What Would Direct Representation of Artists Look Like?

In a post earlier today, Clay Lord calls attention to the admin-heavy nature of the arts field, both in economic terms and (as others have noted) in policy conversations with government officials and others in direct position to shape the landscape for the arts in this country. As he points out, one reason for this is that "the relative entropy of a thousand individual artistic voices" is not always the most helpful context in which to communicate with regulators and suits. The way in which our field has historically addressed that entropy is through national service organizations (by which I mean both the usual suspects such as the ones Bill mentions but also the unions, trade groups, etc.). Yet I'm not convinced that this structure constitutes the best means of expressing artists' concerns to the people that need to hear them. For one thing, even this strategy of centralizing the voices of various subsectors of the arts field is still highly decentralized. On an issue like copyright, for example, you have hawks such as the RIAA and ASCAP purporting to represent artists' interests at the same time that an organization like Future of Music Coalition, representing the same constituency, might be more open to alternative models. For another, I question how effective the feedback loops are between the people who determine policy positions for national service organizations and the artist communities who fall under their organizations' umbrellas. Most artists, as has been pointed out, don't necessarily have the time or inclination to research policy issues in depth for themselves, so the primary information they have about a particular issue is often what the national service organization chooses to tell them. Moreover, even that's only true for the artists who are members of that service organization--yet we know that there are thousands upon thousands of unaffiliated artists who either choose not to join service organizations or don't even know about them. Who is in a position to speak for them?