2003 - 2004 Cultural Policy Workshops

Winter Quarter 2004

• Tuesday, Jan 20, 4-6pm Harris School. Woodlawn Room

Presenter: Jeffrey Milyo, Assistant Professor, Irving B. Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies.

Topic: “Social Capital and Support for the Arts.”

Download Jeffrey Milyo's paper: "Social Capital and Support for Public Funding of the Arts"

Several influential social scientists have argued that social capital is an important determinant of support for government programs, but this claim has not been applied to public support for the arts and artistic expression. This project is the first empirical investigation of the extent to which social capital is a determinant of support for the arts, using statistical analysis to identify the independent effect of social capital on individual opinions regarding government and other types of funding for the arts.

Professor Milyo will exploit some of the unique features of the General Social Survey (GSS) to conduct this analysis. Much of the research on social capital makes use of the GSS, since it contains several questions pertaining to voluntary associations, social connectedness and social trust; responses to these types of questions have been used to construct measures of individual and state level proxies for social capital. Milyo conducted a multivariate statistical analysis using GSS data regarding support for the arts and support for government funding of the arts. He used a range of socioeconomic and demographic data (such as age, education, income, race, marital status, political ideology, etc.) as control variables. He used information on homeownership, religion and other variables that are often cited as important determinants of social capital as "instruments" to identify the direct and independent treatment effect of social capital on support for the arts.

ABOUT JEFFREY MILYO: Jeffrey Milyo is an assistant professor in the Irving B. Harris School of Public Policy Studies. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University. Milyo was a political economy fellow at both Washington University in St. Louis and jointly at Harvard/MIT; he was also named a Salvatori Fellow by the Heritage Foundation and was a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Scholar at Yale University.

Milyo’s primary research area is the political economics of American public policy. Recent studies have explored the role of money in American politics and the efficacy of campaign finance reform. His other recent research examines the organization of Congress and the federal budget process, the effects of advertising prohibitions on retail markets and the importance of social determinants of health. Milyo’s work has been published in several scholarly journals, including the American Economics Review; the Journal of Law and Economics; the Journal of Human Resources; the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management; the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law; Business and Politics and Public Choice. In addition, Milyo has served as an instructor in several workshops for congressional staffers and as a member of a special commission on campaign finance reform in Massachusetts.

• Friday, February 6, Noon, Harris School. Lecture Hall (142)

Presenter: Steven Tepper, Deputy Director, Princeton University Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies

Topic: Culture, Conflict and Community: Rituals of Protest or Flairs of Competition

Download Steven Tepper's paper: "Culture, Conflict and Community: Rituals of Protest or Flairs of Competition"

Tepper examines the incident of public conflict over artistic and cultural expression in 75 U.S. cities. His analysis of more than 500 cases of conflict reveals that levels of public dispute are related to several underlying structural characteristics of cities. In particular, rapid demographic shifts, especially changes in foreign-born residents, are related to higher levels of conflict. Tepper’s paper also suggests that there are at least three different profiles of conflict—there are highly contentious cities, where both liberal-based and conservative-based groups are actively involved in protests; there are cities that experience cultural conflict as identity politics (liberal-based groups are most active); and those cities that practice cultural regulation (conservative-based groups are most active).

ABOUT STEVEN J. TEPPER: Steven J. Tepper is deputy director of the Princeton University Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies and lecturer at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and the Department of Sociology. He has published articles in the areas of the sociology of art, cultural policy and democracy and public space and is currently completing a book on cultural conflict in 75 American cities. He has also examined the role of the meeting and convening as instruments of policy making, especially in the field of art and culture. Tepper received his Ph.D. in sociology from Princeton University, a master’s degree in public policy from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and a BA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Before coming to Princeton, Tepper served for five years as the executive director of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Bicentennial Observance and is author of The Chronicles of the Bicentennial Observance (UNC, 1998). In addition, he has served as a consultant to numerous cultural institutions including the National Humanities Center, the American Academy of Arts and Science, the Canadian Confederation Center for the Arts, the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies and various foundations.

• Tuesday, February 17, 4-6 pm, Quad Club. Library Room.

