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Diane Ragsdale on what the arts do and why

Highlights from the beauty class visiting artists (post 2 of 2)

In my last post and this one I am sharing highlights from presentations by the several artists who joined us in the second half of the course and key ideas that resonated most for the students.  The last two sessions, discussed in this post, focused primarily on the notions of taste and craft.

April 14 – On tastes, on obssessions, on beauty in unusual places (Fred Stonehouse & Polly Carl)

Fred Stonehouse

Fred Stonehouse

Polly Carl

Polly Carl

In the first half of this class we enjoyed a great lecture by the artist Fred Stonehouse, who is on faculty at UW-Madison.

Fred was laid back and put the students entirely at ease. He began by talking about growing up in a middle class family and not knowing much about museums. As a Roman Catholic, he said that his experience with art as a child was mostly from religious calendars.

Fred’s work is inspired by where he finds beauty—in tattoos, in devils, in the sacred heart, in bats, in his dog, in skulls—in short, in things that most people find rather dark. Fred’s presentation alternated between the motifs that have inspired him over the years and the works that he created. (See his online gallery for images.)

The students were able to relate to Fred and his art and many expressed later that it was a relief to understand that Fred draws bats, for instance, because he finds bats beautiful; and that sometimes futher interpretation is neither necessary nor even beneficial. At one point, Fred quoted Barnett Newman, the abstract expressionist who said in 1952, “aesthetics is for artists as ornithology is for birds.” Fred characterized artists generally as being about the idea, the object, communicating visually, having imagination and intelligence—but not being intellectuals, per se. Speaking personally, he said that he is most interested in art not sanctioned by the academy. Fred’s talk was very much in line with the Greil Marcus commencement address that I had the students listen to in preparation for this class (see below).

Toward the end of his lecture I reminded Fred that when we first met each other I had been talking about the Elaine Scarry idea that beauty is lifesaving and that he had responded, “Absolutely. It’s what keeps us from hanging ourselves.” Fred elaborated a bit on this, saying that art is an obsession and necessity for him. He commented, “When I’m in the studio I hate to be distracted; it’s hard to come out and deal with life … And if I’m not in the studio for more than about three days I turn into a total douchebag.” The students laughed and I responded, “It’s interesting to think about which practice, if one doesn’t do it for a few days, makes one turn into a total douchebag.”  For me, these days, this seems to be writing. A few weeks later I asked the students to think about just that question. Another portfolio assignment inspired by Fred’s talk: I asked the students to document beauty they find in something typically perceived by people as dark.

***

This same week Polly Carl returned and did an engaging and insightful riff on the Carl Wilson book, Let’s Talk about Love: A Journey to the End of Taste. The book is Wilson’s quest to figure out why so many people in the world love Celine Dion, an artist that he had come to loathe since her triumph at the 1998 Oscars with the theme song from Titanic (over Elliot Smith, who composed the music for Goodwill Hunting). In advance of this class the students wrote about an artist/genre that they loved and one that they loathed and also interviewed someone quite different from them age-wise or background-wise and asked, “Who is a musician/band or other type of artist that you deeply admire, and why?”

I also gave them the assignment to listen to this 20-minute SVU commencement address by Greil Marcus, in which he talks about art, audience, and artistic hierarchies, among other things.

In class, we spent about an hour exploring the students’ loves and loathes. While almost all students’ taste preferences were firmly planted in the realm of popular art, their loves and loathes were sometimes polar opposites–so the exercise seemed to be a good setup to Polly’s lecture, which focused on tastes and their relationship to values. She began by taking the students back to the 1998 Oscars. She played videos of the performances by both Celine Dion and Elliot Smith and asked the students which artist they would have selected to win had they been voting members of the Academy. (Somewhat surprisingly to Polly and me, all but two voted for Celine Dion.) Polly then introduced the premise behind Wilson’s book and walked the students through the journey he makes. Basically, Wilson’s eyes-wide-open examination of Dion and what her fans value about her ultimately leads him to the point where he can no longer loathe her (or, by extension, those who love her).

Polly also talked about her experience in various gatekeeping roles in the arts. (The term gatekeeping is used by both economists and sociologists to refer to those individuals and organizations who control resources and select which artists/works are produced and distributed). Polly talked, in particular, about the tension that curators, producers, and presenters of art sometimes feel between programming what they love versus what they think other people will like. And she conveyed the discomfort she felt when she first realized that she had the power to make or break an artist and how this caused her to question her judgments and what she was excluding, and why.

This led to a brief introduction to her current position (among other titles she holds at Arts Emerson) as the editor of the online journal at HowlRound. She explained why she is an advocate for the idea of a theater commons and why she encourages the philosophy that anyone who wants to write for the HowlRound journal should have the opportunity to pitch an article. By diminishing its gatekeeping authority and, essentially, allowing hundreds of voices to be heard through the platform, HowlRound is endeavoring to expand and democratize the conversation about theater in America.

We ended with a brief discussion of Pierre Bourdieu and the concepts of social and cultural capital (which, as Polly pointed out, is the only kind of capital most high school and college students have). We encouraged the students to think about what has shaped their tastes and how one’s taste biography is tied to one’s identity. That week I gave them a portfolio exercise to think about an area in life where they now have great taste and to reflect on the process by which their tastes were developed.

April 21 – On the aesthetics of craft (Joshua Berkson, co-owner of Merchant; and Magnus Genioso of Mad Genius, the anonymous sound collective)

Josh Berkson, co-owner of Merchant

Josh Berkson, co-owner of Merchant

Magnus Genioso of Mad Genius Anonymous Sound Collective

Magnus Genioso of Mad Genius Anomymous Sound Collective

Finally, in the last regular session with guests, I invited two individuals: (a) the restauranteur Joshua Berkson, who runs the farm-to-table and craft cocktail establishment, Merchant; and (b) a member of the anonymous sound collective, Mad Genius, who goes by the alias Magnus Genioso. We explored a range of topics with each of them, but the unifying concept had to do with craft.

Josh told the story of graduating from business school and going to work in hedge firms—work that he referred to as soul killing and back breaking (literally, he developed chronic back pain). While living in NYC and making money on Wall Street he became a bit of a foodie—and spent an increasing amount of his time and money checking out the best restaurants in the city. His passion for food began to become an obsession and he decided to go culinary school. Along the way he became increasingly interested in concepts like sustainable food, slow food, farm-to-table, and the American Craft Movement.

Josh ended up in Madison and opened Merchant—a casual farm-to-table restaurant, craft cocktail bar and liquor store. It was one of the first of its kind in Madison at the time. He showed one of the most beautiful PPT presentations I’ve ever seen (and talked a bit about his obsession with great PPT design). He expounded on the challenges of balancing a pure notion of craft against the reality of running a business that is profitable. He also explained the philosophy of “accessible craft” that is at the heart of what he’s trying to do at Merchant.

The students were given a chance to experience his restaurant and were quite engaged in his session. Students asked what he looks for in his employees (answer: people who are nice, who have passion and commitment to the values of the place, and who are not concerned with being hipsters, per se). They also wondered about particularly tough choices or decisions he had to make along the way.

***

Our next guest, Magnus Genioso, is an artist who creates sometimes whimsical, sometimes serious, but inevitably moving works of radio art using noise and conversation that he records. He is part of the anonymous sound collective Mad Genius, whose works can be found on Sound Collective. Magnus played several works; but there were two that we talked about extensively.

The first piece was created as part of a short radio series about the sense of place called @whereabouts. Titled Resale Records, it was recorded in a Madison-based used vinyl shop (of the same name), located in an old rusted-out shed. It is composed from a collection of sounds endemic to the record shop (the sound of flipping through vinyl, for instance) interwoven with an interview done with Eric Teisberg, the owner of the shop, about his work and life.

The second piece we discussed extensively is called Someone’s Screaming Outside and is composed from a series of 911 calls that came in before, during, and after the Trayvon Martin shooting. Magnus called this a piece about witnessing and commented, “Witnessing is really hard. Sometimes there are no concrete facts. Sometimes you don’t know what the hell you are witnessing.”

The conversation with Magnus touched on concepts like injury, beauty, and ethics as well as the nuts and bolts of collecting, modifying, combining, and layering found sounds to create radio art. He also gave the students some terrific tips to keep in mind when creating their final assignment for the class–a video collage based on what they have collected in their portfolios (e.g., think in terms of a metaphor for your experience in this class and use that metaphor to give the piece shape and meaning).

The presentations by Joshua Berkson and Magnus Genioso helped us better understand two approaches to an aesthetics of craft. Josh begins with using only the highest quality inputs and processes to create the food and drinks in his establishment; but he must balance this ideal against the material reality of having to earn sufficient profit to stay in business. Magnus begins with the material constraints of using found sounds and voices (whose quality is unpredictable and uncontrollable to a some extent) and then strives to craft from this assemblage of auricular artifacts, compelling music-based narratives.


In the SVU commencement address embedded above, Greil Marcus says:

What art does — maybe what it does most completely — is tell us, make us feel that what we think we know, we don’t. There are whole worlds around us that we’ve never glimpsed.

That’s what art does, that’s what it’s for — to show you that what you think can be erased, cancelled, turned on its head by something you weren’t prepared for — by a work, by a play, a song, a scene in a movie, a painting, a collage, a cartoon, an advertisement — something that has the power that reaches you far more strongly than it reaches the person standing next to you, or even anyone else on Earth — art that produces a revelation that you might not be able to explain or pass on to anyone else, a revolution that you desperately try to share in your own words, in your own work.

Die Soldaten at Lincoln Center Festival in 2008--a production that was a revelation for this blogger.

Die Soldaten at Lincoln Center Festival in 2008–a revelation for this blogger.

At the end of the term I asked the students about the experiences in class that were most meaningful to them and  there was a remarkable diversity in where the students found the most meaning and connection. I invited more than ten artists to join us over the course of the term and each one of them was mentioned.

This reinforced an idea that I started out with at the beginning of the class: that we would approach beauty from as many directions as possible—on the faith that this would increase the odds that each student would encounter something meaningful, revelatory, perhaps even life-saving.

 

Highlights from the beauty class visiting artists (post 1of 2)

Apologies for the radio silence. The beauty course marched on but I failed to get anything written on Jumper the past few weeks as I was finishing up the term and writing talks for two symposia (a symposium on Beauty and Business that I helped put together at UW-Madison and then the fourth biennial Pave Symposium on Arts Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University). I’ll post transcripts from both conferences in conjunction with the videos from each being posted by the conference organizations (UW-Madison & ASU, respectively).

lynette damico

Lynette D’Amico

Michael Rohd

Michael Rohd

Paul Sacaridiz

Paul Sacaridiz

 

 

 

 

 

 

As I reflect on the second half of the beauty course I now perceive that it was about trying to add, subtract, multiply and divide with what we had soaked up (in terms of concepts and frameworks) in the first half. It was about releasing ourselves a bit from the philosophy and formal definitions; engaging with art, artists, and life; and seeing what would stick. In this post and the one that follows I am sharing highlights from the presentations by the several artists who joined us in class and key ideas from them that resonated most for the students.

March 17 – Revealing and obscuring ourselves through self-portraits (Lynette D’Amico)

You may recall that the students created photographic self-portraits the first week of class and we used the assignment to, among other things, discuss the difference between a selfie and a self-portrait. In the same week that Polly Carl discussed the Elaine Scarry monograph On Beauty and Being Just, Lynette brought in slides of self-portraits by two artists: Vivian Maier and Francesca Woodman (links are to documentaries on each artist and are highly recommended). Lynette discussed that what interests her is how these artists both reveal and obscure themselves in their self-portraits. Lynette shared the Diane Ackerman quote:

Selves will accumulate when one isn’t looking; and they don’t always act wisely or well.

