Bill Ivey

Bill Ivey died this past weekend; he was eighty-one years old. It came as a shock to us - just last week he was here in Bloomington meeting with our arts policy students, something he loved doing. He was a great friend to our program, generous with his time and advice to students and to younger faculty. He had studied Folklore and Ethnomusicology here at IU, and enjoyed visiting.

He is best known for having been Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts in the last years of the Clinton administration - you can read more about his career here.

I really enjoyed his 2010 book Arts, Inc. - an idiosyncratic look at American cultural policy, and what he saw as issues that were, unwisely, being neglected, such as with large corporations taking ownership of what ought by rights to be public domain national heritage. I used to assign to my students this essay he wrote for the Chronicle of Higher Education - “America Needs a New System for Supporting the Arts” (2005 - paywalled, sorry) - where he, rightly I’ve always thought, took aim at a public and big-philanthropy sector that assumed nonprofit arts presenters were the unique and special home of anything seriously worth consideration in the arts.

I first met him a little over twenty years ago, and enjoyed the chance to talk with him whenever I could - he was a very fine listener as well as a speaker, a really stimulating conversationalist. We could disagree on things - when Obama was first elected President, Bill was much more keen that the US create an executive position akin to a “Secretary of Culture” than I was - but our disagreements were always friendly, always with a smile.

We will all miss him here in Bloomington, and I send my condolences to his family and everyone close to him.