I just read a piece in the Utne Reader that I'd like to share with you.
It's an interview with Bill Ivey , former chair of the National Endowment for the Arts in the United States, and the author of a book called Arts, Inc.: How Greed and Neglect have Destroyed our Cultural Rights.
In the article, Ivey comments on the failure of public policy, reflecting society as a whole, to recognize artists who are not considered professionals. He writes: "while we understand that amateur basketball players are not going to be as good as a superstar, there's no sense that they shouldn't be doing what they're doing. But in the arts...we tend to denigrate the amateur. The NEA participated in this by concentrating so much of its work on professionals: using the term excellence as a kind of euphemism for professional art-making, concentrating on elevating the top pros and the organizations that they work with, and pretty much leaving the amateur unincorporated art-making piece of the American scene off to the side."
Amateur artists are denigrated at times. We've all felt it, even those of us who have achieved some degree of professional success, because few of us achieve enough of it to make a dent in the cultural firmament. I think we do feel "off to the side" as Ivey says, in a kind of no-man's land where we feel neither fully professional nor contentedly amateur. To get out of that uncomfortable, anxiety-producing place, we spend a fair bit of time and money creating an image and a product that might put us on the map, all the while suspecting that no map, or straightforward success path for artists, exists.
One of the reasons I'm encouraged by Ivey's interview is that he suggests a change in perception is possible, and that it might come about through public policy. It's certainly not going to come through the commercial entertainment industry, which on the surface may appear to encourage amateurism through Idol and related reality programming, but in fact divides the world of artists into winners and losers: winner take all.
More good could be done by more artists, if we invested in ALL artists' sense of worth.
