The Gift_ Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World - Lewis Hyde [173]
Internet publication has provided a solution. In 2000 a group of biomedical scientists, including Nobel laureate Harold E. Varmus, began urging scientific publishers to make all research available for free distribution online. When the publishers resisted, the group simply worked around them and in 2003 launched a nonprofit Web publishing venture, the Public Library of Science. By now there are six online journals (PLoS Biology, PLoS Medicine, PLoS Genetics, and others). These are not Web logs or chat rooms or sites where people may post whatever they wish; they are well-edited, peer-reviewed journals publishing original research, as with traditional journals. The difference is that PLoS journals are “open access,” meaning that the authors grant to all users “a free, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual right of access” to their work. “Everything we publish is freely available online throughout the world,” say the editors, “for you to read, download, copy, distribute, and use (with attribution) any way you wish. No permission required.”
The Public Library of Science has added “publishing as gift-exchange” to the older idea of “research as gift-exchange.” Nor, I might add, is gift-exchange at odds with commerce in this case; the editors allow commercial reuse of their journals’ content. In the introduction to The Gift, I say that artworks exist in two economies, though one is primary; the same might be said of scientific knowledge in the Public Library model: commerce is not excluded, but it follows after contributions are made; it does not come first.
To present my second example of a new noncommercial institution I need to back up and describe a little-known piece of the history of support for the arts. In modern times, young artists in need of help have traditionally received support either from public coffers or from private fortunes. The question is, might there be a third path? Might not the art world itself hold wealth sufficient to support emerging talents?
An interesting experiment in that line was initiated shortly after the Second World War when musicians in the United States began to worry that the popularity of long-playing records would cut into their performance income. What if every time the band goes to the recording studio all they are doing is playing themselves out of half of next year’s jobs? Responsive to such concerns, the musicians’ union worked out an innovative agreement with the recording companies such that a small percentage of the sale of each recording would go into a trust fund, the fund then being used to augment the income of musicians playing live performances.
After half a century this institution, the Music Performance Fund, still exists. It distributes millions of dollars annually, and supports thousands of concerts in the United States and Canada. It’s the largest sponsor of live, admission-free music in the world. In recent years it has also developed a Scholarship Fund to help pay for the training of young musicians.
What I like especially about the Music Performance Fund is its recycling feature, the wealth moving in a circle. That small percentage of the commerce that goes into the Music Performance Fund is a kind of self-tithing that the community has accepted so as to support its members, and to support musical culture in general (most of the performances are given for young people in schools). As a result, the recording industry is not purely extractive; the business side itself agrees to support the cultural ecology that nurtures musicians in the first place.
More to the point, I like the revealed fact that artists need not always go begging to taxpayers or private patrons; the arts themselves produce wealth and therefore, if we have the wit to organize the needed institutions, the arts ought to be able to support the arts.* In the United States, the Arts Endowing the Arts Act was, in fact, the name given to a legislative proposal that—had it been realized—would have nicely reproduced the structure of the Music