— Diane Ackerman

As she scrolled through slides of self-portraits by Maier and Woodman, Lynette asked the students, What selves are being shown in these self-portraits? She also played the grammy video of Sia, a pop artist who has attempted to evade a celebrity’s life by hiding her face in all live performances and videos and commented, Hiding oneself or camouflaging oneself is its own version of revelation.

Lynette ended her terrific lecture by encouraging the students to further consider their self-portraits and how they might re-approach the assignment in light of this idea. After spring break the students were given just this assignment. The students, by and large, did strong work on their second self portraits. Indeed, it was difficult to choose only five to share. It’s perhaps also worth noting that more than a few students expressed gratitude at being able to go back and repeat an assignment from the past, with new knowledge, skills, awareness, and confidence.

Brian Thue

Brian Thue

Hailee Von Haden

Hailee Von Haden

Liz Krueger

Liz Krueger

Lauren Wrobbel

Lauren Wrobbel

Daria Kryuchkova

Daria Kryuchkova

March 24 – Designing beautiful interventions (Michael Rohd)

Michael Rohd  joined us for our final class before spring break for a terrific session that I titled “designing beautiful interventions.” If you don’t know Michael’s work he is founding artistic director of Sojourn Theatre, founder of the Center for Performance and Civic Practice, and on faculty at Northwestern University. Much of Michael’s work is situated in the intersection between theater and democracy. In advance of his session the students read a short text by Michael called Listening is the New Revolution, which is a good introduction to his ideas. They also spent two weeks collecting experiences (from real life, not their FB feeds) of the following:

a beautiful decision you made

Michael’s session was broken into three parts. In the first hour he did an exercise called, “Where I come from”—a kind of musical chairs in which the person left without a chair must go to the center of a circle and finish the sentence, “Where I come from …”.  The “where” could be geographic, identity-based, or values-based. So,”Where I come from there are skyscrapers” was one geographic example. If this statement is true for others students they stand. Funnily enough, when someone made the statement about skyscrapers almost no one else in the class stood up. So instantly we all grasped that most of us were not from large, urban areas. An identity example: “Where I come from one’s parents are divorced.” A values example: “Where I come from most people are politically liberal.”

Following this exercise students talked in small groups about which of these revelations by their classmates struck them most intensely. Working in groups students were then asked to design a scenario based around a particular perspective—for instance, “Where I come from, anyone can say anything.” The aim was to demonstrate with the scenario how such a perspective could be a source of tension or conflict between two or more people. The students later commented that they loved this exercise as it allowed them to learn about their classmates and themselves in comparison.

In the second part of the class, Michael spent some time describing six projects he has worked on that he finds “beautiful” and asked the students to listen to these six stories and then reflect back to him his notion of beautiful work. There was a general consensus that beauty for Michael is knowing that the interventions or projects that he and his collaborators design have enabled individual citizens or whole communities to achieve their goals.

Finally, Michael led the students through a series of physical exercises with the material they brought to class (from having gone in search of beauty in the 11 sites outlined above). It’s hard to do justice to this exercise in writing, but essentially the students were led through a process of embodying the essence of these sites of beauty, relating their individual physical expressions to each other, and then working together to create a a brief performance incorporating text, movement, lights and sound. I would characterize it as an exercise in combining, layering, iterating, and shaping. It was definitely a challenging experience for the students, but one they embraced and seemed to enjoy.

April 7 – Beauty in the Thing to Make the Thing (Paul Sacaridiz)

Studio of Paul Sacaridiz

Studio of Paul Sacaridiz

I’ve already shared a few points made by sculptor Paul Sacaridiz (concerning the role of beauty in a democratic society) in my prior post on beauty and justice. There were a couple more themes from his lecture that really seemed to resonate with the students. The first had to do with finding beauty in the creative process. As he scrolled through slides of his studio and works in process, Paul commented:

Our job as artists is to notice the moments, the little beauties everywhere. … I document the process. At every moment I am looking for what no one else will see.  … I find beauty in the thing to make the thing.

 

The second theme had to do with the tension between the ideas “art is for everyone” and “you need special knowledge to understand art.” Paul commented:

  • Museums want people in their institutions because we believe that what is inside is worth the experience. That’s why museums are often free. Nonetheless, people feel intimidated by art. We’re confronted by something we don’t understand.
  • One of the dangerous notions out there is that art is a universal language. It isn’t. It’s specialized. For instance, there is the Japanese notion of wabi sabi, that there is beauty in imperfection. The Japanese make pots that highlight the cracks and bumps. But westerners see the pots and mis-interpret them as “not successful.” Our understanding of beauty is culturally contingent. Just because you don’t get something, or even whole societies don’t get something, doesn’t mean it’s not a “successful”  work.
  • Art is a kind of system. And we cannot grasp it immediately but we often feel immediately whether or not we are drawn to something, or repelled by it. Like physics or medicine we need to invest time and energy if we want to understand art, to figure it out. When we find something “stupid” or  incomprehensible or we don’t grasp why it is worthwhile to anyone we can ask, “What is it?”  And we can stick around and seek to understand what we are offended by or what we don’t understand.  We can transfer this same skill to other things in life. Rather than rejecting things we don’t know and understand as stupid, we can back off a bit and seek to understand.
  • The idea that you need specialized knowledge to understand and the idea that everyone should be able to approach art are both true. On the one hand, you don’t need historical knowledge to walk up to something and perhaps be compelled by its form, shape, colors, or even to understand it on some level. However, particularly with works from a different era, to have a deeper relationship with the piece, you may also find value in learning more, in understanding the context, the history, etcetera.

Portfolio Assignment: A second visit to the Chazen Art Museum

In order to examine the notion that art is a way to understand another culture, I gave the students the assignment to go to the Chazen Art Museum on their own to see the exhibition: Tradition and Innovation: The Human Figure in Contemporary Chinese Art. The students were generally quite enthusiastic in their responses to this exhibition. I gave them two assignments: (1) spend time with the exhibition and give me five adjectives to describe the culture being represented based on what you have experienced and (2) wait three days and document the work in the exhibition whose form proves to be most memorable.

In response to the second part of the assignment, foreign exchange student Constance Colin (from France) reflected:

endless tower

Mortals – Endless Tower, Xiang Jing

Dialogue, David Kukhalashvili

Dialogue, David Kukhalashvili

At first I thought the piece that stuck to my mind would be the painting of Chi Peng entitled “Mood is never better than memory” because I stayed watching that one for a long time … However, two days after, the one that I could not forget was Endless Tower (sic) of Xiang Jing. It was so impressive by its size and striking. From a far point of view, you tend to think that all the women are similar but getting closer you realize the faces are all different. [It] raises the question of being special and unique in a society that pushes you to fit in, to be like others. To illustrate this experience, I chose a piece I found on a social media dedicated to art I really enjoy, Stack (theartstack.com), entitled “Dialogue” by David Kukhalashvili.

Another student, Stacey Dougherty, wrote about the following artwork:

busy people 1

Photo by Eric Baillies. Su Xinping, “Busy People No. 1

I don’t remember the name, but the piece that sticks most in my mind is the large painting of the Chinese man walking in what looks like fire. The picture intrigued me because I could not stop wondering, where is that man going? Why is he taking such long strides? Is he walking into hell?  …

She documented her interpretation of the work in a Haiku:

Hell is Near

Fire is burning now / I run, but cannot escape / Hell is awaiting

In class I reminded the student that the title of the work is Busy People No. 1. I remarked that her interpretation, combined with the title, caused me to think that by racing through life and not being present, by allowing life to be consumed by busy-ness, we are, in a sense, living in a kind of hell.

Perhaps letting beauty in and letting it work on us helps us make strides in the other direction?

Approaching Justice & Democracy (in Beauty Class)

columnsIn last week’s post I wrote about a lecture by Polly Carl on the first half of Elaine Scarry’s monograph on beauty, which focuses on the relationship between beauty and truth. This week’s post takes as a starting point Polly’s lecture on the second half of Scarry’s book, which focuses on the relationship between beauty and justice. From there, it explores the importance of beauty in a democratic society.

How beauty presses us toward justice

Polly began her lecture by explaining that there are two enduring criticisms of beauty that Scarry seeks to counter.

(1)   The first criticism is that beauty distracts us from social wrongs. Scarry counters with the argument that seeing something beautiful wakes us up and inspires us to turn our attention to others. She writes (on p. 81) of Plato’s notion that we move from “eros,” in which we are seized by the beauty of one person, to “caritas,” in which our care is extended to all people.

(2)   The second criticism of beauty is that the viewer’s gaze is destructive to the object or person. Scarry counters this idea with the argument that when we pay attention to another being, both viewer and object come alive. She writes (on p. 90), Beauty is, then, a compact, or contract between the beautiful being (a person or thing) and the perceiver. As the beautiful being confers on the perceiver the gift of life, so the perceiver confers on the beautiful being the gift of life. [1]

Scarry also finds that these two enduring criticisms of beauty are fundamentally contradictory. The first assumes that if our ‘gaze’ could just be shifted away from beauty toward some neglected object our attention would bring the wronged object remedy; the second assumes that sustained attention can never be beneficial and always brings suffering to the object.

Scarry addresses these two criticisms as the first step in her thesis that:

… beauty, far from contributing to social injustice in either of the two ways it stands accused, or even remaining neutral to injustice as an innocent bystander, actually assists us in the work of addressing injustice …

Below is a video of a lecture in which Scarry outines the key arguments about beauty and social justice from her book. My points below are drawn from this videotaped lecture.

Scarry prefaces her talk by noting that beauty and justice share the same synonym—fairness—and that, etymologically, the word that best describes the opposite of both beauty and justice is injury. Scarry then outlines three sites in which beauty presses us toward justice.

I. Beauty in the object itself.

The attributes of the beautiful object have parallel attributes in justice. For example, the symmetry in a flower, or a poem, or Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper, models the concept of justice, which is defined by John Rawls as “a symmetry of everyone’s relations to each other.”

last supper

II. The immediate response to beauty in the viewer.

In The Sovereignty of Good Iris Murdoch’s asks, “How can we make ourselves better?” She answers: In a secular age, beauty is the “most obvious thing in our surroundings” to help us “move in the direction of unselfishness, objectivity, and realism.”[2] Murdoch observes that when a beautiful object hooks our attention it draws us out of our normal state of selfish absorption and shifts our attention to the world around us. She calls this process unselfing. 

Scarry’s term for this unselfing is opiated adjacency, by which she means that beauty reveals to us that we are not the center of the universe, but that the experience of ‘sitting on the sidelines’ is pleasurable. Scarry argues that while many things can bring us pleasure and many things can knock us into the margins, beauty may be the only thing that does both. When we are transfixed by the beautiful object, it inspires in us a desire to locate truth (discussed in last week’s post) and advance justice.

III. In the aftermath, when beauty gives rise to the act of creation.

This is the idea of replication or unceasing begetting (also discussed in  last week’s post). When we see beauty we are drawn to create more beauty: We write a poem, take a photograph, compose a song, bake a cake, plant a garden, draft a legal treatise, share a beautiful object with another. This unceasing begetting inevitably leads to the distribution of more beauty in the world.

The importance of beauty in a democratic society

A couple of weeks after Polly’s lecture I asked the students to read the first 55 pages (sections I-III) of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric. My aim was to explore the importance of beauty (in particlar, art and artists) in a democratic society. As President John F. Kennedy spoke in a 1963 speech honoring the life of poet Robert Frost:

If sometimes our great artists have been the most critical of our society, it is because their sensitivity and their concern for justice, which must motivate any true artist, makes him aware that our Nation falls short of its highest potential. I see little of more importance to the future of our country and our civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. … Artists are not engineers of the soul. It may be different elsewhere. But democratic society–in it, the highest duty of the writer, the composer, the artist is to remain true to himself and to let the chips fall where they may. In serving his vision of the truth, the artist best serves his nation.

claudia rankine

In her beautiful book-length poem, interspersed with images, Claudia Rankine raises our consciousness of everyday acts of racism. Two of the sections the students read are, essentially, a record of injurious remarks that Rankine has taken in and a recounting of the anger that has built up over time in response to these humiliations. She gives testimony to these everday shocks to the system as in a diary or logbook: one per page, page upon page.  Here are two pages:

Page 12

Because of your elite status from a year’s worth of travel, you have already settled into your window seat on United Airlines, when a girl and her mother arrive at your row. The girl, looking over at you, tells her mother, these are our seats, but this is not what I expected. The mother’s response is barely audible—I see, she says. I’ll sit in the middle.