Presenter: Katherine A. Giuffre, Assistant Professor, Colorado College

Topic: Sandpiles Of Opportunity: Success In The Art World

Download Katherine Guiffre's paper: "Sandpiles of Opportunity: Success in the Art World"

This study conceptualizes artists' careers as transitions through positions within a constantly shifting web of relationships that are without a priori hierarchical demarcations. Network analysis of this shifting web, from 1981 to 1992, produces three distinct career paths with differential outcomes in terms of the amount of critical notice received by each artist. Those who have had a long history of membership in loosely knit networks receive more critical attention than either artists who have had a long history of membership in tightly knit cliques or those with a history of sporadic connections to the art world. The career ladder is not so much a ladder as it is a sandpile, in which each actor's attempts to reach the top change the shape of the climb. Network theorists have long argued that the shape of an individual's social network has an impact on differential access to rewards and success (Burt 1992; Granovetter 1974; Howell 1969; Travers & Milgram 1969). Although many of these theorists implicitly notice that networks are constructed and reconstructed, and that former network contacts play an important role in present network usage (see especially Granovetter 1974), none has explicitly treated time in networks. Anheier, Gerhards and Romo (1995), for example, produce a compelling network picture of the German writers' world based on ties between authors, but they view the personal networks of these writers as static. That is, each writer has a network configuration that implicitly does not change over time. Likewise, Faulkner (1987), in his insightful study of Hollywood studio musicians, is explicitly concerned with the building of career trajectories, yet he uses network analytic tools in only a secondary way, which does not allow him to analyze the changes in network form over time. This article tests the hypothesis that different network shapes lead to different personal outcomes while explicitly incorporating time into the model. I argue that the shape of an artist's art-world network history influences success -- specifically, that a consistent history of a pattern of broad-ranging weak ties will lead to greater amounts of critical notice than will other types of network shapes, such as dense cliques of overlapping ties. This is especially interesting in the world of fine art, where talent (as opposed to structure) is supposedly driving careers but where network structure nevertheless has an important and profound effect on success.

ABOUT KATHERINE GIUFFRE: Katherine Giuffre is Associate Professor at Colorado College in Colorado Springs, CO, where she was named a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor. She received a Ph. D. and M.A. in sociology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a B.A. in Social Studies from Harvard University. She is also a member of the Steering Committee for the Program in the Arts at the Social Science Research Council. Her main areas of expertise are the sociology of art, culture and network theory. Her published works concentrate on the role of social networks in the production, reception and patronage/funding of the arts. She has only recently returned from a year-long residence on the small island of Rarotonga in the South Pacific Ocean where she has been researching the emergence of a contemporary Maori arts community and the intersection of that community with the traditional indigenous artists, long-term ex-patriot artists, tourists, Maori-rights activists, and with the global art marketplace.

• Tuesday, March 2, 4-6 pm, Quad Club. Library Room.

Presenter: Diane Grams, Associate Director, Cultural Policy Center at the University of Chicago.

Topic: Producing Local Color: A Study of Networks and Resource Mobilization in Three Local Communities.

Download Diane Grams' paper: "Producing Local Color: A Study of Networks and Resource Mobilization in Three Local Chicago Communities"

Download Diane Grams' Appendix B to "Producing Local Color: A Study of Networks and Resource Mobilization in Three Local Chicago Communities": "Appendix B: Maps and Figures" [5MB Word document]

According to Becker (1982) art is produced through a network of people who share an understanding of what can be considered “art” and who directly or indirectly participate in the activities necessary to create the art. By shifting the frame of art production from a “field” or “occupation” to “locality,” I explored how the social linkages necessary to produce art constituted a local community and were shaped by local possibilities. This comparison of art production networks in a predominantly black area (Bronzeville), a predominantly Mexican-American area (Pilsen) and a racially/ethnically diverse area (Rogers Park) showed how network participants mobilized local cultural, physical and human resources to attract economic investment, often from external sources, and produced art that filled a local purpose. Through interviews with 80 people, participant observation of art events, classes and daily life of arts producers, I constructed a typology of art production networks identified by their local purpose. Among the types of networks were those organized around producing territorial markings, producing collections of locally significant art, asserting artistic autonomy, asserting local sovereignty, providing youth services and solving local problems. The art created a local identity by re-presenting community history, its people and its potential vitality to itself and outsiders. Local identity became another resource to be exploited by the community.

