Quincy Jones leads call for creation of US Arts Secretary post

Nick | 06 Jan 2009, 11:47

Quincy Jones, the legendary US musician and producer has called for President-elect Obama to create a new position of Arts Secretary, prompting nearly 10,000 people to sign an online petition in support of the idea.

“My passion in life now, and one of the first conversations I’ll have with President Obama, is to beg for a Secretary of the Arts,” he told a New York radio station on 15 November 2008. He has repeated his call on a number of occasions since.

One of the key challenges to developing a coherent set of supra-national policies for the creative economy is that there is no standard international definition of the creative economy. The US is the world’s single biggest market for the arts. Recently, Secretary of State Andy Burnham, in an article on the Huffington Post expressed his wish that the Obama administration would present the opportunity to establish a new US-UK dialogue on many of the challenges facing the creative industries and that c&binet could help to play a facilitating role. Mr Burnham’s department, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport has no obvious counterpart in the US.

Although an Arts Secretary would only have a remit to address one aspect of the creative economy, the establishment of such a post would recognise the importance of creativity to US social and economic development.