Page 43

When a woman you work with calls you by the name of another woman you work with, it is too much of a cliché not to laugh out loud with the friend beside you who says, oh no she didn’t. Still, in the end, who cares? She had a fifty-fifty chance of getting it right.

Yes, and in your mail the apology note appears referring to “our mistake.” Apparently your own invisibility is the real problem causing her confusion. This is how the apparatus she propels you into begins to multiply its meaning.

What did you say?

In addition to exploring the meaning and impact of particular passages, I prompted discussion among the students with a number of questions:

  • What is Rankine’s goal with this work?
  • Does it turn you off or draw you in? Why?
  • Do you recognize this everyday racism she’s talking about?
  • How does reading this poem make you feel?
  • Have you witnessed or experienced or participated in these types of injuries?
  • Where else and how else do we dehumanize people?
  • Have you ever felt injured in this way?

Dehumanization explored on a visit to the Chazen Museum of Art

The day we discussed Rankine we also spent an hour at Chazen Museum of Art viewing four artworks, selected by the docents. Two were the sculptures Humiliation by Design by Beth Cavener Stichter and Black Jack, by Inigo Manglano-Ovalle.

humiliation by design

Beth Cavener Stichter’s 2009 sculpture, Humiliation by Design.

 

black jack

Inigo Manglano-Ovalle’s 2006 sculpture, Black Jack.

With the docents, we observed the threatening angle and missile-like tip of Black Jack, as well as the work’s cold, dark, impenetrable surface. We interpreted it to be about asserting power over another. It brought to mind notions of war games and star wars. We also noted that the large globes of the jack reflect back to the viewer a distorted self image. In contrast, Cavener’s goat (evidently based on someone she knows, as many of her works are) embodies the state of being systematically disgraced, shamed, tortured, or disempowered by another. We were at first repelled by and then drawn into this sculpture. The students were invited to spend more time with the work they found most interesting. A majority decided to revisit the goat sculpture.

After the Chazen visit, sculptor Paul Sacaridiz (who is currently chair of the Art Department at UW-Madison) talked about his work and process (more on that in another post); however, he also took a few moments at the top of his talk to speak to the importance of beauty (and, in particular, artists and art) in a democratic society. He commented to the students, “As graduates of a university, you have an obligation to look at the world critically and to question things. […] Art is a way of understanding the world; and there is no better way of comprehending things that are ambiguous or contradictory or complex than by going to see art. […] If you spend time with art you begin to develop this understanding.”

Portfolio Assignment: Injury Documented

While the students’ portfolios are intended primarily as catalogues of their experiences of the beautiful, in week 8 I gave them the exercise: Creatively document a way in which you see people being dehumanized in your world (small world or big world). Many documented ways in which the homeless, the physically different, those with mental illness, the LGBT community, and ethnic minorities are routinely dehumanized. A few also captured the everyday harms we inflict upon each other in our day-to-day social interactions on social media and in person. A good example of the latter is this poem by student, Michelle Croak. I end this post by sharing it with you.

It is saying “Hello!” on the street
and a negative thing behind closed doors.
It is asking your roommate how their day was
and checking your email while they answer.
It is telling someone you are SO sorry
and feeling nothing but regret for saying the “S word.”
What is it?

It is telling someone “We should catch up!”
without following up.
It is saying “I love you”
without action to back it up.
It is offering to cover someone’s portion of the check
without bringing out your credit card.
What is it?

It is unconditional love
but including all the conditions.
It is being Facebook Official
but refusing to hold hands around others.
It is saying everyone is equal
but not including everyone.
What is it?

What is it?
Dishonest. Insincere. Artificial. Untruthful. Disingenuous.
Dehumanizing.
Do we need a single word, a single phrase for all of these actions?
Do you see yourself in them? Do you see others?
Have you witnessed them and said nothing?
Then the next time I ask you, “What is it?”
You only need one word to answer.
Me.

***

[1] While not referenced by Scarry, for more on this notion I recommend the recent New York Times article, Being There: Heidegger and Why Our Presence Matters. Hat tip to my friend, Greg Conniff, for drawing this article to my attention.

[2] Murdoch, I. (1991). The sovereignty of good. London: Routledge. As cited in Winston 2006, p. 285.

What beauty does. (Taking stock in WK6 of the class.)

butterfly-viceroy-metamorphosis

 

Approaching Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just:

Elaine Scarry is a major contributor to the discussion on beauty. In the sixth week, the always brilliant Polly Carl gave a lecture on Scarry’s monograph (based on a series of lectures), “On Beauty and Being Just.” Scarry is a professor of aesthetics and literature and her book is an attempt to rescue beauty from its banished state in the humanities (by which Scarry means the conversation about beauty, not beautiful objects themselves).

It’s difficult to summarize Elaine Scarry’s potent monograph in a few paragraphs, much less Polly Carl’s reflections on Scarry. I’ve cherry-picked a few ideas from Polly’s lecture on the first half of Scarry’s monograph, On Beauty and Being Wrong, which examines how beauty evokes in us a longing or conviction to locate what is true.

I. Beauty is sacred, unprecedented, life-saving, and incites deliberation

Akin to (but more rigorous than) the characteristics of beauty proposed by Howard Gardner (which are essentially aimed at helping us recognize the beautiful experience), Elaine Scarry proposes four features of beauty:

  1. Beauty is sacred. An encounter with the beautiful is almost like a religious experience; it seems to have been inspired by the gods.
  2. Beauty is unprecedented. An encounter with the beautiful initially causes you to reel backwards in your mind and search “Have I seen this before?” (You have not; or if you have, only rarely.)
  3. Beauty is lifesaving. “Beauty quickens. It adrenalizes. It makes the heart beat faster. It makes life more vivid, animated, living, worth living.”
  4. Beauty incites deliberation. Beauty fills you with something beside yourself and you are then inspired to go forward and locate what is true. It’s a starting point. It inspires imagination. It makes us want to live better. We are constrained by the material world; but we can imagine anything. Beauty does that. 

II. Beauty compels replication

Correspondent with Howard Gardner’s notion that beautiful experiences invite revisiting, Scarry asserts that beauty compels replication (what she calls unceasing begetting). This doesn’t necessarily mean that if you see a beautiful flower you will photograph or draw it (though it might). This replication takes many forms. For example: We linger. We stare. We replay an image or scene in our mind. We play the same song over and over again. We insist to others, “You must see this!” We send postcards, “Wish you were here.”

III. We can be wrong about beauty

One of the recurring discussions in the course is around the notion that beauty is subjective (Gardner argues to the point of being idiosyncratic, even). Something is beautiful to you but not to me, for instance, and this difference is a factor of many things (including cultural background, context, education, and aesthetic sensibility). Related to this, Scarry finds that what we find beautiful (or not) today, may change; and she problematizes these changes as “errors.” Scarry recognizes two types of error with regard to beauty:

  • The first is over-crediting, when something we once deemed beautiful suddenly seems the opposite.
  • The second is failed generosity, when something we overlooked or dismissed we now see as beautiful.

For Scarry, an example of the second kind of error is palm trees, which she did not find beautiful, until she did. This prompts Scarry to wonder about all the beauty she has missed.

IV. Beauty is the basic impulse underlying education

One of the most compelling ideas of Scarry that Polly touched on (from my perspective) is the assertion that beauty is the basic impulse underlying education. Scarry’s argument is built on one by Simone Weil who (in Waiting for God) explains the “love of beauty” as “the love of all the truly precious things that bad fortune can destroy.”[2] Scarry notes that the first of these “truly precious things” numbered by Weil is education—what Weil calls “the pure and authentic achievements of art and sciences.” Scarry elaborates on Weil, writing:

This willingness continually to revise one’s own location in order to place oneself in the path of beauty is the basic impulse underlying education. One submits oneself to other minds (teachers) in order to increase the chance that one will be looking in the right direction when a comet makes its sweep through a certain patch of sky.

This hopeful passage is resonant with Rebecca Solnit’s notion of getting lost (placing oneself on the path of the unforseen) in order to be taken beyond what is already known. (See last week’s post for more on Solnit and the merits of getting lost).

pathway

What beauty is doing to us, thus far:

After introducing this last idea of Scarry, Polly asked the students how they think they have changed or what they have learned from the course, thus far.  Here were some of the responses. In the parentheses are my attempts to categorize these benefits in terms of qualities of leadership.

  • I do things I wouldn’t do. [daring, courage, unconstrained by pragmatism]
  • I look at things harder. [critical observation, looking beyond the surface, better seeing]
  • I see other people’s points of view. I think, “There might be more going on here so I won’t jump to a conclusion.” [empathy, balancing conflicting elements, able to see things from multiple viewpoints simultaneously]
  • I am re-evaluating relationships in my life. [emotional intelligence]
  • I am asking whether I’ve had the emphasis on the wrong things. [contemplating values and purpose in relationship to action]
  • I am thinking about homework differently—how to make it creative, not anxiety-provoking. How not to approach homework with dread. [approaching work with creativity, imagination, hope]
  • I’m trying to focus on the process, not the product. [quality and excellence in the way of working, not just the end result]
  • I am slowing down. [paying attention, being present]

When Polly was here and giving her two lectures it was midway through the term. I had been feeling a bit anxious about making the turn from talking about beauty in art and nature to exploring how cultivating an aesthetic sensibility (encountering beauty) leads to better leadership (the promise of all those academic papers I found when I was developing my course).  I provided an overview of all those papers in the essay I posted several weeks ago—Why Beauty in a Business School. You would be forgiven if you peered into that bag of bones and quickly slammed the door shut.

After Polly’s lecture–and getting this bit of feedback on the class from the students–I began to feel less anxious about this process. I perceived that, without forcing things to a particular end, but simply by committing to the experience of the class itself, the students were beginning to transform. An email from my generous and insightful pen pal/mentor, the artist Carter Gillies helped me to recognize this. He wrote to me after reading last week’s post (the one inspired by Polly’s lecture on Rebecca Solnit’s book, A Field Guide to Getting Lost).

The conclusion you draw at the end of the post is perhaps the single most important objective you could achieve: It’s not simply about perception, as if what students were learning were akin to picking up microscopes and telescopes to peer at the world differently. And they are not simply flexing some long unused muscle, changing their abilities by degree, lifting heavier mental objects, more nuanced aesthetic experience. Rather, the project they are most working on is their own transformation. They are working on the project of themselves in the same way that every artist isn’t simply learning techniques and processes but a way of fitting in the world that had been impossible for the person they once were.

If the key is being more open minded, then its not simply a difference in allowing more things as possible, an incremental adjustment, but changing from a lock with a specific keyhole to a wide open vista. It’s not a change in degree as much as in kind, the chrysalis giving way to the butterfly. Which, of course was part of the point I was making in that post [Maximum Beauty] I referred you to in a previous email suggesting that what we like and don’t like are not always divided by the increments of our better understanding them as much as the qualitative incommensurability between them. To be open minded enough to capture those inconsistent thoughts was what the F. Scott Fitzgerald quote had to do with: “An artist is someone who can hold two completely opposing viewpoints and still function”. It seems your students are on this path …

I couldn’t say it any better.