ABOUT DIANE GRAMS: Diane Grams is the Associate Director of the Cultural Policy Center at the University of Chicago. Her research focuses on cultural organizations and art production networks, particularly those found in low-income and minority communities. Since 1998, she has worked as an independent consultant for foundations and non-profit organizations doing research, program evaluation, management consultation and fundraising. 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 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.” As a Ph.D. candidate at Loyola University, Chicago, 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.” She was a part time faculty member at DePaul University 2001-2003, and at Loyola 2000-2002, teaching courses in the sociology of art & culture, gender, and race/ethnicity. During her twenty-year career in the Chicago arts community, 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. She was the Executive Director of The Peace Museum, Chicago, 1992-1998.

Spring 2004 Workshops

• Wednesday, April 7, 8:30 – 10:30 am, Quad Club. Library Room.

Presenter: Lior Strahilevitz, Assistant Professor, University of Chicago Law School

Topic: Do you have the right to destroy that which is yours?

Download Lior Strahilevitz's paper: "The Right to Destroy"

"Do you have the right to destroy that which is yours?" This paper addresses that fundamental question. In contested cases, courts are becoming increasingly hostile to owners' efforts to destroy their own valuable property. This sentiment has been echoed in the legal academy, with recent scholarship calling for further restrictions on an owner's right to destroy cultural and other property. Yet this property right has received little systematic attention. The paper therefore examines owners' rights to destroy various forms of property, including buildings, jewelry, transplantable organs, frozen human embryos, patents, personal papers, and works of art. A systematic treatment of the subject helps support a qualified defense of the right to destroy one's own property. For example, an examination of American laws and customs regarding the disposition of cadaveric organs helps one understand and weigh the expressive interests that prompt people to try to destroy jewelry via will. Similarly, an examination of patent suppression case law points toward a form of ex ante analysis that has been de-emphasized in opinions involving the destruction of buildings and other structures. An analysis of cases involving the destruction of frozen human embryos may shed light on creators' rights to burn unpublished manuscripts or works of art. And collectivist theories of free speech may help explain why the Visual Artists Rights Act sensibly prohibits the destruction of paintings by living artists, but not Old Masters. In advocating a more unified treatment of destruction rights, the paper argues that greater deference to owners' destructive wishes often serves important welfare and expressive interests. The paper also critiques existing case laws that call for particular hostility toward will provisions that direct the destruction of a testator's valuable property. Courts and commentators have not given particularly persuasive justifications for restricting testamentary destruction, and the paper proposes a safe-harbor provision whereby sincere testators who jump through certain hoops during their lifetimes can have their destructive wishes enforced.

ABOUT LIOR STRAHILEVITZ: Lior Strahilevitz received his B.A. in Political Science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1996, graduating with highest honors. He received his J.D. in 1999 from Yale Law School, where he served as Executive Editor of The Yale Law Journal. Following his graduation, he clerked for Judge Cynthia Holcomb Hall on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He then practiced law in Seattle before joining the law school faculty in 2002. His teaching and research interests include property and land use, privacy, free speech, and intellectual property.

• Wednesday, April 21, 8:30 – 10:30 am, Quad Club. Library Room.

Presenter: Richard A. Epstein, James Parker Hall Distinguished Service Professor, University of Chicago Law School

Topic: Cracks in the Foundations of Copyright Law

Download Richard A. Epstein's paper: "Liberty versus Property? Cracks in the Foundations of Copyright Law"

Many modern intellectual property scholars have argued that the creation of patents and copyrights, for inventions and writings, respectively, should be resisted on the ground that these forms of property necessarily infringe ordinary forms of liberty, in contrast to property that is found in tangible things. This article rejects that claim by showing how property conflicts with liberty in both settings, but that the different configurations of rights observed in these various areas is defensible on the ground that the loss of liberty for all persons is, to the extent that human institutions can make it, compensated by the increased utility generated by the various property rights in question. The appropriate approach to intellectual property is not abolition but fine-tuning in an effort to increase the gains from intellectual property generally.

