by Lewis Hyde
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.
For now, however, the point is less about the particulars of this case than about the search for practical responses to the general problem posed by The Gift. Some responses will necessarily be fitted to their historical period; the Music Performance Fund belongs to a time of powerful trade unions, and the heyday of public support for art and science seems to belong to the cold war.
But surely there could also be responses that transcend their time. The royal patronage that Sir Isaac Newton received may have fallen out of favor, but other innovations from his day have survived. The idea that colleges might have endowed professorships has not been lost. Newton was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics; that position was created in 1663 by one Henry Lucas, and it endures to this day (the theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking is its current occupant). The forums for scientific discourse that Newton knew have likewise endured. In 1672, Newton sent a long letter to Henry Oldenburg of the Royal Society in London, an outline of his theory of light and color. Oldenburg immediately printed the letter in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. It was Newton’s first scientific publication. Philosophical Transactions is the oldest scientific journal in the English-speaking world, having now published for over 340 years. Oldenburg was its founding editor. When he started it, it wasn’t part of a scientific community, it created a scientific community, and that community has endured.
Lucas and Oldenburg: these are good ancestors for the community of science; their institutions survive and their names are remembered. And for the community of artists? Those who can be clear about supporting the arts not as means to some other en
d but as ends in themselves, those who can shape that support in response to the gift-economy that lies at the heart of the practice, those who have the wit and power and vision to build beyond their own day: for artists, those will be the good ancestors of the generations of practitioners that will follow when we are gone.
Lewis Hyde
Cambridge, Massachusetts
April 2007
* An amusing echo of this debacle was heard many years later: in 1948 one of the tour’s “surplus” paintings, Stuart Davis’s Still Life with Flowers, was bought for a high school in Chicago by one of its art teachers. The price was $62.50. In 2006 the school sold the painting at auction for $3.1 million.
* Actually, wit may not be the key ingredient; power helps. It was the American Federation of Musicians that got the Music Performance Fund started as part of their collective bargaining with the recording industry. The loss of union power is another chapter of the recent saga of market triumphalism.
Bibliography
Part I
Bailey, F. G., ed. Gifts and Poison: The Politics of Reputation. New York: Schocken, 1971.
Barnett, H. G. “The Nature of the Potlatch.” American Anthropologist 40, no. 3 (July–September 1938): 349–58.
Benveniste, Emile. Indo-European Language and Society. Translated by Elizabeth Palmer. Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1973.
Blau, Peter. Exchange and Power in Social Life. New York: Wiley, 1964.
Boas, Franz. “The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians.” U.S. National Museum, Annual Report, 1894–1895. Washington, 1897, pp. 311–738.
Drucker, Philip. Cultures of the North Pacific. Scranton, Pa.: Chandler Publishing Co., 1965.
Fox, Renée C, and Swazey, Judith P. The Courage to Fail: A Social View of Organ Transplants and Dialysis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974.
Goody, Jack, and Tambiah, S. J. Bridewealth and Dowry. London: Cambridge University Press, 1973.
Goody, Jack, ed. The Character of Kinship. London: Cambridge University Press, 1973. Grimms’ German Folk Tales, The. Translated by Francis P. Magoun, Jr., and Alexander H. Krappe. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1960.
Hagstrom, Warren O. The Scientific Community. New York: Basic Books, 1965.
Hardin, Garrett. The Limits of Altruism: An Ecologist’s View of Survival. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977.
__________“The Tragedy of the Commons.” Science 162 (1968): 1243–48.
James, Wendy R. “Sister-Exchange Marriage.” Scientific American, December 1975, pp. 84–94.
_________“Why the Uduk Won’t Pay Bridewealth.” Sudan Notes and Records 51 (1970): 75–84.
Joll, James. The Anarchists. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1964.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Translated by James Bell et al. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969.
Malinowski, Bronislaw. Argonauts of the Western Pacific. London: George Routledge & Sons, 1922.
Marshall, Lorna. “Sharing, Talking, and Giving: Relief of Social Tensions Among !Kung Bushmen.” Africa (journal of the International African Institute) 31, no. 3 (July 1961): 231–49.
Marx, Karl. Capital. Translated by Eden and Cedar Paul. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1930. Mauss, Marcel.
“Essai sur le don: Forme et raison de l′échange dans les sociétés archaïques,” L’Année Sociologique 1 (1923–24), pp. 30–186. Available in English as The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies. Translated by Ian Cunnison. New York: Norton, 1967.
Meister Eckhart by Franz Pfeiffer. Translated by C. de B. Evans. London: John M. Watkins, 1924.
