William Ivey

Being the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts used to be a splendid job. Established in 1965, the agency took as its mission “encouraging thought, imagination and inquiry.” The NEA budget grew from an initial $3 million to $170 million by the end of the 1980s. Then came a series of controversies that nearly eviscerated the agency.

In 1989, critics of the homoerotic photography of the late Robert Mapplethorpe were outraged when they discovered that a show featuring his work was funded in part by an NEA grant. Other NEA-funded exhibitions were quickly challenged. In 1990, NEA chairman John E. Frohnmayer withdrew a grant to performance artist Karen Finley, who, among other things, poured chocolate over her nude body in her performances. Frohnmayer was ultimately sacked, and the NEA became the political right’s symbol of the government’s embrace of antifamily values. When Newt Gingrich emerged as leader of the Republican House of Representatives in 1994, he vowed to eliminate the NEA.

The Clinton administration countered by naming a prominent actress, Jane Alexander, as NEA chair. Presiding over the agency’s darkest days, she watched as its budget was cut by more than a third. Still, she managed to preserve the NEA and move it out of the direct line of fire in the culture wars.

Alexander stepped down last summer, and finding a replacement wasn’t easy. Yet, the man who accepted the post, William J. Ivey, is proving to be an inspired choice. A folk musician and ethnomusicologist, Ivey spent 27 years as head of Nashville’s nonprofit Country Music Foundation. He was familiar to NEA staffers, having served on numerous endowment panels, and he was popular among members of Congress, including chief NEA foe Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) The two often jawboned about country music’s Randy Travis, a North Carolina native.

Homey and intelligent, the 54-year-old Ivey faces a variety of challenges. The agency’s annual budget is now less than that of a modestly ambitious Hollywood movie, currently $98 million, or a third of what the NEA thinks it needs. He also is attempting to reach out to areas of the country that have had little or no NEA support for the arts. In a conversation from his office in Washington, Ivey talked about the value of art in our society, his goals for the NEA and how his personal passion for music has inspired his career as an arts administrator.

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Question: Tell me about your favorite guitar.

Answer: Well, that’s tough. I guess my favorite guitar is the Gibson Super 400. It has a very large body, and it was designed to be used as a rhythm guitar in jazz bands. It’s got a very big sound, and it’s very playable. But I don’t own one.

Q: How many guitars do you own?

A: I think at the moment I have seven guitars. You know, guitar players need more than one guitar. You may need a classical guitar, you have to have a steel-string acoustic guitar and you have to have an electric guitar. Plus, you need a guitar that plays well but isn’t very expensive that you can travel with. That way, if an airline ends up smashing it, it’s not a total disaster. So you end up with a number of guitars. I don’t think I’m unusual in that regard.

Q: How much of your public role in the arts has been shaped by your personal relationship to art and music?

A: If you’re lucky, at some point early in your life, you find something that you are really passionate about. In my case, it was music, folk music and popular music, and I was able to combine my study of American culture and folklore with my interest in music. Then I was able to find a career in my work with the Country Music Foundation that kept me involved with music. That, in turn, kept me connected with the whole world of the arts. My folklore background allowed me to be a frequent panelist at the NEA. So my interest in music and the arts has been the central thread in my work and has led me to where I am today.

Q: Yet, the skills you need in your position as a facilitator of the arts would seem to be quite different from the skills you use as an artist or performer.

A: You’re absolutely right. But look at the world of arts managers, and in that I include people like recording-company executives, publishers, theater-company managers and film producers. You’ll frequently find these types of people started as artists or performers and moved into their management positions. Perhaps they recognized that they didn’t have the high level of skill needed to succeed as an artist. Still, they had passion, so they developed management skills to help others make art.

It’s true that the skills one needs to be an artist and to manage artists are somewhat different. In my work at the NEA, I certainly draw more from my years as manager of a not-for-profit cultural organization than I do from my personal involvement with music.

Q: What did you learn running the Country Music Foundation that has helped you with the current job as head of the NEA?

A: I brought a good understanding of the challenges facing not-for-profit organizations. Even the most successful of these organizations operate in a difficult financial environment. Unlike for-profit concerns, you can’t be taken over by a larger company, and you can’t grow by issuing junk bonds. You’ve either got to earn money, successfully encourage people to donate money or borrow money. Having worked in this environment, I think I have an understanding of the challenges of running an arts organization, and I understand how much even a small amount of help can mean to one of these groups.

I’ve also had a good deal of experience making the case for the important role art plays in our society. In my previous job, that was explaining the value of country music as a grass-roots art form. I think that prepared me for an important aspect of my current position, which is to talk about the value of the arts to communities and the importance of the federal role in supporting the arts. Finally, I think there are a number of practical things that I bring to the job, such as dealing with personnel issues, understanding how organizations work and having some experience looking at a complicated budget and understanding what’s on the page. All those things have helped me a great deal.

Q: What do you see as the NEA’s core functions, and how are you redefining its role?

A: In its most basic sense, the NEA is the federal agency charged with helping bring the arts to the American people. In the past year, we’ve refined that role a bit. Our mission statement says that the NEA serves the public good by nurturing creativity, supporting community spirit and fostering appreciation of the excellence and diversity of our nation’s artistic accomplishments. We’ve tried to place an emphasis on the public good, on citizen service and on using the arts to improve people’s lives and communities. While that’s always been a part of NEA’s mission, I think it has a special resonance today as we focus our attention on young people, on education, access to the arts and the preservation of cultural heritage.

I think we are moving gradually from a kind of entitlement model of how the arts should be funded to more of a citizen service model. I think the endowment is participating in that transition.

Q: What should the government do to best support the arts, and what should it not do?