ABOUT RICHARD A. EPSTEIN: Richard A. Epstein is the James Parker Hall Distinguished Service Professor of Law at the University of Chicago, where he has taught since 1972. He has also been the Peter and Kirstin Bedford Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution since 2000. Prior to joining the University of Chicago Law School faculty, he taught law at the University of Southern California from 1968 to 1972. He served as Interim Dean from February to June, 2001. He received an LL.D., h.c. from the University of Ghent, 2003. He has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1985 and a Senior Fellow of the Center for Clinical Medical Ethics at the University of Chicago Medical School, also since 1983. He served as editor of the Journal of Legal Studies from 1981 to 1991, and of the Journal of Law and Economics from 1991-2001, At present he is a director of the John M. Olin Program in Law and Economics. His books include Skepticism and Freedom: A Modern Case for Classical Liberalism (University of Chicago, 2003): Cases and Materials on Torts (Aspen Law & Business 7th ed. 2000) Torts (Aspen Law & Business 1999) Principles for a Free Society: Reconciling Individual Liberty with the Common Good (Perseus Books, 1998): Mortal Peril: Our Inalienable Rights to Health Care (Addison-Wesley, 1997) Simple Rules for a Complex World (Harvard, 1995) Bargaining With the State (Princeton, 1993) Forbidden Grounds: The Case Against Employment Discrimination Laws (Harvard, 1992) Takings: Private Property and the Power of Eminent Domain (Harvard, 1985) and Modern Products Liability Law (Greenwood Press, 1980). He has written numerous articles on a wide range of legal and interdisciplinary subjects. He has taught courses in civil procedure, communications, constitutional law, contracts, corporations, criminal law, health law and policy, legal history, labor law, property, real estate development and finance, jurisprudence, labor law land use planning, patents, individual, estate and corporate taxation, Roman Law torts, and workers' compensation.

• Wednesday, May 5, 8:30 – 10:30 am, Quad Club. Library Room.

Presenter: Adrian Johns, Associate Professor of History, University of Chicago

Topic: The Nature of Intellectual Property in the Mid-twentieth Century

Download Adrian Johns' paper: "The Nature of Intellectual Property in the Mid-Twentieth Century"

In this workshop I aim to restore to view a debate about the nature of intellectual property that took place in the mid-twentieth century, coinciding with the invention of the information society. The participants in this debate included Norbert Wiener, inventor of cybernetics, the scientist-philosopher Michael Polanyi, and the economist Arnold Plant. Their arguments extended beyond the doctrines of intellectual property to embrace the consequences of those doctrines for the future of science, technology, and society. I hope to show that while the debate itself was soon forgotten, some of its arguments survived to shape the developing information age of the 1960s and after - and that others, if revived now, may suggest promising responses to the problems of intellectual property that now confront us.

ABOUT ADRIAN JOHNS: Adrian Johns is an associate professor in the Department of History at the University of Chicago, and chair of the University's Committee on Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science. He is the author of The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (1998), and a number of papers on early modern science and print culture. He is currently working on a history of intellectual piracy from the invention of print to the present.

• Wednesday, May 19, 8:30 – 10:30 am, Quad Club. Library Room.

Presenter: Martha Woodmansee, Professor of English, Law, and Comparative Literature at Case Western Reserve University, Director of Society for Critical Exchange

Topic: Beyond "Authorship": Refiguring Rights in Traditional Culture and Bioknowledge

Download Martha Woodmansee's Paper: Beyond "Authorship": Refiguring Rights in Traditional Culture and Bioknowledge

"Authorship" matters. The figure for the process of culture-making that emerged as dominant in early nineteenth-century European literary discourse has cast a long forward shadow. Today, perhaps more than ever before, it has practical implications for the way in which benefits and burdens are distributed in the real world. In this paper Peter Jaszi and I examine one of those sets of implications: in the post-colonial era "authorship" operates as a key conceptual mechanism by which the nations of the industrial North maintain economic and cultural hegemony over information flows, and by which the claims of the peoples of the South are marginalized or denied. Building on our previous collaborative work, the paper attempts to call attention to the inequitable way in which the law operates to allocate "intellectual property" rights, suggest the connection between this form of distributional injustice and the "authorship" construct, and explore alternative ways of thinking and talking about cultural production that could provide the foundation of a different legal order.

