Clive Davis Accepts the Carolyn Clark Powers Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2017 National Arts Awards Dinner
Clive J. Davis, NYU alumnus, a member of the Tisch Dean's Council, and the namesake founder of the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music, was awarded the Carolyn Clark Powers Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2017 National Arts Awards on October 23, 2017.
During his remarks, Mr. Davis spoke about how education and how he founded the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at Tisch School of the Arts. Mr. Davis granted permission to publish those remarks below.
NATIONAL ARTS AWARD 2017
Honoring Clive Davis
“Carolyn Clark Powers Lifetime Achievement”
Monday, October 23, 2017
Location: Cipriani 42nd Street
"I am so happy to be here tonight. I feel at home with art permenating the night and I feel a palpable connection. Your organization, Americans for the Arts, has long recognized how invaluable, how to the core essential, Art and our major artists are to our culture and to our society. We are sitting together tonight at a time when budgets to support the Arts are being painfully scrutinized by the current administration. So now is the time we have to be vigilant and tough and our voices have to be heard. In the past you have honored Edward Albee, Baryshnikov, Belafonte, Gordon Parks, Martin Scorsese, Beverly Sills, Marian Anderson, George Balanchine, Aretha Franklin, Martha Graham, Neil Simon, Frank Stella, Stephen Sondheim among many, many others. What would our respective lives be like without these magnificent artists and their transformative genius? So, when I was approached about tonight and this award, I was honored and touched. I immediately decided I wanted to focus my thoughts on two words: contemporary music. Because it’s been contemporary music that has crossed international borders and caused this country’s most effective and penetrating impact on world culture: Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Patti Smith, Don Henley, Glenn Frey – they have been our true ambassadors.
So, when it was time in my life to give back, I vividly remembered that it was education and the beneficence of others that allowed me to find my destiny in life. My parents had died within a year of each other when I was a teenager. I received their total inheritance: the grand sum of $4000. Without full tuition scholarships, I never would have made it to N.Y.U. or Harvard Law School. Furthermore, when I went to college, there was no school that offered courses or degrees involving contemporary music. If you wanted movies as a career, you could go to USC or NYU. But there was an elitist approach to music: you could study jazz or classical music but only that. The new revolution: the contemporary music one – was off limits. So I acted to change this. I endowed at Tisch NYU what’s become The Clive Davis Institute for Recorded Music and it’s now among the most applied to branches of Tisch. Students can now study all aspects of Contemporary Music and receive a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Recorded Music degree in the process.
Let me just say that to spend this evening among all of you so committed to the Arts is an absolute pleasure. You have long recognized the Arts to be indispensable to life. I am deeply grateful to you for that and I am deeply honored to accept your Lifetime Achievement Award this evening."