Several hours ago now, Donald J. Trump was elected the forty-fifth President of the United States. I haven’t slept in 36 hours. As the results of the election became clear, more than a few theater friends on my Facebook feed began to post the words: “The Great Work Begins”—a reference to a phrase in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America and Angels in America, Part Two: Perestroika. Fueled by confusion and concern, and with a desire to spur myself and others to both reflection and action, I offer this post (a combination of new thoughts and those I’ve generated elsewhere over the past two years). I hope I can enjoin others to engage in a practical and hopeful conversation about where we go from here and the perhaps “painful progress” that we in the arts need to make.[1]
By the way, I am honored and delighted to announce that I recently began a 15-month fellowship as a (mostly virtual) Arts Blogger/Writer in Residence at the Thomas S. Kenan Institute at North Carolina School of the Arts. In the coming months you may see some of my Jumper posts syndicated on the Kenan website and vice versa.
From the Wikipedia Commons
At 10:58 pm Eastern—before the game-ending number of electoral votes had been reached and while Hillary Clinton still had at least a few pathways to 270—columnist Paul Krugman posted:
We still don’t know who will win the electoral college, although as I write this it looks—incredibly, horribly—as if the odds now favor Donald J. Trump. What we do know is that people like me, like most readers of the New York Times, truly didn’t understand the country we live in.
From where I stand, those working in nonprofit professional cultural organizations across the US—we in the so-called Creative Class—are, without a doubt, among those who did not understand our country, its culture, or its values. If we are shocked and outraged by the election results this only seems to prove the point. And this lack of understanding is disappointing given that art can be—arguably, should be—the way we share with one another what it means to be human (a powerful and democratizing notion I first encountered in Bill Sharpe’s wonderful monograph, Economies of Life: Patterns of Health and Wealth).
Looking at the programming on our stages it seems that many of us have existed inside a bubble, utterly out of touch with the Trump-supporting working poor in America, among many others.
How did this happen?
Virginia Woolf writes in her book, Three Guineas:
If people are highly successful in their professions they lose their senses. Sight goes. They have no time to look at pictures. Sound goes. They have no time to listen to music. Speech goes. They have no time for conversation. They lose their sense of proportion—the relations between one thing and another. Humanity goes.
This statement is hauntingly resonant when I think about the arts and culture sector in the US. The price of success has been the loss of our humanity as organizations. We appear to have lost our senses.
I came to this realization in June 2014 at a residential training with the organization Common Cause, which seeks to encourage NGOs and others working in the social sectors to join up to advance a set of common values in society—values like A World of Beauty, Social Justice, Equality, A Sense of Belonging, Broadmindedness, A Meaningful Life.[2] At the first gathering, when we went around a circle and talked about why we had chosen to come on the training, I said something to this effect:
I’m here because I don’t know if I can continue to work on behalf of the arts if the arts are only interested in advancing themselves.
I’m here because I’m worried about things like growing income inequality and suspect that growing income inequality may actually benefit the arts. And what are we going to do about that? I’m here because I’m worried about cultural divides and that the arts perpetuate them more than they help to bridge them.
I believe the arts could be a force for good, but I believe we will need to change as leaders, and as organizations, in relationship to our communities, for them to be so.
I was despairing about my life working in the arts when I spoke these words and I felt that same despair this morning in the aftermath of the election. But it is incumbent upon us to move on from sorrow as there is important work to be done. Earlier this year, New York Times columnist David Brooks argued in this article that there are forces coursing through all modern societies that, while liberating for the individual, are challenging to social cohesion—meaning the willingness of members of a society to cooperate with each other in order to survive and prosper together.
Friends, this is our crisis today. And we need to wake up to it.
Do we really want to be #strongertogether? If so, who better than the arts to help repair the divides in our country? Who better than we to contribute to the fostering of social cohesion? And do we understand that, without this, many other aspects of society—including the economy—will continue to break down?
So how do we begin again?