I find I am also beginning to feel some of these same benefits as a result of having set aside my dissertation for a bit to focus on the beauty course. I’m slowing down. I am more present. I am living more intuitively. I’ve thrown away the manic to-do lists I’ve lived by since at least college, maybe earlier. And I feel like my relationship to work is beginning to shift. I’m developing the capacity to relinquish control. I am learning how to approach this course and my dissertation with more curiosity and creativity, less force and determination to achieve particular ends or goals. More than anything, I’m beginning to figure out a way of fitting in the world (which I haven’t really felt since moving overseas five years ago).

So, this is what beauty is doing to us, thus far …

PS – I highly recommend Carter Gillies’ blog, including the post mentioned above, Maximum Beauty.

PPS – Polly also lectured on the second half of Scarry’s monograph–On Beauty and Being Fair–which addresses the relationship between beauty and justice. I will discuss this particular aspect of beauty in a future post. One can handle only so much Scarry in a single post. 🙂

[1] Murdoch, I. (1991). The sovereignty of good. London: Routledge. As cited in Winston 2006, p. 285.

[2] Simone Weil, “Love of the order of the world” in Waiting for God, trans. Emma Craufurd., p.  180

 

“Disbanding our armies” (in Beauty Class)

lostLeave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go. Three years ago I was giving a workshop in the Rockies. A student came in bearing a quote from what she said was the pre-Socratic philosopher Meno. It read, “How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?” I copied it down, and it has stayed with me since. … The question she carried struck me as the basic tactical question in life. The things we want are transformative, and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation. Love, wisdom, grace, inspiration — how do you go about finding these things that are in some ways about extending the boundaries of the self into unknown territory, about becoming someone else?       – Rebecca Solnit

If you have never read Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost, read it. It’s a beautiful series of essays on the value of losing oneself in order to undergo transformation. The passage I’ve just quoted does a good job of conveying its essence and impetus. In week five of the beauty class we were joined by two special guests, Polly Carl, (who has been instrumental in my thinking about this course) and her partner, the fiction writer Lynette D’Amico, who designed a class session inspired by Solnit’s book.

Polly Carl: On Getting Lost

Polly spent about 90 minutes introducing students to key ideas in Solnit’s book and guiding them through a discussion on getting lost, anxiety, wandering, wondering, desire, and longing and how these relate to the creative process. She structured the lecture around a range of provocative questions she posed to the students, such as:

  • What would you like to become right now? We talk about who we are, but who would you like to become?
  • How do we “calculate the unforeseen”? When and how do we encounter that which we do not already know? When and how do we put ourselves on paths that will make this more likely?
  • Where do you feel longing? Where do you feel desire? Longing is the distance between where you are and where you long to be. The sensation of desire is beauty. How do we stay with the sensation of desire rather than seeking to accumulate stuff to fulfill the desire?
  • Do you have to be in the present to have any hope of getting lost—of putting yourself on the path of the unknown? If so, how do we stay in the present?
  • How often are you thinking about what you’re not doing? (This was a question posed to Polly by a scientist when she participated in an NEA research symposium on creativity and the brain.) For example, how often are you checking social media when you are not in a position to respond to it (for instance, in the middle of class)?
  • If creativity lives in the space of being lost and in the ability to roam, is anxiety the opposite of creativity? Solnit talks about how explorers got lost all the time; however, the difference between explorers and the rest of us is that they approach getting lost with optimism. Has anxiety replaced optimism? How much anxiety do you feel about school, for instance? What would it mean to replace this with optimism and creativity?
  • How do others see you? When do you see yourself? How do we become lost to ourselves? Solnit tells us lost has two meanings: the familiar falling away and the unfamiliar appearing. Do we need to lose the sense of how we are perceived through the eyes of others in order to see ourselves more clearly?

In perhaps my favorite moment in the lecture, Polly talked about the following passage from Solnit’s book:

The word ‘lost’ comes from the Old Norse los, meaning the disbanding of an army, and this origin suggests soldiers falling out of formation to go home, a truce with the wide world. I worry now that many people never disband their armies, never go beyond what they know. Advertising, alarmist news, technology, incessant busyness, and the design of public and private space conspire to make it so.

She then asked the class: What disbands your army?

The first student to raise her hand responded, “This beauty class disbands my army.”

Others agreed.

Lynette D’Amico: On Story

Polly ended her lecture by telling the students about an experience (that she had with Lynette) of getting trapped underground in a NYC subway packed with people, without air conditioning or lights, on a blazing hot day. After a short break, Lynette then read the short story she eventually wrote, Fictions of the City, inspired by the subway fiasco. The point of this exercise was to examine how an artist takes an experience (in this case, one filled with tremendous anxiety) and shapes it into a story.

Lynette commented after reading her story to the students: Stories are how we make sense of the world and experience things that don’t make sense to us. They are how we stand in the prsence of wonder and mystery. She then talked about the process she used to approach the project (among many things, her research on various aspects of subways in NYC and her desire to make a connection to The Great Gatsby).

Lynette then showed the William Kentridge video, Journey to the Moon, which she used as a catalyst to talk about what it means to live in a space of wonder and mystery. She also read a statement by Kentridge to the students: There is a desperation in all certainty. The category of political uncertainty, philosophical uncertainty, uncertainty of images is much closer to how the world is.

The students were asked to think about the possible meanings of various elements in the film in light of this statement.

Portfolio Assignment #1: Wander to Wonder

At the end of class, Lynette gave the students the following portfolio assignment:

Get lost and record the experience. The form of getting lost can be geographical or experiential. It could be going somewhere you’ve never been before, which can be a neighborhood, a park, a lake, a city, a building. It could be going to a restaurant and ordering a type of food you haven’t had before. It could be going to a church. It could be going to a sports event. It could be going to an arts event. It could be doing something you’ve never done before, something you’ve been thinking about, or wanting to do, like trying a pilates class at your gym, or riding a city bus, or something spur of the moment and spontaneous, finding a roof top where you can watch the sun rise, or watching a foreign film. The parameters are that you have to go someplace where you don’t already know the rules or the norms, and document your experience, and the documentation can be in a form of your choosing. You can write about the experience, take photos, send a series of texts to a buddy and then capture those texts.

Some studets went to restaurants, some wandered down streets in parts of town where they had never ventured, one walked into a small gallery on campus she had always been curious about, and more than a few ended up losing their smart phones for a day. Here’s how student Lindsay Bloomfield documented her experience of losing her connection to her phone for a day.

No signal.

I lost my friend Siri yesterday. I lost my friends Chris Martin, Taylor Rice, and Kanye West whom I talk to almost everyday. I ached to hear my friend cry out “Turn left in 300 feet”. But, it was quiet.

Silent.

Then I heard it. The faintest rustle of the trees. The deep bellowing of my breath. The laughs coming from an unknown place up the street.

Then I saw it. The blinding sun piercing across the vast sky. That night I saw the same sky splattered with perfectly sporadic specks.

Then I felt it. Above the ache for my simulated friends on my 5.44 x 2.64 screen, I was a present in the present. A gift of the hour. The hour, in turn, a gift to me. It was a symmetry I hadn’t found before.

A peacefulness.

Portfolio Assignment #2: How to Listen to Music

In the last half hour of class I talked with the students about another portfolio assignment I had given them the week prior. I asked the students to watch a TED Talk by the renowned conductor, Michael Tilson Thomas, called Music and Emotion Through Time. I then asked them to sit quietly, do nothing, listen to a piece of music lasting at least 40 minutes, and document the experience.

A number of students commented after their classical music listening experience that they had never actually sat quietly and listened to a long piece of classical music from start to finish. Many also remarked on how soothing, clarifying, inspiring or energizing it was. Given our discussions about anxiety and the pressure that students feel in relationship to school and life, this struck me as rather meaningful.

Here’s how one student, Brian Thue, documented how he felt after listening to Henryk Gorecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs.

bian thue

Nothing anxious here. If anything, the image is quite the opposite–both soulful and transcendent.

***

As I reflected on Solnit’s gorgeous book and this equally gorgeous class session designed by Polly Carl and Lynette D’Amico, I thought:

This is the value of beauty in a business school. It requires that students “disband their armies” … “go beyond what they know” … “expand their boundaries.” By sending them out into the world each week with assignments to get lost, sit quietly, really listen, look closely and then reflect on what they sense, feel, and think–they are not just learning a new (aesthetic) way of knowing the world, they are also encountering different parts of themselves. They are learning a different way of being in the world.

Awakening to truths about ourselves and the world (in the Beauty Class)

Intervention Wall Street, Laura Anderson Barbata, photo by Frank Veronsky

Intervention Wall Street, Laura Anderson Barbata (2011), Photo by Frank Veronsky

This is the sixth post in a series of posts focused on the course on beauty that I am coordinating/teaching for business students at UW-Madison. In the fourth week of the Beauty Class I wanted to explore the notion, articulated by Jeanette Winterson, that “art can waken us to truths about ourselves and the world.” The class examined works by two artists: monologist/raconteur Mike Daisey, whose piece The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs was aimed at getting people to think about about the injurious labor conditions by which their beautiful Apple devices are made; and transdisciplinary social artist Laura Anderson Barbata (born in Mexico and currently based in New York City), whose ongoing Julia Pastrana Project has been aimed at getting people to see the “ugliest woman in the world” as a human being with rights rather than as an object of scientific study or historical artifact.

 

On the Nature of Artistic Truth: Mike Daisey & His This American Life Fiasco

As probably anyone reading this blog knows, in 2010 Mike Daisey, a renowned storyteller, created a show that centered on his experience of going to China and witnessing firsthand the egregious working conditions in the FoxConn factory in Shenzhen where Apple products are made. When it premiered, and as it gained attention, the piece was hailed by many theater critics and business journalists as an exceedingly well-researched and well-crafted piece that succeeded in humanizing the issues, arousing empathy, and sustaining public discussion around unfair labor practices by overseas manufacturers of Apple products and other electronic devices.

Portfolio Assignment

The first part of the weekly portfolio assignment was for students to listen to Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory, an episode of This American Life in which Daisey performs a version of his show. After listening to the episode they were asked to write down their thoughts and feelings about Apple, its products, Mike Daisey, and theater/storytelling.

Unsurprisingly, almost all the students in my class own one or more apple products; somewhat surprisingly, more than a few have actually worked for Apple. While a couple of students were skeptical of Daisey’s piece, and wondered how true it was as they were listening to it, most were completely absorbed by the story and deeply troubled by it. Here are a handful of pretty typical responses:

#1 – After listening to this podcast, I am questioning how many of my technology products are made and the path each item takes before it gets into my hands.

#2 – It makes me feel ashamed that companies would allow sweatshops and abusive labor situations to occur. The stories about the suicides and injuries make me feel sick …

#3 – This has definitely changed my perception of Apple. They are such a well-known company and treat their employees very well, but as soon as the jobs go overseas to increase their margins, then everything goes down the gutter. Apple, being a front-runner in future technology should also be a front-runner in global-labor rights. This was definitely a good podcast to listen to.

#4 Throughout this story I thought about this winter break and how I was annoyed when I ordered my new iPhone that the ship date was TBD … Reflecting on this experience, it didn’t even cross my mind that there are workers making these phones. Daisey talked about how when there’s a new Apple product it’s not uncommon for workers to work 18 hour days. It made me feel guilty for being annoyed that there was a wait for my new iPhone. I realized it’s people like me … that cause [Apple’s] manufacturers in China to feel pressure to work their employees overtime to meet demands like mine.

#5  … Immediately after [listening to] the audio, I felt upset. … My relationship with my device changed—I stared at it differently.

I then asked the students to listen to a second This American Life episode featuring Daisey—the Retraction episode, in which Daisey is interrogated about certain facts of his story that do not seem to hold up under rigorous fact-checking. Over the course of the episode Daisey and his story come undone as he acknowledges, in what seems to be a state of distress, that he fabricated some of the events portrayed as truths (i.e., facts) in his story.

