Bill Ivey

Folklore has a bit of an identity crisis. It treads fines lines, spilling over into ethnography or anthropology too easily. It also has a bad rep from things like the Third Reich, which immediately understood the value of inventing a folklore for national consumption and adoption. Folklorists have “discovered” that Hollywood films follow a standard story line, much to George Lucas’ apparent surprise when he wrote the original Star Wars script. But such storytelling goes back well before the bible to the time of shamans. Writers have known this structure for millennia.

Now, Bill Ivey, of the American Folklore Society, and head of the National Endowment for the Arts under Clinton, presents an argument for folklore in policy-making. He doesn’t really succeed.

Folklore listens. It records stories, jokes, songs, plays, books – everything that makes up a society. As Ivey admits, this also includes urban legends, fake news and ulterior motives. One of its illuminati, Richard Dorson, defined it as “the hidden submerged culture lying in the shadow of official civilization.“

The problem it seeks to solve is, at base, communication. The West thinks it’s better. It has a better way, better insight, better tools, better institutions, and better attitudes. Maybe so, Ivey says, but it has all been squandered in 250 years of “Enlightenment”, to the point where the majority no longer believes it, and actively seek to undermine it. Ivey postulates the end of the Enlightenment as “the exhaustion and rejection of social justice, elites, secularism, science, and political participation as underpinnings securing progressive modernism.” We see it in the rise of populism and nationalism worldwide. Trump is a symptom.

But the book never successfully makes the case that folklore can reverse the situation or lead the way into a solution. It is mostly a history of folklore as a discipline. It is a history of its notable proponents, its unfortunate relationship with government, and the internal arguments that make it more or less valuable – I can’t tell from the text. At no point does folklore present itself as expert in economics, or as the expertise needed to make Ivey’s claims against politicians, economies and enlightenment that he does throughout. It is a 145-page editorial that pretty much any liberal scholar could have written except for the profiles of “celebrity” folklorists.

At bottom, Rebuilding an Enlightened World is deeply dissatisfying.

David Wineberg… (plus d'informations)

On some level I agree with one of Ivey’s essential premises: that the “I’m an artist, dammit, and I create art, which is good for you, so you should help pay for it whether you like it or not” argument has limited effectiveness. We do need to be rethinking the fundamental basis for our argument that a healthy, vibrant arts community is good for America. I also am completely on board with his suggestion that the US would benefit from comprehensive discussion about and policy towards arts and culture at the Federal level. For much of the world to have developed its impression of our country by watching “Baywatch” is scary indeed.

However, I found many things to disagree with in this book, and I found a few things downright offensive. Ivey takes shortcomings of some of the largest, most arrogant arts institutions in the country and attributes them to the entire field in a way which to me suggests a profound ignorance of the variety and vitality of some really amazing work being done all across the country by orchestras and other arts institutions in cities small medium and large.

Ivey has insightful things to say about some of the recent changes in both copyright laws (and the interpretation thereof) and radio station ownership rules, changes which have benefited large corporations and arguably damaged artists, teachers, and consumers in ways that were not even considered at the time. He has an obvious agenda of wresting control of historic master recordings away from the vaults of multinational conglomerates, arguing that short term profit minded companies undervalue these important parts of our collective heritage. I’ll grant him that there is plenty of evidence that the free market has a hard time measuring “quality” in the arts: today’s hits may well be consigned to the garbage bin of tomorrow, and works that are widely ignored today may someday be acknowledged the masterworks of our time. But that doesn’t really mean that every incidence of artistic endeavor by every artistically inclined person needs to be captured for posterity.

Ivey reserves some of his most biting commentary for the orchestra field, saying things like “Sure, plenty of classical music gets made, but, as even insiders acknowledge, nobody seems to care.” In his world, Classical music’s sole redeeming quality is that it “encourages deep contemplation, a state more difficult to achieve in rock, blues or hip-hop.” Ultimately, Ivey seems to believe that all those people in all those cities all across America who’ve worked so hard to create orchestras to serve their communities have misdirected their efforts: “Let’s encourage 25 or 30 symphony orchestras to maintain and present the finest and most demanding classical repertory; the remaining 550 can do something else—perform works by composers in the state university music school, or commission pieces memorializing landmark community events.” This bizarre conclusion brings to mind the image of “Seinfeld’s” famous “Soup Nazi.” Only in my vision it was Bill Ivey, standing at the head of a long line of people from cities small and large (including, one can only assume, the entire citizenry of my new home state of Alabama), saying “No Tchaikovsky for you!” to all but a very few. In a book that purports to link democracy and a healthy cultural landscape, this left me seriously scratching my head.… (plus d'informations)