Honestly, it feels impossible at the moment. Nonetheless, I’d like to suggest that we might start by borrowing a page out of the play book of a colleague in the UK, Andrew McIntyre. For the past few years Andrew has been leading workshops in which he guides arts organizations to write manifestos. He justifies this work saying:
If you just want to organize the world a little more efficiently, you’ll get away with just a business plan. But if you want to change the world, leave your artistic mark, make a cultural impact or have ever used the word transform, then nothing short of a manifesto will do. Manifestos are open letters of intent that are fundamental and defining. They terminate the past and create a vision of new worlds. They demand attention, inspire and galvanize communities around us and knowingly antagonize others. They provoke action.
As citizens of a country that feels dangerously unstable, incoherent, unmoored, precarious, and divided, I suggest we begin by tearing up the generally lifeless and useless corporate mission statements that currently guide many of our organizations. In their place let us compose manifestos grounded in the reality of the present moment. Here are some questions to get you started:
What are you laboring for that transcends your organization and position within it—what values, goals, or progress in the world? Indeed, what are we laboring for collectively? Do we have a common cause?
It’s a small way to begin.
In his 2014 keynote address for a reunion of Asian American alumni at Yale, Vijay Ayer remarked:
Now that I am hanging my hat each week at that other centuries-old corporation of higher learning, just up the road in Cambridge, I am more and more mindful of what the British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare has called complicity with excess.
And as we continue to consider, construct and develop our trajectories as Americans, I am also constantly mindful of what it means to be complicit with a system like this country, with all of its structural inequalities, its patterns of domination, and its ghastly histories of slavery and violence.
Many of us are here because we’ve become successful in that very context. … Whether you attribute it to some mysterious triple package or to your own Horatio Alger story, to succeed in America is, somehow, to be complicit with the idea of America—which means that at some level you’ve made peace with its rather ugly past.
As we write our manifestos, let us do so cognizant of the possibility that the success of our institutions may be related to decades of “complicity with excess” and let us also temper any tendencies toward self-righteousness, bearing in mind the words of American feminist, author, speaker, and social and political activist, Courtney Martin.[3] Perhaps, she says,
…our charge is not to save the world after all, it is to live in it, flawed and fierce, loving and humble.
If we are to fulfill our highest purposes as communal organizations—places where art can provide a way for people to share with one another what it means to be human—then it seems that we arts workers will need to let go of the notion upon which many nonprofit professional cultural organizations were founded: that we exist, essentially, to save the world with art (and, quite often, with Western European Bourgeois Art, specifically). Instead, it seems that our first charge is to live fully in our tragically divided country and participate fully in our tragically broken democracy. Fleeing physically, mentally, emotionally, or spiritually is to deny both our culpability and power to make a difference. (And, yes, in case you are wondering, I’m planning to move back to the US when I finish my dissertation.)
It’s time to walk out into our communities, with our senses wide open, and absorb “the relations between one thing and another.”
It’s time to find our humanity and help others to find theirs.
***
[1] “The World only spins forward. We will be citizens. […] More Life. The Great Work Begins.” “Painful progress” is also from Kushner’s Angels in America, Part Two: Peristroika: “In this world, there is a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we’ve left behind, and dreaming ahead.”
[2] These values are taken from the research of Shalom Schwartz. You can read more about this at http://valuesandframes.org/handbook/
[3] From her book, Do It Anyway, as cited by Krista Tippet in the session: Parker Palmer and Courtney Martin – The Inner Life of Rebellion. http://www.onbeing.org/program/parker-palmer-and-courtney-martin-the-inner-life-of-rebellion/7122
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I’m not so sure we need more manifestos. Our lack of reality stems directly from idealizing our thought instead of dealing directly with the hard, cold questions of social reality directly in front of us. For example:
1. The collapse of the Rustbelt. Detroit is, as just one case, is in the process of bulldozing 40 square miles of abandoned ghettos to simply return it to open land.
2. The social conditions in our cities. In Cleveland, for example, Seeds of Literacy found that 60% of the people are functionally illiterate (i.e. can’t read at a 4th grade level.)
3. The social neglect of our population. In Philadelphia, for example, 180,000 people live in deep poverty (defined as less than 10,000 per year for a family of three.) This includes 60,000 children who face daily problems with hunger.
4. Massive social dichotomies. We have the highest incarceration rate in the world in both absolute and per capita numbers.