Once again, I asked the students to write down their thoughts and feelings after listening to the podcast. I also asked them to reflect on the nature of artistic truth and whether and how it differs from other types of truth (for instance, in journalism).

Unsurprisingly, almost all the students initially were “outraged” to realize that some of the most moving and troubling parts of Daisey’s story were not true—meaning he had not actually experienced some of the events that he claimed to have experienced. Many used the word “betrayed” to describe how they felt; some indicated that they felt foolish or duped or silly for having become emotionally involved in the first episode.

A handful of students were ready to write-off Daisey’s story in its entirety because of its fabricated parts—for them, the piece had lost all integrity. However, a majority of students were able to see both sides. In their written refelections many were able to see the larger truth Daisey was trying to convey and acknowledge the artistic and social value of his theater piece, even while feeling that the choice to present the work as fact within a journalistic frame was short-sighted, inappropriate, unethical, or deceitful.

Here is one student’s written response to the Retraction episode. It is an example of how many students reconciled these two sides.

… I believe it was wrong for him to lie on This American Life. It was not wrong to create this story and theater piece of work; but speaking on this show and implying that his story was journalism was completely wrong. Artistic truth and journalistic truth are completely different … Daisey’s piece is artistic. His story is moving and makes people think about the working conditions overseas, but it is not all factual.

Although my views have changed and I am disappointed that Daisey thought it was perfectly fine to lie on national [public] radio, the fact that these working conditions could still exist is unacceptable. Charles Duhigg states at the very end of the podcast that we, as in the people who are users of Apple products (such as myself), are not only the direct beneficiaries of these conditions, but the reason they exist. …Our nation is not demanding different conditions …

A couple of students tweeted their thoughts after listening to the second episode and in both cases Daisey responded to them—in one instance sending a link to a blog post on the topic. We spent some time discussing sections from that post and considering Daisey’s “rules” and how, in principle, he reconciles telling a good story with getting the facts right.

Laura Anderson Barbata: Visiting Guest Artist

Only known photo of Julia Pastrana (in the public domain)

Photo of the preserved corpse of Julia Pastrana

For the second half of class the students watched a presentation by UW-Madison Artist in Residence, Laura Anderson Barbata, who creates transdisciplinary public art performances that speak to social issues. Before giving her own presentation, Barbata was able to join us for the discussion of Daisey’s work. She has seen all of Daisey’s monologues and sees tremendous craft and value in his work (as do I). After soliciting comments from the students, I asked Barbata if her high regard for Daisey and his work as an artist was diminished in light of the scandal surrounding This American Life. She responded, “Not at all.”

Barbata’s lecture centered on her Julia Pastrana Project, which came about as a result of participating in a 2003 theater piece created by her sister in which audience members sat in total darkness for hours listening to the story of Julia Pastrana (1834-1860)—the “ugliest woman in the world.” Julia was a highly intelligent woman who suffered from a condition that caused excessive hair growth on her face and body. She spent most of her adult life as a carnival attraction being advertised as a hybrid bear-woman. After her death, during childbirth, the bodies of Julia and her baby were preserved, studied by scientists, and toured as freak-show curiosities. In response to public outrage they were taken off the touring circuit in the 1970s (!) and stored in a closet at a university in Norway, where they began to decay due to exposure to water, sunlight, and rodents.  When this decay was discovered the remains were sealed in a coffin and stored in the Department of Anatomy at the Oslo Forensic Institute.

And this is where the story ended when Barbata’s sister made her theater piece and submitted a petition, signed by hundreds, requesting that the remains be repatriated and properly buried. There was no response to the request; and this compelled Laura Anderson Barbata to use an artist fellowship grant to travel to Norway in 2004 to better understand Julia Pastrana and what had happened to the petition.

This initial  inquiry became a multi-year project, the aim of which was to get people to see Julia not as an artifact but as a human, a woman with a medical condition, a mother, and a Catholic, with rights—rights to be repatriated to her native home in Mexico, have her death authenticated and acknowledged, receive last rights, and be granted a proper burial. The project was a success. Pastrana was returned to her small village in Mexico and buried in 2013.  You can read an excellent chronology of Pastrana’s life and Barbata’s project, here. One of the artworks associated with the project is the print Julia y Laura (below) which features the only known photo of Julia Pastrana when she was alive and the artist, Laura Anderson Barbata.

***

Julia y Laura, 2013. Laura Anderson Barbata.

Julia y Laura, 2013. Laura Anderson Barbata. Posted with permission.

In reflecting on these works by Mike Daisey and Laura Anderson Barbata I am reminded of Elaine Scarry’s argument that, etymologically, the word that best represents the opposite of beauty is injury, not ugliness. I wanted them to think about how and why these artists were able to awaken consciousness to injuries being perpetuated when the facts of these stories (which were known for years before these artists made their work) had failed to do so. I wanted them to see how these artists help us see parts in relationship to the whole (person or system)–and in particular, our part in perpetuating injuries.

However, I also wanted them to experience how easy it is to forget the initial empathy we feel for the workers at FoxConn and order the new Iphone anyway; how easy it is to sign a petition and then promptly forget about Julia Pastrana stuck in a coffin in a lab in Oslo.This suggests that we need a process for remembering, for keeping our eyes open, for being awakened to truths about ourselves and our world over and over again.

As Jeanette Winterson says, “Art can bring us back to consciousness, sometimes quietly, sometimes dramatically, but the responsibility to act on what we find is ours.”

Post Script:

While in class, Laura Anderson Barbata also took a few moments to show a video of her work Intervention Wall Street, a street performance that featured African American men (the Brooklyn Jumbies) walking on stilts in suits through Wall Street during the Occupy Movement, handing out gold chocolate coins to actual Wall Street suits, while the O’Jays song For the Love of Money played in the background. Her aim was to engage and respond to the social and economic issues raised by the economic collapse of Wall Street. You can watch the trailer below to get a sense of the piece (Laura Anderson Barbata is the woman featured in the piece.) Coincidentally, the original video artwork Intervention Wall Street is owned by the school of management at my university in the Netherlands, where it is a catalyst for discussions.

 

 

 

Approaching Beauty in Art (Beauty Class Continues)

This post discusses how the business students prepared for a visit to the contemporary art museum; their three-hour visit to the museum and the exercises they completed there; and the portfolio assignments created by students both leading up to the museum experience, and in response to it.

Before the Museum

In anticipation of a visit to the museum I assigned a few videos for the students to watch. The first was Michael Kimmelman on Art Parts 1 & 2 (two brief segments excerpted from the documentary My Kid Could Paint That).

Here are some of the key ideas from Kimmelman that we discussed in class after watching the videos:

  • Even things that appear simple can require great skill.
  • What you determine to be great art and what I determine to be great art may be different. Although there are no longer fixed and strict standards in art to which everyone must agree, this doesn’t mean there are no standards. What is important is understanding why you have the standards you do. You may also want to keep your eyes open (meaning continue to seek out new experiences) so that you can evolve to have different standards.
  • Sometimes what is most important about a piece of work is the idea behind it rather than the technical skill; art works are often valued because they are innovative and push the art conversation forward.
  • The determination of what counts as art (beyond commonly accepted standards) is made by experts who are able to declare something a work of art. This can be alienating to people; but it’s how the art world works.
  • Art is not meant to be instantly understood and you may need to make an effort to understand what makes a work of art great in the eyes of experts—but only if you want to. You are also under no obligation to increase your understanding of art.

We then discussed Alain De Botton’s sermon Art As Therapy. De Botton’s work is concerned with the content of art and how everyday people can derive meaning (a kind of self-help) from it. He posits that art is good for us in five key ways:

  • It keeps us hopeful.
  • It reassures us about the normality of pain and makes us feel less lonely.
  • It balances us and compensates for what is lacking in us; it has qualities we need.
  • It helps us appreciate the value of simple things in life. It’s a counter to materialism.
  • It is a tool of memory and opens our eyes to what we are unable to see.

We also read a few texts. We examined a statement by Oscar Wilde from the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray on the uselessness of art; a passage by Susan Sontag in her essay Against Interpretation (hat tip to my friend and former colleague Lane Czaplinski for recommending these); a brief 1949 essay by E.M. Forester published by Harper’s Magazine called Art for Art’s Sake; and the Claudia LaRocco talk, Some Thoughts, Possibly Related, on Time, Criticism, and the Nature of Consciousness, which I found in the Yerba Buena Arts Center Reading Room. The goal of pulling these various texts together was to get at several things: What does art for art’s sake mean? What is art for? How might we approach art works (particularly if we don’t have much experience with fine art)? and What does it mean to be present and engage with a work of art?

The session before the visit to the museum I asked a UW Grad Student, Tara Austin, to teach a brief drawing workshop. She led students through a series of observation and sketching exercises aimed at giving them a number of approaches to drawing and, thereby, developing their skills of observation. Tara showed slides of her own pieces, as well as those by other artists whose works are inspired by beauty in the natural world: Marianne North, Ernst Haeckel, Philip Taaffe, Beatriz Milhazes, Annette Davidek, and Fausto Fernandez. Tara also engaged in a Q&A with the students and talked about such things as how she approaches a work of art in a museum, why she’s drawing orchids these days, and her artistic process. Here is a work of hers (in her orchid series) that she gave me permission to share.

Orchidaceae #4

Tara Austin. Orchidaceae #4. Oil and Acrylic on Panel. 2015

After Tara’s workshop, the students had a visit from a docent at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art (MMoCA). Carol Hay covered the major periods of art, as well as the formal elements used to analyze drawings, paintings, and sculpture (e.g., line, shape, form, texture, pattern, tone, value)–however, she stressed throughout her presentation that such knowledge is not required to enter a museum and begin to engage with the work. Much of what she did was aimed at demystifying the museum experience. She engaged the students in a critical response analysis of two works (one realistic and one abstract) in the MMoCA permanent collection–asking questions such as, What do you notice? What does it remind you of? What feelings does it evoke? She also led students through an exercise in which they worked in groups to construct a poem (using a guide) in response to a work of art whose title they did not know. Finally, she provided information on the themes and artists in the current exhibitions and introduced students to a few of the works they would see.

MMoCA was a terrific partner for us at every step of this process (both before and during the museum experience). I worked with their curator of education, Sheri Castelnuovo.

Portfolio Exercises

As an exercise in advance of the museum visit I asked the students to watch a sunrise or sunset, then write a haiku and document the sunset visually (use old school or new school techniques to draw or construct). The goal of the exercise was to engage them in sustained close observation and to practice letting the hand capture what the eye sees. In this case I suggested they focus on capturing their experience of the colors and shapes of the sunset. Here are two of the submissions (Left, Michelle Croak; Right, Jackie Lee):

Is that grey? Or white? / Where does the sky start and end? / Will winter end soon?

Is that grey? Or white? / Where does the sky start and end? / Will winter end soon?

 

The sun surrenders/As deep purple streaks the sky/Through dark, bare trees.

The sun surrenders / As deep purple streaks the sky / Through dark, bare trees.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A second portfolio assignment was to write about a beautiful work of art (owned by a museum). Here was the assignment:

  • Choose a work you judge to be beautiful;
  • Briefly describe the work of art objectively;
  • Enumerate aspects or details you notice and the associations and feelings that arise as you examine the work;
  • State what makes the work beautiful from your perspective–(i.e., seek to understand your own standards for beauty in art);
  • Do some research and read about the artist and work. What do you learn? Does this knowledge enhance or detract from the beauty of the work?

Many students picked well-known masterpeices and generally it seemed that gathering additional knowledge about the work and artist was perceived to be beneficial and to enhance appreciation of the work (but not always).

