in HER Vol. 83, No.3) were John Abodeely, manager of national partnerships, John F. Kennedy Center for the Arts, Washington, DC; Ken Cole, associate director, National Guild for Community Arts Education, New York City; Janna Graham, project curator of the Serpentine Gallery, Centre for Possible Studies, London; Ayanna N. Hudson, director of arts education, National Endowment for the Arts, Washington, DC; and Carmen Mörsch, head of the Research Institute for Art Education, Zurich University of the Arts. In his original essay, Gaztambide-Fernández makes the case that advocacy for arts education is trapped within a “rhetoric of effects” that relies too heavily on causal arguments for the arts, whether construed as instrumental or intrinsic. Gaztambide- Fernández further argues that what counts as “the arts” is based on traditional, Eurocentric, hierarchical notions of aesthetic experience. As an alternative, he suggests a “rhetoric of cultural production” that would focus on the cultural processes and experiences that ensue in particular contexts shaped by practices of symbolic work and creativity. Here the author engages the forum's discussion in an effort to clarify his argument and move the dialogue forward.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Michael Sy Uy
Keyword(s):  
Rockefeller Foundation ◽  
National Endowment ◽  
Arts Funding ◽  
The Arts ◽  
History Of ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Congressional Investigations

This chapter introduces the book’s sociocultural history of expertise as analyzed in arts and music grantmaking during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, It explains the origins of the Rockefeller Foundation, Ford Foundation, and National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) as grantmaking institutions, the individuals involved, and how the missions of the two foundations eventually came to include arts funding. The 1960s and 1970s were a period of “cultural explosion,” as characterized by the popular press. During the early part of the Cold War, both foundations were also subject to congressional investigations which impacted their grantmaking. Finally, the introduction includes a chapter overview of the book, as well as its division into two parts: “Who Were the Experts?” and “Experts in Action.”

Endangered Strangers

2018 ◽  
pp. 86-110
Author(s):  
Sarah Wilbur
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Federal Government ◽  
Government Support ◽  
The Political ◽  
National Endowment ◽  
Competitive Advantages ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Us ◽  
Key Players ◽  
Us Federal Government

The project of tracking competitive advantages in US federal dance funding is complicated by the historically partial, contingent, and indirect character of government support for the arts in US culture. Rather than discussing grant competition strictly in terms of who won the funds, this chapter offers a comparative analysis of early and recent funding infrastructures at the US National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the lone arts philanthropic arm of the US federal government. By following the political rationales of NEA key players and the institutional rhetorics, programs, and governmental procedures that set these agendas in motion, one can better attend to which competitors hold advantages in the millennial turn toward art as an investment yielding economic deliverables, a far cry from the NEA’s early promotion of cultural preservationism, defined through the narrow production curricula of concert dance.

Ask the Experts

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Sy Uy
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
Local Community ◽  
Rockefeller Foundation ◽  
Scientific Models ◽  
National Endowment ◽  
Leonard Bernstein ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Personal Connections

From the end of World War II through the U.S. Bicentennial, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Ford Foundation granted close to $300 million (approximately $2.3 billion in 2017 dollars) in the field of music alone. In deciding what to fund, these three grantmaking institutions decided to “ask the experts,” adopting seemingly objective, scientific models of peer review and specialist evaluation. They recruited music composers at elite institutions, professors from prestigious universities, and leaders of performing arts organizations. Among the most influential expert-consultants were Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, Lukas Foss, and Milton Babbitt. The significance was twofold: not only were male, Western art composers put in charge of directing large and unprecedented channels of public and private funds, but also, in doing so, they determined and defined what was meant by artistic excellence. They decided the fate of their peers and shaped the direction of music making in this country. By asking the experts, the grantmaking institutions produced a concentrated and interconnected field of artists and musicians. Officers and directors utilized ostensibly objective financial tools like matching grants and endowments in an attempt to diversify and stabilize applicants’ sources of funding, as well as the number of applicants they funded. Such economics-based strategies, however, relied more on personal connections among the wealthy and elite, rather than local community citizens. Ultimately, this history demonstrates how “expertise” served as an exclusionary form of cultural and social capital that prevented racial minorities and nondominant groups from fully participating.

scholarly journals Beyond Darwinian Distance: Situating Distant Reading in a Feminist Ut Pictura Poesis Tradition

PMLA ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 132 (3) ◽  
pp. 659-667 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Marie Rhody
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
National Endowment ◽  
Distant Reading ◽  
Western Tradition ◽  
Parts Of Speech ◽  
Reading Methods ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Sister Arts ◽  
The Devil ◽  
Ut Pictura Poesis

The challenge facing “distant reading” has less to do with Franco Moretti's assertion that we must learn “how not to read” than with his implication that looking should take the place of reading. Not reading is the dirty open secret of all literary critics-there will always be that book (or those books) that you should have read, have not read, and probably won't read. Moretti is not endorsing a disinterest in reading either, like that reported in the 2004 National Endowment for the Arts' Reading at Risk, which notes that less than half the adult public in the United States read a work of literature in 2002 (3). In his “little pact with the devil” that substitutes patterns of devices, themes, tropes, styles, and parts of speech for thousands or millions of texts at a time, the devil is the image: trees, networks, and maps-spatial rather than verbal forms representing a textual corpus that disappears from view. In what follows, I consider Distant Reading as participating in the ut pictura poesis tradition-that is, the Western tradition of viewing poetry and painting as sister arts-to explain how ingrained our resistances are to Moretti's formalist approach. I turn to more recent interart examples to suggest interpretive alternatives to formalism for distant-reading methods.

