CPC News - 2003

New Staff Appointments at the Cultural Policy Center

13 Graduates Students Awarded $5000 Assistantships

Cultural Politics: … French and American Models

New Staff Appointments at the Cultural Policy Center

The University of Chicago’s Cultural Policy Center is pleased to announce the appointments of Diane Grams and Brian Roush.

“We are very pleased to have Diane Grams join us as the new Associate Director of the Cultural Policy Center,” wrote Carroll Joynes, Executive Director of the CPC, in an introductory memo to Harris School of Public Policy staff and faculty. “We conducted a national search, and were fortunate to find an individual with all the key qualifications, plus extensive experience, in the Chicago area.

In her new role, Diane will manage grant projects, maintain oversight of the center’s budget, coordinate staff and graduate assistantships, and represent the center at outside conferences and events. She will continue to pursue her own research on cultural organizations and art production networks, particularly those found in the lower income and minority communities surrounding the University of Chicago.

“The CPC offers me the ability to continue to do research and continue to grow in the field that I have specialized in for 20 years,” said Grams. “I’d like to see the CPC support research that gathers new data about the arts. Because art is produced as a second profession for most artists, there is little data compared to other professions. For example, because 66% of visual artists surveyed by the Department of Cultural Affairs do their artwork as a second profession – they’re not counted in conventional ways by the Board of Labor, for example. I would like to see the center foster the kind of research that unearths the subtleties of how art production and arts policy.”

Diane brings substantial experience to the Cultural Policy Center, having worked in the Chicago arts community as an artist, as the Executive Director of The Peace Museum from 1992-98 and as an independent consultant. She moved into academia in 1998 when she received a full scholarship and an assistantship at Loyola University, Chicago to pursue a Ph.D. in sociology. Since then, she has worked for foundations and non-profit organizations doing research and program evaluation while working as a part time faculty member at DePaul University. Diane is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at Loyola University Chicago, focusing her research on cultural organizations and art production networks, particularly those found in low income and minority communities.

Her accomplishments and contributions to the field of cultural studies are considerable. She was a principal investigator for Leveraging Assets: How Small Budget Arts Activities Benefit Neighborhoods, a 2003 report commissioned by the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation and funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. She was also co-author of “ArtsAlive: The 2001 Report on the State of Arts Education in Michigan” for Art Serve Michigan and the Michigan Board of Education. She won a 2002 Schmitt Dissertation Fellowship for her research, “Networking for Arts’ Sake: A Comparative Study of Art Production Networks in Bronzeville, Pilsen and Rogers Park.” And she was named among One Hundred Women Making a Difference in Chicago by Today's Chicago Women in 1989 and given the 1989 Civil Liberties Award from the Roger Baldwin Foundation of the American Civil Liberties Union of Chicago for her work in support of artistic expression.

To listen to July 28, 2003 National Public Radio interview with Diane about her research and her new job at the Cultural Policy Center, click on the following link: http://www.will.uiuc.edu/am/focus/archives/03/030728.htm

To view the Driehaus/MacArthur Report to which Diane contributed, click on the following link: http://www.macfound.org/documents/docs/small_budget_arts_activities.doc

As the assistant director for projects, Brian Roush is responsible for coordinating and overseeing Cultural Policy Center publishing projects including grants, newsletter, invitations, press releases, website and academic articles. He is also in charge of administering Center-sponsored events and programs, including receptions, conferences, public lectures, and workshop series.

“Working in a policy center was attractive to me. It coincides with my interests and possible PhD level work,” said Roush. “I’m really interested in coordinating a lot of [center-related] conferences and publications and getting people involved in the policy center.”

Brian comes to the CPC with a background in psychology, English, and graduate level sociology. He is primarily interested in the interrelation of gender, media, and culture from both an intellectual and public policy perspective. As a Loyola University Chicago undergraduate in psychology, Brian’s research focused on various ways in which media and advertising reinforce gender stereotypes and purchasing habits. In a term project that now influences Brian’s current graduate-level work in sociology, also at Loyola, he investigated whether the instruments played by musicians in local orchestras are divided along socially-acceptable gender lines.

