I’ll be blogging elsewhere on ArtsJournal this week, as part of the ”Expressive Life” week-long blog discussion convened by Bill Ivey and featuring a ragtag bunch of big thinkers.
Since his work as Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, Bill had been increasingly frustrated with the public and policy discourse about arts and culture. He eventually decided that the phrase and frame itself, ”arts and culture,” was partially to blame. The two anchors of that phrase were both impossible to define and easy to dismiss by those who defined their future.
So his concept of ”expressive life” was born, intending to restart the conversation with a clean slate and a bigger circle of human activity in the mix — from the most extraordinary artist to community arts to fashion to handicraft to political speech to songs around the family piano.
But does the phrase have potential? Is it only semantic shuffling? Does it change the game or just rename the players? That’s the focus of the roundtable happening all this week. Hope you join the conversation.
To me this is taking a broad, vague & highly subjective frame and replacing it with one that’s even broader, vaguer, and more highly subjective. My instinct says “the conversation” would benefit from greater clarity & specificity.
Here is a relevant quote about nomenclature from Lavoisier:
”…we cannot improve the language of any science without at the same time improving the science itself; neither can we, on the other hand, improve a science, without improving the language or nomenclature which belongs to it.”
A. Lavoisier, Traité Elémentaire de Chimie. William Creech, Edinburgh, 1790. Translated by Robert Kerr as The Elements of Chemistry, reprinted by Dover, 1965
By changing the old term- it can,at the very least make people pay attention a little more and think about the new term and what it means. Kind of a gentle kick to pay attention. I am not sure it’s quite the squeaky wheel that will get the oil- another old term. WE (the arts) have a lot to compete with ( for funding, fair pay ) and it is a heavy burden we carry as expressive creative lifers. All the arts do their best to help all good causes, medical research, children, soldiers, hurricane victims, earthquake victims, terrorist victims or abused fellow humans….we give our small coins to keep NPR going, the NEA, our local and regional museums, arts centers, theaters, bookstores etc.We help children discover their creativity and get them into their academic subjects-yet we are the first to be cut from the schools…WE do so much and are glad to- even for nothing but the pleasure of helping- but when it comes to making decent money for all we do to make other industries succesful- it just isn’t recognized because we have seamlessly intergrated our skills into everyday life. What if we all went on strike. It seems to work for many- but it would have to be across the board EVERONE. Have fun defining who all that would include. Printing that list on line and in the NYTimes might be the squeak – where did I put that list I started 20 years ago…..
I think the effectiveness of the term, “expressive life,” comes down to accessibility. The term “art and culture” tends to connote “high art and high culture” in the greater American public mind. Expressive life however, brings the same topic down to size. If playing the piano in the family room can be considered living an expressive life, then visiting the local Opera doesn’t seem so out of place, as both actions are now under the same umbrella term. The term “art and culture,” by connotation, works through exclusion of everyday art forms, creating a growing gap between the arts and the public.
I believe by taking such a wide-ranging label, and reinstating it with a new title that is even more broad and disconnected than the original, is not the most effective way to generate progress. Essentially those who passionate about the arts have not developed a coherent way of expressing to society the significance of the arts in the community. Perhaps making the public more aware of the actual definition of the title–new or old–is the first place to start.
I agree that “arts and culture” is hard to define, but “expressive life” seems just as ambiguous. I don’t know that changing the name will really have that much of an impact. As someone else said, it would get some initial attention without a doubt, like changing the name of a building. The people that grew up with it being called one thing will continue to call it that and quite possibly even scoff at the attempt to change the name.
The terms “arts and culture” and “expressive life” can create two different audiences. “Arts and culture” draws in more of a formal audience while “expressive life” draws in a much more casual audience. So maybe it’s worth adopting the term “expressive life” without abandoning “arts and culture”.