Pro-Am

I don’t always find myself agreeing with Bill Ivey’s ideas about the arts economy (he seems to put a strong insistence on markets as both the best way to support art and the judge of value, discounting the idea that there would be organizations or art forms that should receive other kinds of public support), but he and Steven Tepper from his research center at Vanderbilt have a good article in the Chronicle of Higher Education that includes a couple of points near and dear to me: that art-making is increasingly driven by what he (or actually Charles Leadbeater) call professional amateurs, people who take it seriously but don’t make a living at it, and that this is a “revitalization of folk culture” (a line written by Henry Jenkins in an upcoming volume Ivey and Tepper are editing).

Ivey and Tepper go from those points to argue that this sort of folk cultural experience is a matter of elite privilege, something available to people with leisure. That doesn’t match my experience so much, where it seems that the most serious people are accepting pretty marginal standard of living to pursue this, and that the socio-economic backgrounds represented are pretty broad, although most of the people I run across have had at least some college.

I'm not entirely sure, but it seems like Ivey and Tepper may be willing to take the artistic production from these sources seriously. In one sentence they credit "pro-ams" with "producing high-quality innovatice work." I'm always on guard for the tendency to dismiss as the work of hobbyists the efforts I see going on all around me.