A: First, one needs to understand that the federal government, and government in general, constitutes just a small portion of the funding support for the not-for-profit arts. Our budget is currently about $98 million. The state governments invested a total of about $370 million in 1998. Almost twice that, about $700 million, came from cities and counties. But private sources--individuals, foundations, corporations--invest about $10 billion annually in the arts. So when you look at that total, the NEA, whether we’re at $100 million or a more appropriate level, say, $300-400 million, we’re still a small part of the total funding picture. Our role has to be defined along the lines of leadership, continuity and creating the sense of a national arts scene. I think we do a good job of providing those elements.

Q: I suppose at the root of all this is the idea that art and culture somehow shape our identity. But how, in fact, does art do that?

A: I don’t know that I agree with that premise. I do think that art, culture and identity are very closely intertwined. But it’s very difficult to unravel that combination to see what causes what. If you look at art, you can see three things that come together. One is individual creativity. Second is a sense of cultural heritage, because every artist is working out of some kind of tradition, even if they’re working against it. Finally, there is the immediate environment, which provides the vocabulary for the creative person. Out of those three things can come work that reflects the character and personality of entire peoples. I’m not sure that art causes people to change; I tend to think of art more as reflective. I see it more of a window into community and culture, rather than as something that causes groups or individuals to think and act in a certain way. We frequently look at a painting, listen to a work of music or see a play and then extract from that a certain understanding about the values and vision of a culture or an individual. That is to me the great value of art to society. It is a great avenue along which the diverse communities which make up this nation can converse with one another in a kind of guilt-free zone. For us, art, and the way we make art, is a great calling card for the way our democratic experiment is working out. Some of the best values of our society, of accommodation and sharing, are reflected in our American style of art making.

Q: You’ve tried to place more emphasis on expanding the grant-making machinery to include areas and communities that have not been supported in the past. What is the NEA doing to reach out?

A: The endowment has had a long history of supporting the diverse cultural traditions in our society. I think there’s also interest here at the NEA in making sure that parts of states and cities that weren’t really a part of the arts boom that the nation has experienced over the last 30 years have access to music, dance, drama and so on. We have an initiative before Congress right now called Challenge America. It has four components: services to young people through arts education, the preservation of cultural heritage, the linking of arts organizations to other components of the community, and access. The last one is important, and it means making sure that the arts really get out to people throughout the country.

Q: One part of your mission statement, as you noted, is to encourage individual creativity. As an agency dependent on funding from politicians, how do you balance support for individual expression with the sort of accountability that is expected from you by Congress?

A: Obviously when you are the chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, you have to understand your responsibility as the head of a federal agency that’s charged with investing taxpayer dollars. From that standpoint, we must be accountable to Congress, the administration and ultimately the people. But there are many ways that this agency can encourage creativity while being responsible with public dollars. Most Americans view support of the arts, even challenging art, as being an appropriate destination for federal dollars.

Q: You’re probably familiar with studies that show that baby boomers like to go to museums, like to see dance, but don’t particularly like to go to the opera or the symphony. Faced with that, how should the NEA react? Should you support the arts that are the most popular or attempt to prop up those arts which are falling from favor?

A: We are very aware that there are some art forms which are very important but may have difficulty making their way if their only funding comes from the marketplace. Opera is an interesting case because it’s making a comeback. I think the use of surtitles has helped make a younger audience aware of the great theatrical spectacle that is opera. Although it’s connecting with a new audience, opera is extraordinarily expensive to produce, and it’s difficult if not impossible for an opera company to survive only on the proceeds of ticket sales. So we know there are art forms that require nurturing. By the same token, there are folk-art forms that also are subject to disappearing. It’s important that we find ways to connect old-time fiddlers or blues musicians with younger artists, so that traditional music can be carried on to another generation. I think that’s another example where you don’t want to leave the art form to the whims of the marketplace.

One part of our Challenge America program is to help arts organizations make better connections with people in the communities they serve. I think the NEA can really help by sponsoring an arts education program or a series of concerts at a senior citizen’s center. These are activities that take the work of the arts organization outside the normal boundaries of which it performs to a wider audience. So helping support art that is popular and works to retain and attract audiences is also a very important part of what the endowment can do.

Q: You speak of artists performing citizen service. What do you mean by that?

A: Again, this is art and artists connecting with the community. For instance, in Europe, when a government entity begins a large development project, it will include an artist from the very beginning. In many countries being a writer or a playwright is a solid qualification for becoming an elected official. We’re not there yet, although we’ve certainly had an actor. But the kind of engagement we’re talking about is placing the artist in a more appropriate and central role in the community. It’s a way of establishing the value of artists and demonstrating the value of culture to our society. As I travel across the country, I see this idea growing in many places.

Q: The NEA has made something of a political comeback. But no matter how good your relationship is with Congress, one artist with a little grant money from the NEA can do something controversial, and all that work comes undone. How do you protect yourself from that?

A: You can’t. At any given moment, there are about 6,000 active NEA grants around the country. Any one of those could turn out to be offensive to some member of the public or some member of Congress. I think the way we protect ourselves is not by becoming so conservative that there’s never a problem grant. Rather, we need to work with Congress and with the arts community to so firmly establish the value of what we do for the American people that when we hit the inevitable problems they get solved as individual issues and don’t end up creating talk of doing away with the entire NEA program. If I had to state a single goal for my time as chairman, it would be to leave the agency in a place where there’s a deeper understanding of the value of living cultural heritage and creativity, such that federal investment in this part of life is seen as essential, almost like the department of Defense. We have a good argument about what art can do for people, families and communities. Not only is it a good argument, as Henry Kissinger once said, it has the added benefit of being true. I consider making that case to be a very important part of my job.*