Readings

Three briefings for funders on electronic media policy were held January—March 2005, organized by Grantmakers in Film and Electronic Media, hosted by the Ford Foundation, and co-sponsored by other interested parties, including Grantmakers in the Arts. The first session, “Securing Our Rights to Public Knowledge, Creativity, and Freedom of Expression,” was reported on by Helen Brunner in the spring 2005 Reader. (Please note that web addresses for most of the organizations mentioned are listed at the end of this article.)

“What the FCC Is Going On?”

Lawrence Lessig sees Big Media waging war against culture in America. And he, for one, is fighting the battle. A professor at Stanford Law School, Lessig achieved notoriety when he represented web site operator Eric Eldred in the ground-breaking case Eldred v. Ashcroft, a challenge to the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. Eric Eldred was a man who wanted to build a library of derivative versions of public domain books (e.g., Hawthorne's A Scarlet Letter) and make them available for free on the Internet.

As Tia Oros Peters so eloquently states in her essay that follows, there is no particular word for art in the thousands of Indigenous languages of the world. While there are hundreds of Native American languages, the same holds true; Native Americans do not and cannot separate the importance of art and culture from everyday life. It is one goal of GIA's Indigenous People's Network to bring this important way of life to the fore of grantmakers' thinking.

The fall 2002 issue of the Reader (volume 13, number 3) introduced an ongoing feature, "Why Art?" as a response to GIA's goal to strengthen the role of arts and culture in philanthropy and in society as a whole. This Reader feature aims to help members and others make stronger arguments for the support of arts and culture by sharing examples of arguments, case statements, insights, and stories that convey the multifaceted role that culture, the arts, and artists play in our society, neighborhoods, and individual lives.

The following remarks were presented at a symposium that was part of the 2004 Ars Electronica Festival: TIMESHIFT—The World in Twenty-Five Years. This festival for art, technology, and society was founded in 1979 and is held annually in Linz, Austria. Joan Shigekawa, associate director of Creativity and Culture at the Rockefeller Foundation, spoke on the final panel of the symposium, “TOPIA,” which was designed to “present scenarios around a wide variety of topics relating to art, technology, and society.

We are very pleased that Ruby Lerner, executive director of Creative Capital, took up the challenge of writing about anti-terrorism language in grant award letters. As an intermediary organization, Creative Capital is in the position of being both a funder and a grantee. This dual role, shared by many other GIA members, gives Ruby an especially wide view of the topic.

As one of the three vice presidents of the Ford Foundation who issued the January 8, 2004 memo, I am fascinated and impressed by Ruby's description of Creative Capital's process for dealing with the memo. She and her colleagues correctly understood that Ford was not operating in a vacuum. We were responding to new Federal legislation that required us to review our own grantmaking and monitoring processes to insure that they conform to the new law. Importantly, we chose to make our values explicit in the memo rather than repeat the exact language of the legislation.

The full text of this article is not yet available on this site. Below is a brief excerpt.

I believe it is time to begin a conversation about a new model for building a vibrant arts landscape. Since I left federal service in the fall of 2001, I have had an opportunity rare for former chairmen of the National Endowment for the Arts—the chance to create a research center engaging the very issues that fascinated me during my tenure with the endowment.

It was April 1968: I was out for lunch break with Jim and Mary, co-workers from the general accounting office where we worked in the University District. They were old hands in the office. I was new on staff and excited. This was my first real job out of high school after a string of just so-so jobs. There had been the eyeglass factory where I stood, eight hours a day for three months in a windowless basement knocking lead weights off newly polished eyeglass lenses with a mallet. A friend of my mother's had gotten me that job.