Art is a Conversation...

Thank you David Dombrosky for more Capitol Hill Office anecdotes. Perhaps your Republican Congressman helped the Arts Caucus work towards the proposed 2.5 million increase to $170 Million for the FY2011 NEA budget.

Echoing Alex Shapiro, we at NAMAC realized at the beginning of the Obama administration that there is a great need to train media and art makers to attain fluency in policy issues NOW, and to be able to confidently participate and influence the great telecom and cultural policy debates of this moment.  To that end, we are currently planning a Winter 2011 NAMAC Campaign and Policy Institute for media and arts leaders to learn about how to become policy influencers and train others -- especially artists -- across their own cultural networks.

The "idea exchange" that has taken place with Future of Music, Fractured Atlas and NAMAC has resulted in what I think is still a visionary outline for the issues that triggered this forum, and that we can be working on all together, our collaboratively created Green Paper on The Future of Digital Infrastructure and the Creative Economy.

Throughout this remarkable dialogue, I keep thinking of David Shield's new book Reality Hunger and this quote:

"In a regime of superabundant free copies, copies are no longer the basis of wealth.  Now relationships, links, connection and sharing are.  Value has shifted away from a copy toward the many ways to recall, annotate, personalize, edit, authenticate, display, mark, transfer and engage a work.  Art is a conversation, not a patent office."

Now, on to devising new ways to get financed and compensated for this vital work.