Brian brings a degree of public policy awareness to the CPC. He recently analyzed the political policies of welfare-to-work training programs and child care and their effect on single mothers transitioning from welfare to work. The experience has inspired him to pursue a career that works with and for groups to create change in public and political policies. “It’s safe to say that my interests are multi-faceted, but I’m interested in political activist kind of things, looking into policy and advocacy groups,” he said

Beyond his academic and CPC-related duties, Brian is working towards founding the Chicago chapter of the National Organization for Men Against Sexism (NOMAS), an advocacy group that attempts to change the way men view violence and masculinity by exploring and promoting pro-feminist, gay-affirmative, anti-racist men’s issues. He has also worked at the Dean’s Office at Northwestern University’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences as a program assistant, and has previously worked as Graduate Secretary in the University of Chicago’s English department.

“I’m excited about working at the CPC because it embodies policy and culture, two things I’m interested in. I think I can bring a lot to the table.”

Grams and Roush replace Christopher Perrius and Andrea Jett at the CPC. Chris has since moved on as the Deputy Director of Development at the Des Moines Art Center, while Andrea is a now a Program Officer for the Citizenship Program of the McCormick-Tribune Foundation.

To listen to July 28, 2003 National Public Radio interview with Diane about her research and her new job at the Cultural Policy Center, click on the following link: http://www.will.uiuc.edu/am/focus/archives/03/030728.htm

To view the Driehaus/MacArthur Report to which Diane contributed, click on the following link: http://www.macfound.org/documents/docs/small_budget_arts_activities.doc

By Nadav Enbar, CPC Graduate Research Assistant.

13 Graduates Students Awarded $5000 Assistantships

The Cultural Policy Center at the Harris School recently awarded 13 Graduate Research Assistantships (GRAs) to University of Chicago graduate students. The $5000 award for the 2003-04 academic year will provide financial and educational support for students interested in cultural policy research. To this end, the newly appointed GRAs will work on current faculty initiated projects or on self-designed research projects, and will present their findings at the end of the year. In addition to their research projects, each of the GRAs will also assist the Cultural Policy Center by giving three hours of administrative work to specifically designated tasks.

This year nineteen students applied to work on seven Cultural Policy Center projects covering such topics as: the arts workforce and its place in the economy, cultural amenities, assessing the use of economic impact studies, the future of public television, inter-urban migration of artists, changing perceptions of the arts over the life course, and community arts & neighborhood development. The bulk of the assistantships were granted to Harris School Master’s of Public Policy (MPP) students, including: Isabel Josie Anadon, Marianne Anderson, David Beeman, Amer Hasan, Caryn Kuebler, Sarah Lee, Heather Rogers, Jennifer Novak and Leslie Sperber. Also receiving assistantships were Sam Jordan, pursuing a joint Law and Public Policy degree; Nadav Enbar enrolled in the Masters of Arts Program in Social Science (MAPSS); and Len Albright and Xuefei Ren, both enrolled in the Department of Sociology’s Ph.D program.

By Nadav Enbar, CPC Graduate Research Assistant.

Cultural Politics: … French and American Models

On Friday, October 24, 2003, the Cultural Policy Center at The University of Chicago hosted a discussion and brunch with French Cultural Attaché, Frédéric Martel, to explore the divergent French and American models used to frame each country’s cultural agenda.

Martel, Head of the Academic and Cultural Services at the French Embassy in Boston, presented his working hypotheses for a book on “Cultural Politics: A Comparison Between French and American Models” to cultural policy students, researchers and faculty at The Irving B. Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies.

An academic, accomplished author and French diplomat, Martel chose to examine the French and American cultural models partially because they arguably represent the two most extreme systems of cultural policy in the world. His underlying motivation, however, is to provide an explanation for some of the reasons American culture dominates the French landscape, creating somewhat of a schizophrenic response in France – animosity and fierce cultural protectionism coupled with an admiration of American art forms.

“This is a work aimed at a French audience, who constantly compare themselves and their culture with the United States,” he said. “I am not necessarily a big fan of the American cultural model, but understanding [it] and explaining how it works can help answer some of cultural questions facing France.”

Martel’s approach was compelling and received reactionary remarks from the audience. “It’s intriguing how the US is perceived by France as its biggest cultural opponent as well as by their fear of being swept over by US culture,” said Carroll Joynes, Executive Director oft The Cultural Policy Center. “There is, in [Martel’s] judgment, a fundamental lack of understanding surrounding how the US funds culture.”

