Advocacy and Public Policy

It is very unusual for any urban renewal plan not to include reference to the role that arts organizations and arts buildings can potentially play in regeneration. Most recently, in Hurricane Katrina's wake, both have figured prominently in discussions about the future of New Orleans and Biloxi. But the discussions about arts organizations and those about arts buildings are curiously and uncomfortably divorced.

We live in a world of "widespread hostility toward the United States and its policies."1 This antipathy is not limited to the countries and peoples that are directly affected by the U.S. "war on terror" and its attendant pol-icies, but includes many of our former allies and fellow democracies. A friend who just returned from a year in Spain reports that she spent a significant amount of time and energy convincing people she met there that the U.S.

Artists and arts institutions rely on the free flow of information to create and distribute their work. The converging digital environment presents many new options for the delivery of specialized information to targeted audiences, and the cultural community is becoming increasingly sophisticated in deploying these tools. However, the United States is only sixteenth in the world in broadband Internet penetration, and the growing digital divide presents a challenge to the vision of ubiquitous access to high-quality images, sound, and text.

This time it was the catastrophic devastation in the Gulf States. Last time it was the 9/11 attack. Before that were the floods in North Dakota, the earthquakes in San Francisco and Seattle, and Hurricane Hugo in South Carolina, and then

Each time disaster strikes — whether natural or man made — communities face inestimable emotional and economic suffering. When artists, arts organizations, and cultural institutions are affected by these disasters, the confusion and bewilderment about what to do and how to help extends very directly to us as arts grantmakers.

Under Marian Godfrey's direction, GIA held a pre-conference immediately before its 2005 conference called "New Directions in Cultural Policy Research." As part of that meeting, four well-respected individuals were asked to assess the impact and importance of research in the arts. They were asked to specify the big ideas currently in play and to speculate about the future of those ideas. Predictably perhaps, the four argued for the importance of research to the cultural sector. More surprisingly, they agreed that the platform for cultural research needs serious re-planking.

Lawrence Lessig sees Big Media waging war against culture in America. And he, for one, is fighting the battle. A professor at Stanford Law School, Lessig achieved notoriety when he represented web site operator Eric Eldred in the ground-breaking case Eldred v. Ashcroft, a challenge to the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. Eric Eldred was a man who wanted to build a library of derivative versions of public domain books (e.g., Hawthorne's A Scarlet Letter) and make them available for free on the Internet.

2005, 48 pages. Published by American Public Media, 45 East 7th Street, Saint Paul, MN, 55101, 651-290-1225, www.classicalmusicinitiative.org

The second in a series of Working Papers, this report contains ideas and tips for partnering with local public radio stations and national distributors, information on funding resources, rights and clearances, Web initiatives, and audience research.

2004, 58 pages. Free Expression Policy Project, Brennan Center for Justice, NYU School of Law, 161 Avenue of the Americas, 12th floor, New York, NY, 10013, 212-998-6730, http://www.fepproject.org

Download pdf: http://www.fepproject.org/policyreports/InformationCommons.pdf

The full text of this article is not yet available on this site. Below is a brief excerpt.

Three briefings for funders on electronic media policy were held January—March 2005, organized by Grantmakers in Film and Electronic Media, hosted by the Ford Foundation, and co-sponsored by other interested parties, including Grantmakers in the Arts. The first session, “Securing Our Rights to Public Knowledge, Creativity, and Freedom of Expression,” was reported on by Helen Brunner in the spring 2005 Reader. (Please note that web addresses for most of the organizations mentioned are listed at the end of this article.)

“What the FCC Is Going On?”