At the Museum

When the students arrived at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art in week three I had them reflect on the experience of the sunset and on the following passage from Claudia LaRocco’s talk, mentioned above.

It’s astounding the number of people who sleep through performances, even shows they have paid a good deal of money to see. Sleeping through a performance to me always seems akin to putting on headphones in a museum and letting the audio guide tell you exactly when and where to stop and look: you’re there but you’re not there; it’s a form of sleepwalking, really.

And sleepwalking is always a tempting option. A lot of those 170 shows I saw, like a lot of what happens to any of us in the course of an average day, had problems: too slow, too manic, too much, not enough. Some of them were just plain wretched: no sense of themselves, yet possessed of a false sense of knowing. Or maybe I was the one with the problem: scattered attention, sore throat, incorrect understanding, bad attitude.

These problems, whether internal or external, always present the audience member with a choice: to engage or disengage. To stay in the present, stay in our actual time, or slip out through some back window of our mind.

We then split the students into three groups of seven for docent tours led by three terrific docents, Carol Hay, Bob Leschke, and Donna Rae Clasen. I learned this was quite meaningful to the students when I polled them the week after the tour. After their one-hour introduction to the three galleries, I gave a short talk on the nature of the aesthetic experience, as well as on ways that art experts approach art. These examples were largely drawn from two terrific books: The Art of Seeing: An Interpretation of the Aesthetic Encounter by Mihaly Csikzszentmihalyi and Rick E. Robinson and Rendez-Vous with Art by Philippe de Montebello and Martin Gayford.

I explained that aesthetic experience is not unlike the feeling of flow (this is the main argument of The Art of Seeing). I also stressed Michael Kimmelman’s point that different works will speak to different people and that it may not be the most “important” piece in a collection that draws you in. As an example, I shared this comment by a curator interviewed in The Art of Seeing, who was visiting with a dealer, who was trying to turn her on to certain works he was representing:

When the dealer was giving me all these prices for other objects and trying to get me excited about things the he wanted me to be excited about, I kept looking at this little Polaroid … And I was really sort of working on other things, but what interested me was this ….

Part of what can become transfixing, I offered, is the desire to understand why you are drawn to a piece—why and how it is working on you. Here’s another quote by a second curator (same text) that I used to demonstrate this point:

I think there’s the initial response, and then there’s a kind of curiosity as to what there is in the picture that gave you that response, which means that you’re going from the whole picture down to … maybe it’s the way that cherry is painted over there in the corner, that is really knocking me out …

Finally, I conveyed that it takes time for works of art to work on us and read the following quote by Philippe de Montebello before introducing an exercise in which they would spend 30 minutes with a single art work.

I use the word ‘work’ in my approach to art deliberately. …A deeply rewarding experience awaits visitors if they are willing to look searchingly at the works on view. Also … few works of art yield their secrets quickly. … Since most don’t beckon, they must be approached and given time.  … We all know you can’t squeeze Wagner’s Ring Cycle into thirty minutes, yet, perhaps, because the eye can take in a work of art all at once, in a brief instant, we expect it to speak to us in shorthand—it doesn’t. It demands an effort; it must be deciphered, decoded it you will, if we are to be absorbed in its world.

The students dispersed and were told to spend 30 minutes with a work of their choosing and to jot down thoughts, images, feelings, etc. When we reconvened I asked students about the experience. Their energy was a bit subdued and many had found it difficult to stay engaged for a full 30 minutes; but some seem to have become lost in the experience in a positive way.

A student spending 30 minutes with a ChanShatz work at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art

Students sharing their works with each other after 30-minute exercise

Students sharing their works with each other after 30-minute exercise

I sent them back into the galleries in groups to share their works of art. As my TA and I roamed the galleries we noticed the students were much more animated. When we talked with them after this last exercise, we gathered that they enjoyed sharing what they had discovered and hearing, in response, what others saw in the works.

Portfolio Assignment After the Museum

Here was the weekly portfolio assignment: Create an artwork that conveys an idea that stuck with you from the work you spent time with at the museum; and write an artist’s statement (7-10 sentences) that connects your work to the museum work. You may create a visual art work or a poem.

Students submitted poems, drawings, photographs of site-specific work, paintings, watercolors and sculptural works, like the following by student Lyndsay Bloomfield, responding to a work in the Lands in Limbo series by artist Narayon Mahon, documenting unrecognized countries of Abkhazia, Northern Cyprus, Transnistria, Nagorno Karabakh, and Somaliland.

fortune tellerResponse to Dividing Wall #1 by Narayon Mahon 

The piece spoke to me about loneliness. It had a sense of hope with the child, but the shadows seemed almost to engulf him. I have never known a child to seem so dark. I wanted to reach into the photo and speak to the kid, to share something with him, something that wasn’t so dark or lonely. That is why I chose to make a Fortune Teller, something I still make when I want to pretend that picking the color blue or red will tell me my final fate. I used a Street pulse newspaper to make my gift because I think that the homeless people may be able to connect with that boy in the photo. They too after all are in their own land of limbo. I specifically choose the obituary of man, Tim DeDeyne that covered the front page. It had his poetry at the bottom, and maybe as that young boy grew he could look to the small stanzas to keep him sane, just as Tim DeDeyne once did. May his words be remembered, no longer cast aside or forgotten.

As I thought about the student’s fortune teller another connection to Mahon’s artwork occurred to me. The boy shown in the photograph had ended up in an unrecognized country because of a distance of a few feet. A line was drawn, rather arbitrarily. His home could have just as easily ended up on the other side. It was a twist of fate that he ended up in a land of limbo.

Student Hailee von Haden, who is studying design, submitted the following image and text in response to Death in Venice Portfolio: Dark Gondola/I Feel Sick/Death on the Lido by Warrington Colescott. Death in Venice is a portfolio of ten etchings inspired by Thomas Mann’s novella of the same name.

hvh skeleton

When looking at Warrington Colescott’s Death in Venice Portfolio, I understood each to have everyday, present moments happening like they usually would but with a haunting ghost/death lingering within the layers of the etchings.  The colors were very vibrant which made them feel more manic than they were.  My first print of a series that I will be continuing combines everyday activities with a representation of death, the skeleton.  I chose to do a screen print because it is a similar technique as etching as a resist printing technique.  I also layered different papers to mimic the dozens of layers in Colescott’s etchings.

I was moved by the submissions, many of which were quite thoughtful and imaginative.

By no means do I think all of these steps are necessary for a student to have a meaningful engagement with fine art. However, I wanted to give the students multiple entry points and opportunities to engage so they could determine for themselves, and I could learn, what helps them to engage.

Next Post

In my next post I’ll talk about a series of experiences and lectures focused on how artists open our eyes to truths that we may not want to see. As Jeanette Winterson puts it in her essay The Secret Life of Us:

Art can offer no obvious return. Its rate of exchange is energy for energy, intensity for intensity. The time you spend on art is the time it spends with you; there are no shortcuts, no crash courses, no fast tracks. Only the experience. Art can’t change your life; it is not a diet program or the latest guru—it offers no quick fixes. What art can do is prompt in us authentic desire. By that I mean it can waken us to truths about ourselves and our lives; truths that normally lie suffocated under the pressure of the 24-hour emergency zone called real life. Art can bring us back to consciousness, sometimes quietly, sometimes dramatically, but the responsibility to act on what we find is ours.

 

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On Selfies vs. Self-Portraits and Universal Beauty vs. What I Find Beautiful (Beauty Class Portfolio Assignments)

 

FDiane's treeor those following the Beauty Class, this post is about the first two portfolio assignments. One of the primary methods of learning in this course is the creation of portfolios in which students are asked to catalogue their experiences of beauty in art, nature, work, and everyday life. The weekly assignments allow me to trace student progress over the course of the term and are intended to provoke and inspire thinking about beauty. My assignments are a subset of the larger portfolios the students have been asked to create.

Self-Portrait #1

The first portfolio assignment was to create a self-portrait using a camera. In advance of completing this assignment I encouraged students to seek inspiration by browsing a few articles/websites featuring self portraits.

  • 100 Seriously Cool Self Portraits (and tips to shoot your own!)
  • The Top 10 Self Portraits in Art
  • National Geographic Self Portrait competition  (see the submissions)

Since I suspected not all would have access to a tripod, I gave them the option of having someone else click the shutter. What was more important to me than who snapped the shot, I explained, were the particular choices made by the student in preparing for the photo to be taken.  I asked them to submit the image along with five adjectives describing the portrait and what it captures.

When the students came to class the next week they were asked to break into small groups and consider the following questions in relationship to the assignment:

  1. Where did you find inspiration? In the three websites recommended by Diane? Elsewhere?
  2. What was your goal? How did you approach the task? Were you able to achieve what you wanted to achieve?
  3. What’s the difference between a selfie and a self-portrait?

Not all, but many students had browsed the sites I suggested and could describe in some detail specific photos they found compelling. While a handful of students said their goal with their self-portrait was to create art, most conveyed that their goal was more personal—to convey something about who they were. We discussed that these need not be mutually exclusive aims. Finally, we discussed the question of what distinguishes a self-portrait from a selfie. Students suggested that selfies are more casual, that you don’t necessarily want to keep them, and that they are about connecting with your friends. I reflected back to them that their observations were very much in line with statements made  by a curator in an article in the Getty Iris. The article maintains that while both selfies and self-portraits are “efforts at establishing and embellishing a definition of the self,” the primary difference has to do with intention or purpose. A selfie is a “mode of conversation” and is “disposable.”  A self-portrait is intended to be interpreted as a work of art and is meant to endure. The class also agreed with the assertion of one of the curators interviewed in the article that some selfies are great and rise to the level of art.

We then looked at a number of student self-portraits and focused on the various approaches that students took, as well as at the use of line, shape, color, pattern, and texture that made some of the portraits particularly beautiful (from my perspective). The students adopted diverse approaches to the assignment and many made clear choices about color, setting, or staging, as you can see from the following four examples, which the students gave me permission to share (clockwise, Christina Hoo, Enis Gashi, Chelsea Larosa, Megan Schroeder).

CH self portraitEG self portrait

 

 

 

 

MS self portrait

CL Self Portrait

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Universal Beauty vs What I Find Beautiful

For a second assignment I gave the students the following quote as a prompt. It’s by Tom Morris in his 1997 book, If Aristotle Ran General Motors (pp. 82-83):

There are many forms of beauty in the world. When we hear the word ‘beauty,’ we may think of different things. … Many people think of nature. Some envision a painting or  cathedral. A mechanic may imagine an engine he’s seen. A wood-carver may think of scrollwork. A luthier, of a guitar inlaid with pearl. A jeweler might vividly picture a multi-faceted gem. A football coach can call to mind a spectacularly executed play. An avid basketball fan will excitedly talk of “a beautiful move to a basket.

I then asked the students to submit two images. First, I asked for an image of universal beauty (i.e., something that comes to mind when you hear the word ‘beauty’ and that you suspect most people would find beautiful, as well). For the second image I suggested that students consider the following: “If a trial attorney finds beauty in a well-argued case, where do you find beauty?” Alongside each image I added the requirement, “Give me 75-150 words on what this image signifies for you and what makes this object, event, action, or person beautiful (compared to others in the same category). Justify your aesthetic judgments in terms of Gardner’s or Heisenberg’s criteria.” You can read about Gardner & Heisenberg in last week’s post.

When we examined the submissions for universal beauty we found that a significant number of them featured a landscape of some sort, many with water and trees.

constance elephants

Here’s a nice example taken by student, Constance Colin (those are elephants you see). We considered this convergence in taste in light of the curious People’s Choice art/research project by artists Komar & Melamid, who used a survey and statistical analysis to determine “the people’s” Most Wanted and Least Wanted Paintings. Komar and Melamid’s oft-cited (and rather controversial) study found that people around the world favor a painting that is a mostly-blue landscape with water, people, and animals; komar and melamidmoreover, in the US, people seem to enjoy paintings that also feature historical figures and children.