ABOUT MARTHA WOODMANSEE: Martha Woodmansee is a professor of English, Law, and Comparative Literature at Case Western Reserve University where she also directs the Society for Critical Exchange, a national organization devoted to collaborative interdisciplinary research in theory. She has published work at the intersection of aesthetics, economics, and the law. Her books include The Author, Art, and the Market (Columbia UP 1994) a collection of essays coedited with Peter Jaszi, The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature (Duke UP 1994) and the collection, The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Intersection of Literature and Economics (Routledge 1999). At present she is working on the roll played by "authors" in the emergence of international intellectual property accords.

Fall Quarter 2003

• Friday, October 24 at 10:00 AM. Frédéric Martel, "Cultural Politics: A Comparison Between French and American Models." Fr.d.ric Martel is the French Cultural Attach. in charge of Academic and Cultural Services of the French Embassy in Boston, Massachusetts. His background is multidisciplinary: he holds graduate degrees in sociology (Paris I-Sorbonne), philosophy (Paris I-Sorbonne), political science (Paris II-Pantheon) and law (Paris II-Pantheon). After a position as advisor to former Prime Minister Michel Rocard, he served as a senior advisor to the Deputy-Prime Minister, Minister of Labor and Social Affairs, Martine Aubry, in the government of Lionel Jospin. He is a writer, journalist and scholar who has conducted research in sociology at l'Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, EHESS, Paris. In the Harris School, Woodlawn Room. Brunch provided.
• SOCIOLOGY DEPARTMENT: Monday, October 27th at 4:00 PM. Pierre-Michel Menger, "Work, Creativity and Growth: Portrait of the Artist as Worker." Pierre-Michel Menger is a French sociologist. This talk is being co-sponsored by the France Chicago Center and our sociology department. The Cultural Policy Center also encourages its students and faculty to attend. Professor Menger is director of the center for the sociology of work and the arts at the EHESS, Paris's premiere science institution. He is the author of several books on arts occupations, including one on musicians, one on theatre-workers and other representational artists, and one on graphics workers. In SS305.
• STUDENT FORUM: Tuesday, November 11th at 3:00 PM. Jennifer Novak, "The Relationship between Participation in the Arts & the Realization of Benefits." Jennifer, a master's student at the Harris School, will present her summer research as a part of RAND's ongoing study Building An Understanding of the Benefits of Participation in the Arts (McCarthy et. al., RAND, forthcoming). This research is predicated by the absence of explanations as to how benefits are generated by participating in the arts. Jennifer conducted an inquiry into: 1) how benefits are linked to patterns of participation; and 2) how to conceptualize the multiple dimension of participation itself. Jennifer's presentation offers a conceptual framework to understand the dynamics of arts participation and the subsequent realization of benefits. In the Harris School, Room 140A. Refreshments provided.
• STUDENT FORUM: Wednesday, November 19th at 2:00 PM. Caryn Kuebler, Sarah Lee, and Jennifer Novak, "Measuring the Arts & Culture Workforce: A Regional Comparative Approach." Caryn, Sarah, and Jennifer, all second-year master's students at the Harris School, will present the approach that they've taken to define and measure the arts and culture as a sector of the workforce, and discuss the implications for cultural policy making of their approach in comparison to the approach taken by Richard Florida in The Rise of the Creative Class. This work stems from research undertaken in conjunction with the City of Chicago's initiative, "Advancing Chicago's Civic Agenda Through the Arts." In the Harris School, Woodlawn Room. Refreshments provided.
• Thursday, December 4th at Noon. Arthur Brooks, "How Public is Public Broadcasting?" Arthur Brooks, Associate Professor of Public Administration and Director of the Nonprofit Studies Program at the Maxwell School (Syracuse University), will speak on economics and public broadcasting. His recent research has focused on issues such as government subsidies and philanthropy to arts nonprofits, religion and charitable giving, and civil society in transition economies. His talk looks at access to public television and radio, as well as the managerial objectives of public radio and TV stations. The talk is based on the articles "Taxes, Subsidies, and Listeners Like You: Public Policy and Contributions to Public Radio" (Public Administration Review, 2003) and the working paper "What Do Nonprofit Arts Managers Really Want?" In the Harris School, Lecture Room. Lunch provided.