Whether we’re talking to friends or strangers, how do we talk about the value we create? Mary Lou Aleskie, Executive Director of the International Festival for Arts & Ideas, shares why she believes we should stop talking about “the value of the arts” and start talking about the experience of arts and culture as a gateway to civic engagement and participation.
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I have to be frank, does anyone really understand what Mary Lou Aleskie is even talking about? What does her platform present if it isn’t about performance or another art form? What are her participants participating in? What do they have access to? What the heck are they sharing? And why don’t we speak about Art as gateways to civil engagement and participation as Aleskie asks? Probably because most modern artists fortunately still think that that art as governmental or social propaganda, art as a neoliberal economic development plan, is a negative thing.
Oh I don’t mean to pick on her personally. You can click on any number of ArtsJournal blogs and hear the same championing of vague concepts of engagement, participation, community, by people who get paid to tell artists and art enthusiasts that what they do is no longer important but rather it is what the mass audience wants that is. This vague new ideology implies that art no longer has an intrinsic value and that it’s value is in how much it can solve our social and economic problems. Really? Is that what Art does?
I understand that the last ten years have seen arts organizations scrambling to survive and arts advocates equally scrambling to figure out new ideas for survival. I get that. But you people are just throwing the baby out with the bathwater in your desperation.