When Komar and Melamid created the US Most Wanted Painting they added George Washington and a few children in the foreground of the painting (pictured left). You can see the Most Wanted and Least Wanted paintings here.

I also shared my photo of the bare tree at sunset taken from my bedroom window, shown at the top of this post. I explained to the students that I have taken countless photos like this over the years and that it was only when I was thinking about this assignment that I made the connection to Ansel Adams’ photograph Oak Tree, Sunset City, Sierra Foothills, 1962. I used this as a prompt to talk about Elaine Scarry’s assertion that beauty often compels replication.

Next, we examined the what students find beautiful that is more idiosyncratic. However, rather than sharing the images they submitted I shared the ideas or concepts underpinning the images. I took the 75-150 word descriptions written by the students and created encapsulations. Each of the following statements describes where a single student finds beauty:

  • An uncensored view of the world
  • A life well-lived (having impact on others)
  • Family, childhood, homeland
  • Transformation: a symbol of oppression turning into a symbol of freedom and art
  • Inner peace, strength & determination
  • The human form
  • Loving relationships
  • Eclecticism
  • Genuine laughter
  • Rainy days & everyday life
  • Travel, exploration, seeing the world
  • Hard work, celebrating life, and giving back to others
  • The unique, the standout, that without symmetry
  • Exploring the unknown
  • Food – cooking and eating delicious and aesthetically pleasing meals
  • Persevering against all odds
  • The cheese plate and the conversation it promises
  • Unexpected joy in a change of heart (from resentment to love)
  • Risk, adventure, facing fear
  • History; and ruins, which remind us of what’s gone even as they persist into the future
  • Family and memories of when times were good

I ended this part of the exercise by displaying the Schwarz universal values as mapped by the organization Common Cause and suggesting that each student’s particular ‘beauty’ could be mapped onto the Schwarz values (see Psychology and the Search for Universal Values in this Wikipedia Entry). I explained that while everyone has values found across the map, often a person will have a preponderance of values in one part of the chart. For instance, a majority of my values fall in the green segment of the map below. I further explained that Universalism and Benevolence pull in the opposite direction of Hedonism, Power and Achievement; and that Self-Direction and Stimulation pull away from Conformity, Security and Tradition.

Schwarz Theory of Basic Values as Mapped by Common Cause

Schwarz Theory of Basic Values as Mapped by Common Cause

We will return to the Schwarz values later in the term, but I wanted to make the link early on that aesthetic criteria are linked to values. As Steven Taylor describes it in his article The Impoverished Aesthetic of Modern Management: Beauty and Ethics in Organizations.

We all have aesthetics that drive our decisions. I may love small, fast sports cars because my aesthetic criteria value a feel of oneness between horse and rider. You may love large trucks because your aesthetic criteria value utility and power. When I see a sports car, it is a thing of beauty to me. When you see a truck it is a thing of beauty to you. We all hold various sets of aesthetic criteria that we have developed over time and they play a critical role in determining how we act.

In my next post I’ll talk about how we prepared for a visit to the contemporary art museum, the exercises we tried at the museum, and the works the students created in response to the experience.

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A Different Orientation (Beauty Class Wk 1)

Art is a different value system. Like God, it fails us continually. Like God we have legitimate doubts about its existence but, like God, art leaves us with footprints of beauty. We sense there is more to life than the material world can provide, and art is a clue, an intimation, at its best, a transformation. We don’t need to believe in it, but we can experience it. The experience suggests that the monolith of corporate culture is only a partial reality. This is important information, and art provides it. – Jeanette Winterson, The Secret Life of Us

worldviewThis is my first post sharing what we’ve been up to in the “beauty class” (as we’ve all come to call it) since it began on Feb 10. The goal of the first class was to define the universe of the course and to give students a sense of the various ideas that would be in play over the course of the term.

A bit about the students:

I’ve got 22 students for the beauty class and we meet for three hours each Tuesday. In advance of the class I did a 28-question survey of them to learn more about their past arts experiences and preferences, passions, values, and perceptions and goals for the class. This was based, a bit, on the survey that Yerba Buena Arts Center does with patrons who take part in its YBCA + You program. Among the findings:

  • Most had arts experiences in their K-12 years (i.e., taking arts lessons, attending events).
  • If they had $100 burning a hole in their pockets 64% would be most likely to spend it on fashion and 14% on a great meal (before options like books, concert tickets, a live arts experience, or buying a piece of art).
  • They would all prefer to see art with another person or a small group of friends.
  • About half would like to get a recommendation from a friend before venturing out for an arts experience and about half are willing to venture out without one; however, only one would wait to see if something gets a positive review from the critics.
  • When given a range of fine arts choices (across disciplines and ranging from classical to contemporary) they were most interested to explore classical and new music, contemporary art, and dance (both contemporary and ballet). Their interest was lowest in opera (particularly classical).
  • Finally, when we introduced ourselves on the first day I learned that most are business majors with an emphasis in marketing.

Discussion of the comments on Jumper:

To prime the discussion I mentioned to the students that I had posted a blog about the course and shared some of the comments with them, which ranged from affirming to skeptical to verging on hostile. Many were rather agog at the negative comments—with some sincerely confused as, from their perspective, businesses like Apple (and others) pay significant attention to aesthetics. While they were initially ruffled by comments that seemed to suggest that business people care only about profits they also acknowledged that such perceptions are not without basis. But they also intuited possible motivations of those who were most critical of the course: Perhaps arts people are threatened by business people having points of view about art and beauty? Perhaps they are worried that something they deeply care about will be corrupted? We talked about the concept of hostile worlds and debated whether this is an useful way of conceiving of the relationship between art and business.

Digging into the Assigned Texts/Videos:

We defined aesthetics as a branch of philosophy having to do with the creation and appreciation of beauty and with the nature of art, beauty and taste and then proceeded to wade into the assigned readings and videos. We started with excerpts from Gardner’s book Truth, Beauty and Goodness Reframed, and an interview with Gardner by Richard Heffner. We examined Gardner’s conception of beauty, which he primarily applies in relationship to art. Per Gardner, to be deemed beautiful an experience must have four characteristics: It must be interesting enough to behold; it must have a form that is memorable; it must invite revisiting; and it must elicit a sensation in the observer. Rather than a definition of beauty what Gardner really seems to provide is a way of recognizing an aesthetic experience. We compared Gardner’s reframing of beauty in art with Werner Heisenberg’s conception of beauty in science as the proper conformity of the parts to one another and to the whole.

shell

I came across Heisenberg’s definition through the Booth School of Management panel metioned below, in which Harry L. Davis references a talk by Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (1975) called Shakespeare, Newton and Beethoven, or Patterns of Creativity. The Chandrasekhar talk is both insightful and inspiring in its analysis of patterns of creativity in scientists and artists and how and why they differ.

Building on Heisenberg, we then considered whether the beauty we find not only in science, but also in art, has something to do with the relationship of parts to each other and the whole. Or as E.M. Forester discusses in his essay Art for Art’s Sake (a 1949 article in Harper’s Magazine to which I was introduced by Jamie Bennett), “works of art … are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order.” Forester elaborates:

[The artist] legislates through creating. And he creates through his sensitiveness and his power to impose form. Without form the sensitiveness vaniches.  … Artists always seek a new technique, and will continue to do so as long as their work excites them. But form of some kind is imperative. It is the surface crust of the internal harmony, it is the outward evidence of internal order.

We then had a great discussion about a panel discuss at the Booth School of Management at the University of Chicago called Does Your Company Need an Artist?

If you haven’t seen it I highly recommend it. It features Harry L. Davis, Canice Prendergast, and John Michael Schert (former ballet dancer and executive director of Trey McIntyre Project) discussing, in a sense, the justification for Schert’s three-year stint as social entrepreneur and artist-in-residence at Booth.

We delved into several ideas brought foward by the panel:

  • that art teaches business how to explore (in contrast to exploit);
  • that discomfort is part of the artistic process and when things don’t go as planned in the development of work artists don’t tend to think of this as failure as much as opportunity;
  • the concept of individual genius (which is still valued in the arts) versus the collective process that business tends to use to generate new ideas; and
  • the analogies made that art is a different lens on the world, a different language, and a different way of solving problems.

We delved a bit more into that last point and discussed the notion of aesthetic judgment – that it is personal, subjective, and contextual and that there are no rules or rights answers.  Having said that, we also agreed that there must be a basis for judgment and that the concept of “liking” or “not liking” may not be the most helpful or relevant when approaching art, particularly since initial discomfort may be part of the process.

We also discussed the notion of disinterest –– not in the sense of having an experience devoid of emotion but in the sense that an aesthetic interest is “an end in itself that requires no further justification” as John Dobson puts it in his paper, Aesthetics as a Foundation for Business Activity.

Finally, we endeavored to relate the idea of aesthetic judgment to business. We examined the following quote by John Dobson (in the same article):

Aesthetic judgment is needed in business leaders, in particular, because they face the continual challenge of distinguishing between excellence and its by-product, material wealth.

What is Dobson saying, we asked? We concluded that he is basically saying that business leaders need to have the character, the internal standards, and discernment to do the right thing, for its own sake. Moreover, if we equate aesthetic beauty with quality of life, as Dobson asserts, then it becomes the ultimate end to which other interests (economic or otherwise) serve as instruments. We compared Dobson’s quote to one by the poet Shelley, in his Defense of Poetry, mentioned in the talk by Chandrasekhar:

The cultivation of those sciences which have enlarged the limits of the empire of man over the external world, has, for want of the poetical faculty, proportionally circumscribed those of the internal world; and man, having enslaved the elements, remains himself a slave.

We made the analogy to the movie The Matrix.

Finally, we examined particular lines in The Secret Life of Us by Jeanette Winterson, as well as in the Gardner, that dovetail with Shelley and Dobson. They suggest that business leaders need an appreciation of art and beauty because the “economic lens” is a limited or constraining viewpoint on the world. We spent a good bit of time discussing the tensions between the aesthetic and business realms (and the different perspectives one encounters in each). We ended by talking about art being a “different value system” as Winterson puts it (in the quote at the top of this post).

Music Break:

On a whim, during the break, I played a piece of music for the students. We listened to a recording of the cellist Maya Beiser performing the Arvo Part composition “Fratres” off her album World to Come. I mentioned that it is a work for multiple strings that can be played in various combinations but that Beiser pre-records several parts and then plays one part live. I explained a bit about Arvo Part and when he first came to my attention through a Russian Orthodox friend in the mid-90s and that I have an affinity for much of his work, which is minimalist, often somber, and spiritual. I said that I respond to this piece, in particular, because of the repetition and escalation of the main theme, the sense of yearning, resistance and anticipation. We decided on the spot that each week 1-2 students will curate the break music and bring something they consider beautiful.

In the first 2:00 of this YouTube video you can see an excerpt of a performance of Fratres by Beiser:

On the Concept of Portfolio – Guest Artist, Norma Saldivar:

Because the students will create portfolios of their experiences over the course of the term, I invited theater & opera director, and professor of theater at UW-Madison, Norma Saldivar, to discuss the portfolio of images that she voraciously has collected over the years, which serves as inspiration for her work as an artist and reflects her evolving aesthetic. In her presentation she showed a phenomenal workshop video of Bill T. Jones from a residency in France–a piece she returns to each time she begins a new work–in which he demonstrates a bit of choreography and then repeats the movement three more times, approaching it differently each time. Many students were quite moved by the third and fourth versions of the choreography and Saldivar prompted them to analyze what changes with each layer and what impact that had on their reception of it. Professor Saldivar also showed images from her portfolio and encouraged students to analyze and respond to them asking questions like: What do you see? What does that signify to you? How does it make you feel? (a modified version of critical response – hat tip to Andrew Taylor for the link).