Unsurprisingly, French disdain of American culture – despite its widespread consumption within France – can largely be attributed to a backlash against American cultural hegemony. According to Martel, United States cultural and artistic activity dominates France on nearly every level (excluding theater): dance, film, contemporary art, and music. U.S. movies, for example, occupy close to 50% of French theaters (almost 75% in other European countries), while 90% of the movies projected on U.S. screens are American-made. Similarly, of the 100 most famous artists in the world, 40 are Americans and only five are French.

Against this backdrop Martel introduced a number of points of comparison between the French and American cultural models. From a macro-level, France essentially embraces a public, centralized model that separates “high-brow” from “low-brow” (or popular) culture by employing its Ministry of Culture and nearly 90 local and regional government departments to administer specific programs. “In France, you have many agencies in charge of culture,” Martel said. “You have a small government within every department.” With its set agenda, the French government funds high-brow cultural events, but does not support so-called pop cultural pursuits. It instead forces an anemic private market to fulfill this role, separating high art from the whims of the marketplace.

Central to the French model is the value-driven classification of what constitutes high and low cultural art forms. This rigid hierarchy pervades nearly every aspect of French cultural policy and affects a widespread suspicion held by the French public toward “cross-over” artists (those that become successful, equating a transfer from high-brow aesthetic to pop cultural fad).

Meanwhile, according to Martel, America’s cultural model is decentralized. While the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA) provides direct funding to some projects throughout the US, state funding mechanisms, networks of media-specific not-for-profits and a host of for-profit activity disseminate culture from multiple sources. In general, the workings of the market play a greater role in funding cultural activity and the American public is less consumed with notions of where an artist belongs on the high-brow / low-brow scale. “Chicago alone has 170 non-profit theaters,” says Joynes. “That just doesn’t exist in places like France.”

Respective attitudes towards the politicization of cultural policy inform each country’s cultural model. “In the US, you need to be democratic and work for every state,” said Martel. “[Government] funding of culture doesn’t work because you have to do something for everyone. It’s impossible to have a cultural policy by a government that does something for everyone. This is one of the reasons it is impossible to have a [single] cultural policy in the US.”

For example, French cultural policy has focused on building a French national culture that emanates from Paris and is disbursed through a regional network of museums and cultural administrations. By comparison, NEA policy at least for the last decade has focused on funding diversity as opposed to a single dominate cultural perspective. In addition to funding from this federal agency, there are numerous other federal agencies including the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute of Museum Services. Then there are regional, state and local art agencies that only receive partial if any funding from federal coffers. In addition, there are numerous private foundations and corporations that supplement ticket prices and user fees paid by individuals.

“In France, on the contrary, it is possible to have cultural policy [administered by] the government because it is directed only at a small part of the population and is not based on geography or democracy,” Martel elaborated. “It works because of the high-brow mentality of the model. In essence, cultural policy in France is not democratic.”

Where does all this lead? For Martel, the French and American cultural models are both in jeopardy of collapse for very different reasons. The French model shows signs of becoming overly bureaucratized with civil servants and supporting an unsustainable artist welfare state, with the ever-present danger of remaining trapped in elitist definitions of high-brow culture. The French model shows a danger in promoting a less diverse cultural scene whose creative energy could be smothered by government oversight. Meanwhile, for America, the pitfall is money shortages. Martel points to greatly reduced funding on the federal, state, and local levels, and the change in levels of philanthropy as factors that may significantly impede America’s cultural progress. The American model may thus starve its artists because of a lack of government aid and supervision.

“We like the idea of a marketplace of culture where people pay to go [to a cultural event of their liking],” sums up Joynes. “The French [government-directed] system, wouldn’t work in the US. But both sides can learn a lot and borrow certain things from each other.”

Gaining alternate perspectives is a fundamental thrust behind a number of CPC-sponsored events. “Exposure to a different cultural policy apparatus and a different way that culture is administrated abroad is extremely important,” says Joynes. “Students become better able to do policy analysis informed by a broader, comparative perspective.”

So just how does one help create a vibrant cultural center and make it maximally available to the population? For Martel, you start by understanding the various models. “It’s important for me to first try and explain how the American cultural model works, and then to contrast it with France’s.” The analysis could well spur an important shift in French attitudes about funding and projecting its cultural heritage.

By Nadav Enbar, CPC Graduate Research Assistant.