On could go on and on with examples, but the Dems did not address issues like these and remained true to a centrist, status quo built around the manifestos of free trade and deregulation (i.e. the economic policies of neoliberalism.) To neglect issues like these is to lose.
Trump provided specious and opportunistic lip service to some issues like these and so he raked in more votes.
As modernism rose after the war and was idealized exactly because it was apolitical and amoral, social reality in the arts fell to the wayside. This was taken as an example of Western freedom as opposed to the Social Reality of the East. Our bloodless arts world is the inevitable result of this idealization of social indifference.
So my suggestion: stop the effete intellectualizing that beats around the bush. Put hard, straight forward questions on the table that stem directly from from social reality, and provide hard, straight forward answers for how we can deal with them as artists.
And yes, I try to practice what I preach. I’ve spent the last 10 years writing a music theater work about an artist in Detroit. Social issues are addressed, both specifically and on a broader existential level. I should have a video of it ready in a month or so. I’ve dealt for decades with sexism in orchestras and with some notably positive results. Many of my music theater works are directly about the creative identity of women. And I campaign endlessly to raise consciousness about the problems created by the USA being the only developed country in the world without comprehensive public arts funding systems.
In short, pull your heads out of the sand and deal with the concrete, specific issues anyone with their eyes open sees on a daily basis. Don’t let unnecessary and often pseudo-intellectual philosophizing and idealizations distance you from the real world. This means finally getting your hands dirty and getting truly involved with social reality, which is where more artists should be. Not all of them of course, but far more of them.
William, I totally agree with your point about getting our hands dirty. I am so ready to get to work. This is why I despair about working in the arts some days as it seems that we do have our heads in the sand and are immune to what is going on in our communities. With all due respect, however, I think we may need manifestos to start. I was just at a workshop last week with some really enlightened arts organizations. Not one has a manifesto. I don’t think we’re overrun with them. In fact, I think we stopped writing them about the time that arts organizations began to have to submit business plans and mission statements to private foundations and governments and corporate boards. This is why corporate mission statements are so useless – they are weak, safe, vague, uninspiring, and compel us to do very little that requires actual courage or commitment. San Francisco Actor’s Workshop–a nonprofit professional resident theater that truly advanced progressive ideals and was never “complicit with excess” and had a 300-page manifesto (in the form of Herb Blau’s book). I think writing a couple pages could be sufficient. I believe that opera companies and symphonies and first-class theaters and dance companies and museums have an important role to play–in the thick of it–the next four years and the forty after that. But they can’t do it if they feel utterly beholden to the values and needs of the upper middle class patrons that provide the lion’s share of their contributed support. Common Cause asserts that you can’t advance values like social justice and broadmindedness while throwing champagne and caviar galas that, basically, trigger values like power, authority, and prestige among those who are courted to attend them. We do need to get our hands dirty. This is what I think Courtney Martin means (and the point I was trying to second) by living in the world rather than trying to save it. But to do that we need to get clear about whether we stand for something other than art for the 3% (which was basically the strategy Danny Newman handed to us in subscribe now!–pay 100% of your attention to the 3% who are inclined to be patrons and ignore the rest). A lot of people feel ignored. And we ignored them. We need to recognize that and start paying attention. But a manifesto without action, as you say, is worthless. So, yes, let’s get to work.
You’re right about manifestos — formulations of clear visions for action. I was just a little muddled because I too had been up for 36 hours.
To my partisan mind, the support of Trump across the heartland of America seems like a manifestation of ignorance created in part by cultural neglect. For whatever reasons, cities with well supported cultural lives seem as a rule wiser and more tolerant than much of what we see in America today. We have limited the perspectives of regional America by denying them a closer participation in the arts, The more egalitarian effects of a good public funding system for the arts could create a country with a more robust democracy. Ironically, this vision now seems more remote than ever.
William, I think remember that our social ignorance problems didn’t simply happen by cultural neglect but rather by socio/cultural design. A design which was begun by the evangelical political Right in the 1980’s but equally egregious was the neoliberal message of Richard Florida in the early 2000’s. Neoliberalism prevailed in the Democratic Party by moving the party to the right of center while Florida and others sold organizations and institutions on the myth that if we consider everyone creative and connect that creativity to economic growth our social problems would improve.
