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Chapter 3 Field Building The Road to Cultural Policy Studies in the United States Margaret Jane Wyszomirski VARIOUS STREAMS OF SCHOLARSHIP have contributed to the construction of cultural policy studies in the United States. Understanding these intellectual roots is important to students and young scholars entering the field. It is a history and evolution that many authors in this volume lived through and helped shape within the academic community as interests in artistic practice and management, policy and planning, and disciplinary and interdisciplinary research came together. Indeed, one can think of these interest areas as the three pillars of the cultural policy community. Each pillar has influenced and interacted with the other pillars. In large part, cultural policy studies in the United States followed the practice of cultural policy, that is, as cultural policy issues emanated from different arts fields and policy areas at different times, they developed their own policy-making dynamics, and separately began to attract scholarly attention. It has taken nearly four decades for various streams of academic activity to grow, diversify, and professionalize. During the past decade in particular, increased communication and interaction have fostered boundary crossing, cross-fertilization,and collaborations that have linked many separate professional and disciplinary areas, or silos, of knowledge, practice, and policy into a loosely coupled cultural policy issue network and an adolescent policy community. The study of American cultural policy is characterized by pragmatism, instrumentalism, and a public–private emphasis.This approach to culture differs from many European countries, which tend to have stronger theoretical and philosophical roots and longer traditions of public support for and value of the arts and culture. Let us begin by first considering the key terms of “culture ” and “policy.” 39 Chap-03.qxd 2/25/08 3:39 PM Page 39 What Does “Culture” Mean in Cultural Policy? “Culture”—as Raymond Williams, the Welsh critic, observed—”is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language” (1981). Three of its meanings bear on this discussion: 1. Culture ⫽ a whole way of life: material, intellectual, and spiritual 2. Culture ⫽ a general state or habit of mind; a state of intellectual development 3. Culture ⫽ the general body of arts as a whole. The first meaning is sometimes referred to as the anthropological sense of culture. This definition is not the generally accepted one implied in the emerging field of cultural policy studies in the United States. Ideological conservatives have a tendency to treat cultural policy as being virtually anthropological in scope. For example, when former National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Chairman William Bennett published his Index of Leading Cultural Indicators (1994), he was not talking about the arts and culture; rather, his indicators concerned issues of crime, family, and education such as statistics on juvenile crime and drug use, divorce, abortion, single-parent families, and scores on math and science tests.To avoid confusion with this conservative sense of culture, we will pair the term “the arts” with the term “cultural policy,” thus effectively defining cultural policy studies as being specifically concerned with the arts. The second meaning—referring to a general state of mind or of intellectual development—is sometimes taken to mean culture with a capital “C.” This definition suggests a sense of elite status and appreciation, as in the sense of being a cultured person. From this perspective, select arts such as opera and symphonic music were determined to be cultured and sometimes called high arts, elite arts, or classical arts. In contrast were popular culture, mass culture, folk art, and entertainment. Indeed works of high art, professional arts management , fine artists, and elite institutions were the implicit focus of arts-funding policy at the time of the establishment of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) in the mid-1960s. Initially, its funding policy gave first priority to providing public financial support for professional artists and professional nonprofit arts organizations that demonstrated standards of artistic excellence. (In other countries, the cluster of artistic activities considered eligible for public funding is called “the subsidized arts.”) The theory held that the nonprofit arts were prone to market failure—they cost more than they could earn to pay for themselves—and thus were in need of public subsidy. Equitable public access to these arts was another priority of early NEA arts funding policy. The agency’s enabling legislation enunciated the goal of increasing artistic M ar gar e t Jan e Wy s z o m i r s k...

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