Obsolescence

PMLA ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 123 (3) ◽  
pp. 718-722 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen Fitzpatrick
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Graduate Students ◽  
National Endowment ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Contemporary Culture ◽  
American Novel ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Status ◽  
Material State ◽  
Different Response

I was invited by the MLA committee on the status of graduate students in the profession to speak at a convention workshop entitled “Keywords for a Digital Profession.” My keyword was obsolescence, a catchall term for a multiplicity of conditions; there are material obsolescences, institutional obsolescences, and purely theoretical obsolescences, each type demanding a different response. I spent years pondering theoretical obsolescence while writing The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television. The book argues, in part, that claims about the obsolescence of cultural forms often say more about those doing the claiming than they do about the objects of the claims. Neither the novel in particular nor the book more broadly nor print in general is dead, and agonized announcements of the death of such technologies and genres often serve to re-create an elite cadre of cultural producers and consumers, ostensibly operating on the margins of contemporary culture and profiting from their claims of marginality by creating a sense that their own values, once mainstream and now decaying, must be protected. Two oft-cited reports of the National Endowment for the Arts, Reading at Risk (2004) and To Read or Not to Read (2007), come to mind; like numerous other expressions of anxiety about the supposed decline of reading, each rhetorically creates a cultural wildlife preserve in which the apparently obsolete can flourish (United States). These texts suggest that obsolescence is, in this case at least, less a material state than a political project.

scholarly journals “Running the Numbers”: Modes of Microcelebrity Labor in Queer Women’s Self-Representation on Instagram and Vine

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 205630511989400
Author(s):  
Stefanie Duguay
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Economic Capital ◽  
Multiple Forms ◽  
Queer Women ◽  
Affective Labor ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Prominent Component ◽  
Aesthetic Labor ◽  
Social Media Platforms

Microcelebrity, as a set of practices contributing to personalized self-branding, has become an increasingly prominent component of self-representation on social media platforms. While “influencers” who have built lucrative followings through microcelebrity give the appearance of having fun without much exertion, recent studies have uncovered multiple forms of labor involved in their practices of cultural production. In addition, scholars analyzing lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) influencers highlight a tension between labor in service of self-commodification and the representation of sexual minorities. This article examines the microcelebrity labor of everyday queer women who aim to increase their social and economic capital by interweaving personal self-representations with entrepreneurial endeavors on Instagram and Vine. Through a close analysis of these platforms’ markets, governance, and infrastructures alongside interviews with queer female users of each platform, attention is given to both platform influences and participants’ experiences of promoting their jobs, side-gigs, hobbies, or passions alongside the rest of their lives. Findings identify three modes of labor specific to participants’ efforts to build a following: (1) intimate affective labor expended in sharing and managing personal disclosures; (2) developmental aesthetic labor as the acquisition and practice of technical skills and bodily displays to achieve a desired appearance or performance; (3) aspiring relational labor in attempts to forge relationships with established influencers or celebrities. Sexual identity was pivotal across these modes of labor, as it enhanced intimacy with followers, provided a niche audience for self-branding, conveyed authenticity through self-revelation, and established a common ground for forging relationships.

scholarly journals Analysis of the Effectiveness of E-Government in the Federal Government of Nigeria

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 75
Author(s):  
Robert A. Dibie ◽  
Maryam O. Quadri
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Federal Government ◽  
Negative Correlation ◽  
Secondary Data ◽  
The Other ◽  
Government Relations ◽  
Professional Journals ◽  
Governance Practices ◽  
Government Websites ◽  
The Government

This paper examines the nature, impact, effectiveness and barriers of e-government in the Federal Government of Nigeria. It also explores the extent to which e-government has facilitated a better relationship between citizens and the federal government of Nigeria. It argues that the utilization of technologies such as internet, email, websites, and social media have yet to effectively connect citizens, and the government. As a result, the federal government of Nigeria has not fully adopted the new e-government approaches to improve its services. The paper uses data derived from questionnaire survey administered to 3,000 Nigerian citizens including federal government staff in Abuja, Lagos and some state capitals in Nigeria., Interviews of 300 federal officials and stakeholders were conducted. The secondary data consisted of the review of related government reports, government websites, academic and professional journals. Data were analyzed to determine the impacts of e-governance in the federal government. The conceptual framework is based on stakeholders’ theory, and an integrated e-government model. The findings suggest that on one hand there is a negative correlation between the e-governance initiatives and federal government efficient service delivery in Nigeria. On the other hand, there is also a negative correlation between citizens and federal government relations in the country. Some challenges preventing the adoption of proactive e-governance practices were identified and recommendations for appropriate policies that could address the current impediments were offered.

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