Nelson, Benjamin. The Idea of Usury: From Tribal Brotherhood to Universal Otherhood. 2nd rev. ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969.
Nestrick, William. “George Herbert—the Giver and the Gift.” Ploughshares 2, no. 4 (Fall 1975), pp. 187–205.
Onians, Richard Broxton. The Origins of European Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951.
Rubin, Gayle. “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ′Political Economy′ of Sex.” In Toward an Anthropology of Women. Edited by Rayna R. Reiter. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975, pp. 157–210.
Sahlins, Marshall. Stone Age Economics. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1972.
Schumaker, Millard. Accepting the Gift of God. Kingston, Ontario: Queen’s Theological College, 1980.
________“Duty.” Journal of Medical Ethics 5 (1979): 83–85.
_______“Loving as Freely Giving.” In Philosophy and the Human Condition, edited by Thomas Beauchamp, William Blackston, and Joel Feinberg. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1980.
________Moral Poise: Toward a Christian Ethic Without Resentment. Edmonton, Alberta: St. Stephen’s College, 1977.
Schürmann, Reiner. Meister Eckhart, Mystic and Philosopher. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978.
Scott, Russel. The Body as Property. New York: Viking, 1981.
Shell, Marc. The Economy of Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.
Simmel, Georg. “Faithfulness and Gratitude.” In The Sociology of Georg Simmel, edited by Kurt H. Wolff. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1950, pp. 379-95.
Simmons, Roberta G.; Klein, Susan D.; and Simmons, Richard L. The Gift of Life: The Social and Psychological Impact of Organ Transplantation. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1977.
Smelser, Neil. “A Comparative View of Exchange Systems.” Economic Development and Cultural Change 7 (1959), pp. 173–82.
Stack, Carol B. All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community. New York: Harper & Row, 1974.
Titmuss, Richard. The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy. New York: Pantheon, 1971.
Tournier, Paul. The Meaning of Gifts. Translated by John S. Gilmour. Richmond, Va.: John Knox Press, 1963.
Usury Laws: Their Nature, Expediency and Influence. Economic Tract Number IV. New York: The Society for Political Education, 1881.
Van Baal, J. Reciprocity and the Position of Women. Amsterdam: Van Gorcum, Assen, 1975. Van Gennep, Arnold. The Rites of Passage. Translated by M. B. Vizedom and G. L. Caffee.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960. Weiner, Annette B. Women of Value, Men of Renown: New Perspectives in Trobiand Exchange. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1976.
Yaron, Reuven. Gifts in Contemplation of Death in Jewish and Roman Law. London: Oxford University Press, 1960.
Part II
Asselineau, Roger. The Evolution of Walt Whitman. 2 vols. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962.
Budge, E. A. Wallis. The Gods of the Egyptians, or Studies in Egyptian Mythology. Vol. 2. London: Methuen & Co., 1904.
_________Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection. Vol. 1. New York: G. P.
Putnam’s Sons, 1911.
Chauncy, Charles. A Caveat Against Enthusiasm. Boston: J. Draper, 1742.
Doob, Leonard W., ed. “Ezra Pound Speaking”: Radio Speeches of World War II. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979.
Emery, Clark. Ideas Into Action: A Study of Pound’s Cantos. Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1958.
Ginsberg, Allen. “Encounters with Ezra Pound,” City Lights Anthology. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1974.
Hall, Donald. Remembering Poets. New York: Harper & Row, 1978.
Heymann, C. David. Ezra Pound: The Last Rower. New York: Viking, 1976.
Kaplan, Justin. Walt Whitman: A Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1980.
Kenner, Hugh. The Pound Era. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971.
Lawrence, D. H. Studies in Classic American Literature. New York: Viking, 1964.
Lopez-Pedraza, Rafael. Hermes and His Children. Zurich: Spring Publications, 1977.
Neruda, Pablo. Memoirs. Translated by Hardie St. Martin. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1977.
_______Twenty Poems. Translated by James Wright and Robert Bly.
Madison, Minn
.: Sixties Press, 1967.
Norman, Charles. Ezra Pound. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1960.
O’Connor, Flannery. Mystery and Manners. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969.
Pound, Ezra. ABC of Reading. New York: New Directions, 1960.
________America, Roosevelt and the Causes of the Present War. Translated by John Drummond. London: Peter Russell, 1951. (First published in Venice in 1944.)
_______The Cantos. New York: New Directions, 1972.
________Guide to Kulchur. New York: New Directions, 1970.
_______Jefferson and/or Mussolini. London: Stanley Nott, 1935.