Creativity and policy reform

The fact that Arts+Culture is listed as one of the key initiatives of the The Opportunity Agenda, a New York-based organization committed to "building the national will to expand opportunity in America," is very exciting to me. This rights-based leadership, research, and advocacy organization has recognized the important role of arts and media to "create a window into the possible" when it comes to changing public opinion about immigration.

Favianna Rodriguez, David Henry Hwan, and Chung-Wha Hong
Photo courtesy of The Opportunity Agenda

It was this notion that framed last Wednesday's dialogue and multimedia presentation, Immigration: Arts, Culture & Media held at Florence Gould Hall in Manhattan. As I entered the theater, I was greeted by projected images of multimedia artist Kip Fulbeck, front-on portraits of multiethnic individuals holding white pages in front of them that listed their diverse cultural backgrounds. The images reminded me of happy mug shots, as though the artist was challenging the way American society has come to criminalize immigration.

The lights faded and we were shown clips from popular TV shows, movies, and stand up comedians that challenged negative assumptions about immigrants. Alan Jenkins, The Opportunity Agenda's co-founder and director introduced the even and the night's moderator, the dynamic Maria Hinojoso. Acclaimed filmmaker Mira Nair started the evening on a surprising note by indicating during her keynote address that she doesn't consider herself an immigrant per se but as someone who is strongly rooted in three places, on three continents (New York, Uganda, and India). She spoke about confronting ethnic stereotypes in her early work with humor and talent. For Nair, the artist's first responsibility is to her craft, and good work could take an important social justice stand. She also spoke about empowerment as the ability to tell one's own story, this the motto of her East African film training organization, Maisha.

Who Protects Antiquity? Three Models

Who protects antiquity? Apparently, highly-educated, middle-aged white men in dark suits, I couldn't help thinking as I entered the Proshansky Auditorium at the CUNY Graduate Center last Wednesday evening. The suits, James Cuno, Lawrence Rothfield, and Lawrence Coben, moderated by Joel Allen, were gathered on the stage to debate just who is responsible for protecting our ancient heritage and, an even more problematic question, how to go about doing so. As a newcomer to questions surrounding antiquity and its preservation, I learned a lot.

Each panelist had a different take on the crisis facing antiquity today and a different proposal to solve it. Cuno passionately decried the ascription of national boundaries to the archaeological remains of peoples or civilizations, which knew no state lines. The artificial nationalization of artifacts, he argued, keeps nation states from understanding their role as stewards of antiquity, with an obligation to act in their best interest, even when it means relinquishing objects and sites to foreign museums, universities or teams of archaeologists. For Cuno, something like the bygone practice of partage, whereby foreigners were allowed to excavate sites in return for sharing the spoils with the source country, would be a way to save and study the world's treasures.

Rothfield focused on the problem of looters who are pillaging important heritage sites. He led us through an economic analysis of the looting process, blaming the prevalence of looting on the incentives created by collectors (individual and institutional) who put a premium on particular objects. The result was a negative externality: the destruction of the sites of ancient heritage at the hands of profit-seeking thieves. Taking his economic logic one step forward, Rothfield proposed that the demand side should bare the cost of the externality in a tax that would feed into a global antiquity protection fund. This fund would then be used to cover the cost of securing sites in source countries with low capacity to do so on their own.