Yes, the problems are fundamentally systemic. We want to reach rural/regional America with arts funded only by financial elites in a few coastal financial centers. The conflict of interest is inherent in the system. It doesn’t work and it never will.
That’s why ALL other developed countries use public funding systems as the principle means of arts funding. Public systems are inherently democratic while our is inherently undemocratic. Public arts funding inherently reaches for a relatively egalitarian geographic distribution of the arts, while a plutocratic system like ours inherently concentrate the arts in a few financial centers.
This is so obvious one wants to say “Duh!”
Americans, however, are so deeply brainwashed with a type of Ayn Rand, small government ideology that they can’t admit this. We thus see that three people involved with arts administration with blogs on AJ have written about the Trump issue and the way the arts don’t reach rural/regional America, and yet not one addresses the true problem which is our lack of a public arts funding system. It’s an illustration of the totalitarian nature of unmitigated capitalism and how it so deeply shrinks and limits our thought world.
Sanders, with his version of American social democracy lite, was a startling break from this blindness. It was very encouraging to see how millennials overwhelmingly supported him. This shows how completely out of touch our arts administrators and arts institutions are with the perspectives of future Americans.
Brilliant and moving, Diane. Thank you SO much. May I also recommend Naomi Klein’s Guardian piece:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/09/rise-of-the-davos-class-sealed-americas-fate?CMP=share_btn_fb
Fantastic piece, Corey. Thanks for sharing it. Apropos this post, I particularly love:
“People have a right to be angry, and a powerful, intersectional left agenda can direct that anger where it belongs, while fighting for holistic solutions that will bring a frayed society together. Such a coalition is possible. In Canada, we have begun to cobble it together under the banner of a people’s agenda called The Leap Manifesto, endorsed by more than 220 organisations from Greenpeace Canada to Black Lives Matter Toronto, and some of our largest trade unions.”
In solidarity …
Yes
I was just about to post a message in my (books-based) bubble, asking more or less the same question.
I’m going to throw my horde in with yours….
Thank you for your thoughts Diane.
You say above that art can and should be “the way we share with one another what it means to be human”. I see this sentiment, which seems to have been adopted by arts organizations and institutions, as having a profound correlation with what happened in the election.
This notion that art is the “way we share” has a foul aftertaste of neoliberalism to it. Neoliberalism has been the driving force of both the Democratic and Republican parties for the last 30 years. A neoliberal view of art is one where art becomes just part of a long list of commodities. In a neoliberal world “share” becomes code for “sold”.
Who is the “we” in this statement?
Why isn’t the word “artist” used instead?
Where is the artist as cultural leader in that sentiment?
Where is the recognition of the artist as cultural inventor or even anarchist in this notion of “sharing”?
Neoliberalism replaces everything, even ideas, as products to be marketed and consumed. The arts advocacy language of sharing, engagement, and community became clean sounding marketing terms used by arts organization and institutions to control the “product” of art. Let’s not forget that the demagogue and sexual predator Trump was marketed and sold for over 10 years by NBC. He was “shared” as someone to be looked up to.
What is our ‘great work” going forward? Arts organizations need to replace the neoliberal language used in talking about art. Let’s replace the idea that- art is the way we share with one another what it means to be human- with the idea that -Artists show us what it means to be human.
Arts organizations and institutions need to recommit to being artist support institutions not artistic leading institutions who control artistic content through purse strings and vague community engagement language.
If we fail to return to the belief that it is the artist, the writer, the actor, the playwright that leads us as communities to new heights, to places we as a society cannot dream of ourselves, then we run the risk of the Trumps, and yes, the Clinton’s, becoming our cultural controllers.
Richard,
Thanks for your comment. Actually “sharing” which hints at the gift economy is quite different from “selling”. And saying art is the way we share with one another what it means to be human assumes an artist, who has observed the world, and made something, that is then shared. I agree that arts institutions needs to support artists. The problem as I see it is, for example, that to be a playwright that gets produced in a large number of professional nonprofit resident theaters you have to have gone to one of three Ivy league schools, which means you probably had to have come from privilege. You have an even greater chance of being produced in regional theater if you have already had your play produced on Broadway. Regional theaters have never particularly supported regional voices or working class voices, for instance. So, I’m not advocating “selling” and I’ve always advocated that artists should be supported and I believe, as you do, that they show us what it means to be human. But we need to hear from a broader range of artists (different aesthetics, demographics, geographies, etc.) if we are going to see our communities with clear eyes.
Readers of this post might be interested in this follow-on post by Matt Lehrman: 75 Days to Decide: Is Your Organization Part of the Solution – or Part of the Problem (Thanks, Matt, for weighing in!)
http://www.artsjournal.com/audience/2016/11/75-days-to-decide-is-your-organization-part-of-the-solution-or-part-of-the-problem/
Excellent post Diane!!
On the road at the moment but will respond properly when I’m home.
Warmest regards John
Many thanks, John! Look forward to hearing your thoughts (here or elsewhere). Please do share.
Warmly,
Diane
Thank you Diane. A very percipient and useful post, as always. And some very good points made in the comments too. I’d like to pick up on one of those from William Osborne about public funding. I totally agree that public funding is vital. One of the ways in which the arts have gone wrong is because of the need to get funding from corporations and rich individuals. This inevitably means that the arts are at best identified in people’s minds with a financial elite and at worst that the arts are co-opted by them ( which has certainly happened in large parts of the visual arts).
More broadly, I’ve been trying to figure out how things have gone so horribly wrong. What has become of the moral purpose and the nobility of spirit that the US once aspired to ( even if it was deeply flawed in the execution)? Why are its people, who live in one of the safest and most prosperous countries the world has ever seen, floundering in a toxic stew of fear, anger, greed, and hatred? Why so many shootings and so much mental illness and addiction? The answer seems to me to lie in two historic phenomena. One is the Vietnam War, which alienated the younger generation from a state that was quite literally killing them. The result was the alienation of the people from the government – and people reacted by trying to get away from the state in all sorts of ways, such as through technological utopianism, extreme individualism, drugs and religion, and back-to-the-land communes. The hippies were right about peace and love, but if only they had got involved in government rather than running away from it – compare and contrast with Scandinavia. The second time it all went wrong was of course, in the 1980s with trickle-down economics; greed is good, let it rip and hang the consequences..
And what should we do now? I have a suggestion, and I don’t mean this to be flippant. Two real problems that are causing the current malaise are bad food and overwork. It’s not just ‘the poor’ who are affected by these, but almost everyone. The arts need to look to, and affect, the wider culture. Arts centres should be making soup and opening creches. They need to understand not only social problems but wider problems with the culture (which are very deep and entrenched – celebrity/talk radio/pornography/an insane level of materialism – the list is long), and do something about them that goes beyond comment and reflection. The arts have tended to work with the elite or with the disadvantaged, but its the people in the middle who voted for Brexit and Trump.
John,
It’s too incomplete an answer to simply say we need more arts funding. From an artists point of view it’s artists that need more funding. For too many years most of the federal, state, and philanthropic, and public money goes to art organizations and institutions with a fraction of that money ever reaching the people who produce the artistic culture- the artists.
From an artists point of view I think the role of arts organizations and institutions is to support artistic production by supporting artists directly along with educating the public on the value and power of the arts. It’s not the role of the arts to fill in the physical needs that our social institutions are failing to do. If we as a society aren’t feeding the hungry lets put the blame where it belongs and go after the political players who aren’t doing their job.
Hi Richard. I wasn’t saying we need more funding, iMy comment was about the importance of where the money comes from.
All the best
John
I read the blog with some delay. It is still relevant. The other day I listened to a manifesto of an artist to stress the importance of disruption. Apart from my sense of deja vue I was thinking that artists have been disrupting and shocking for quite some thing without much disruption and shock. The real disruption and shock came with 9-11 and trump.
As I try to show in my recent book doing the right thing the significant question is what art is good for. Just as you argue, Diane. It is about realizing values. Which values?
The more poignant issue is whether the arts and the sciences have contibruted to the current malaise with the relativizing of fact, truth and science, and the dominance of feeling of cynicism and a lack of purpose.
Doesn’t the postmodernistic attitude finally surface in the political mainstream? Is trump the apotheosis of the pomo critique?