Here’s that beautiful Bill T. Jones video:

Finally, because the Business School uses an outcome framework call KDBIN, I was asked to think about how the class would contribute to student outcomes. While I cautioned the students that I sincerely believe many of the outcomes of a class like this would not manifest for years, and then probably only if they continue to seek out aesthetic experiences and develop their aesthetic sensibilities, I dutifully outlined a proposed journey for the class:

  • Knowing – We begin to learn a different way of seeing the world (i.e., a new lens, a new basis from which to make judgments, a new way of understanding) and begin to understand the relationship between aesthetics, economics, and ethics.
  • Doing – We experience. We undergo. We create. We approach new experiences, internalize them, discuss them, and create portfolios (starting today) to document and reflect upon what we learn over time.
  • Being – We better understand our values, tastes, and judgments, as well as those of others, and how and why they change over time.
  • Inspiring – We develop the courage to step into the unknown and imagine more beautiful futures for ourselves and the world, and how we might realize those futures.
  • Networking – We develop our skills as translators who can connect the frames of business and art; we feel comfortable with a foot in both worlds and are able to relate to people and ideas in both realms.

At the end of the class I made two portfolio assignments. I will post again in a few days with an outline of those assignments and some examples of, and reflections on, the student submissions.

Hope this was helpful and engaging for those who have expressed interest in keeping up with the course. I’d love to hear from you if you have related texts or ideas to share, or if you are inspired to try something in the classroom after reading this post.

Why Beauty in a Business School?

 

babyA couple weeks ago I wrote a post about the course in beauty that I am teaching this term at UW-Madison, under the auspices of the Business School and the Bolz Center for Arts Administration. In that post I promised to provide an essay in which I address the literature that has, thus far, informed my thinking. That essay (published as a separate PDF) is called Why Beauty in a Business School? and it is an attempt to provide some justification for offering a course in beauty at a business school.

It is not lost on me that there is something rather ironic about justifying a course in beauty and aesthetics in a business school in terms other than “for the sake of learning about the thing itself.” When I proposed to teach the class it didn’t occur to me that I would need such justifications. I thought, “Wouldn’t anyone benefit from time spent thinking about beauty?”

I certainly would have when I was at university.

But, of course, such a perspective is naïve. As much as I and other humanities-types may see the intrinsic value of beautiful experiences (in a business school as much as anywhere), a course like this, in this particular setting, is not intuitive. Further justifications are warranted. Thus, this essay is an answer to those (arts types, business types, and arts-and-business types) with furrowed brows who have asked me over the past year, “Why should business schools teach their students about beauty?”

Part of me wants to quip, “Well, they probably shouldn’t if they aren’t convinced that aesthetics, art, nature, and beauty matter.” However, I recognize the question is sincere and so I have endeavored to offer a sincere response. Moreover, the management scientists and other scholars cited in this paper make compelling arguments for beauty in a business school.

The essay attempts to delve into and piece together (though it is far from a synthesis) what I have gleaned over the past year. It is by no means a comprehensive literature review. I have gone straight for the literature that is focused on the value of aesthetics or beauty in higher education and business schools in particular–and have not attempted to back up and address the broader question of aesthetics and beauty and why they matter in art or life, more generally. This is a new area for me. I have an MFA in Acting but spent most of my career in management and philanthropy; my dissertation research is theater history with a neo-institutionalist bent. If anything has prepared me to teach this class (which emphasizes the experience of beauty rather than the philosophy of aesthetics) it is the several years that I lived in NYC and saw 150-200 performances a year (in theater, dance, music, opera, performance art).

So, this is my first plunge into the topic and it is a working document. I hope you will submit suggestions for further reading as well as critiques—particularly if I have misunderstood or mischaracterized anyone’s work.

This essay is more academic in style and tone than my typical Jumper posts–in large part this is because academics were the first audience for this piece. It’s also long (~5,000 words) so grab a large cup of coffee before you dig in.

I hope it’s not tedious.

The class starts today (Tuesday, Feb 10) and I could not be more enthused. I will use Jumper to give a sense of our weekly readings, experiences, assignments, and discussions.

Thanks for taking the time to read and respond.

Approaching Beauty in a Business School

museumIn a week I will be heading to Madison, Wisconsin to teach a 12-week course in beauty for undergraduate business majors.  The course is aimed at helping students cultivate an aesthetic sensibility. It will combine a bit of philosophizing on the nature and function of beauty in today’s society; arts and other aesthetic experiences; and the documentation of these experiences in a portfolio. Over the next four months I will use Jumper as a platform from which to open up the class. I want to share what we’re doing and learn from others who may be walking down similar or parallel paths. In this first post I thought I’d discuss where the concept for the class came from and how it has evolved, and share a couple sections of the course guide to give a sense of its thrust.

From a course for Arts MBA Students to a course for Undergraduate Business Majors

 In 2013, Sherry Wagner-Henry, Director of the Bolz Center for Arts Administration at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-Madison) asked if I would be interested to come to the Center for a semester as a visiting guest artist/lecturer. For those who don’t know, the Bolz Center offers one of the few Arts MBA degrees in the US, alongside its MBA degree. Students in the program take the required courses for an MBA, plus a range of arts-related courses. I was thrilled by the invitation and we agreed to put together a proposal. In support of that proposal Sherry asked me to think about a course I would like to teach.

At the time, I imagined I would be teaching the Arts MBA students. We set up a time to talk by phone so that I could bounce my ideas off her. I started by explaining that I have always been a bit critical of arts administration programs because they seem to be almost exclusively focused on developing the business skills of their students and rarely, if ever, focused on simultaneously developing their students’ aesthetic sensibilities. Skills in the latter seem to be taken for granted in many arts admin programs (though I would argue that they shouldn’t be).  I remarked that if I ever ran such a program I would probably encourage the students to attend performances and exhibitions on a weekly basis and ask them to write a 3,000-word essay on their tastes in art as one of their graduation requirements.

I then rambled on about three other points of inspiration. (1) One of the questions I have been circling around for the past 5-6 years is How can the arts matter to more people and matter more to people? I am curious about how people develop their aesthetics and tastes and what arts organizations can do to encourage this growth. (2) Like many others, I see time at university as a prime (and in many cases last) opportunity for exploring a variety of arts and cultural experiences and, thereby, learning about oneself, one’s aesthetic, various art forms, and the culture generally. (3) I mentioned that I had seen Howard Gardner speak at MOMA a few years back on his True, Beautiful, and Good series and how compelled I was by the talk I had heard on The Good and, in particular, his concept of Good Work (i.e., work that is Excellent, Ethical, and Engaging).

I ended by saying that I somehow wanted to combine these various ideas into a course.

It turns out Gardner’s 2011 book (Truth, Goodness, and Beauty Reframed) was on Sherry’s bookshelf and that she and a couple colleagues in the business school had been thinking on and off (at the encouragement of the Dean of the Business School) about the virtue of beauty and how it might be incorporated into the curriculum. We started talking about Gardner’s concept of the beauty portfolio.*

Gardner re-defines beauty (for the 21st century) as the property of experiences and asserts that “to be deemed beautiful an experience must exhibit three characteristics. It must be interesting enough to behold, it must have a form that is memorable, and it must invite revisiting.”[1]  Gardner suggests that two educational implications follow from this assertion: (1) students should be encouraged to keep a portfolio of their experiences of beauty, aimed at tracing how those experiences have evolved over time; and (2) students should be encouraged to reflect upon the palpable reasons, or factors, that have lead them to consider one experience to be beautiful and another not.[2]

The more we talked the more I realized that the very course I was imagining could be anchored in Gardner’s idea of a Beauty Portfolio and I blurted out, “I want to create that course—a course on beauty!” And as we continued talking, it became clear that the beauty course we were envisioning should be aimed at a broader population of business school students (rather than at the narrow cohort of Arts MBA students).

I hung up the phone and knew immediately who I needed as my co-conspirator—Polly Carl, who has been thinking and writing about beauty for years. See, for example, here  and also here. We had lunch in NYC and I shared what I was thinking and she jumped in and immediately rattled off a few texts for me to read and we created a napkin sketch of the bones of a course. (I’m incredibly enthused that Polly will be coming out to Madison to give three critical lectures over the course of the term.)

As soon as it was clear that this course was to be a reality I began wading into academic literature examining the links between beauty/aesthetics and leadership/business management, as well as artistic and philosophical reflections on beauty. I needed to be able to answer one question for myself, and others.

Why teach beauty in a business school?

In an effort to articulate the worth of the course I began writing a literature review/essay aimed at answering this exact question, which I’ll share in my next post.

In the meantime, I leave you with an excerpt from the syllabus. I hope if you are at all interested in this experiment you will share your ideas, questions, or criticisms—or reach out if you’d like to think about ways to partner or collaborate.

 Approaching Beauty – Course Overview (excerpt)

 Approaching Beauty (a/k/a aesthetics and business) aims to give business students the tools and encouragement to cultivate an aesthetic sensibility. This is neither an arts appreciation course nor a philosophy course. This is a practical course that takes as a foundational precept that art is integrally linked to the experience of things and of life itself.[3] It will combine discussions on the nature and function of beauty in today’s society (led by a range of scholars and artists); curated and self-directed aesthetic experiences; and the documentation of these experiences in a portfolio. Though Gardner is not specific about the form of such a portfolio, for the purposes of this class we are conceptualizing it as a multimedia (visual, auditory, and written) catalogue. Students will ask and answer (in their portfolios) in relationship to a variety of provocations and experiences a range of questions, including: Is it beautiful? Is it not beautiful? Why? On what basis am I forming this judgment? Students will also share their portfolio entries with each other and reflect upon where their ideas about beauty converge and diverge, and why.

Portfolio assignments will be aimed at giving students “bigger-than-me experiences”—to use the phrase coined by Sociologist Steven J. Tepper in a recent essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Tepper (2014) asserts that we are living in a period in which institutions of learning need to provide courses that help students “realize that authentic growth comes as much from escaping as from discovering the self.”[4] Tepper makes a link between the rise in cultural activity focused on personal expression (what he calls me experiences) and several studies that indicate that empathy, compassion, moral reasoning and tolerance may be declining; ultimately, he makes a case that what is needed (both in the culture-at-large and at universities) is fewer me experiences and more bigger-than-me experiences. He distinguishes the two, writing:

“Me experiences” are different from “bigger-than-me experiences.” Me experiences are about voice; they help students express themselves. The underlying question they begin with is, “What do I have to say?” BTM experiences are about insight; they start with, “What don’t I know?” Voice comes after reflection. Me experiences are about jumping into a project and making something—an idea, an artifact, a piece of media. BTM focuses on John Dewey’s notion of “undergoing”—making something happen in the world, which requires, first, a shift in our own subjectivity. We must anticipate problems, struggle with ideas, seek some resolution. It’s a process.

Fundamental assumptions of this class are that art teaches us to see what me might otherwise (choose to) not see; art confronts or holds together things that are inherently in tension, it embodies paradox and ambivalence, and it resists easy resolution; and the beautiful (in art and life) arises out of struggle.

Because it is being offered through a business school, this iteration of the course is designed to bridge the inspirational/aesthetic and economic/business worldviews. It starts from a first principle that there is great value (for future business managers/leaders, in particular) in having the capacity to approach the world, or respond to it, aesthetically.

Scholar of corporate finance, business economics, and economic philosophy John Dobson (2007) argues that we are living in an aesthetics business era in which corporations increasingly need to recognize the importance of such things as “harmony, balance, sustainability, aesthetic excellence, judgment, context, compassion, community, beauty, and art.”[5] Dobson suggests that aesthetic judgment is needed in business leaders, in particular, because they face the continual challenge of distinguishing between excellence and its material by-product, material wealth.[6]

Likewise, scholar of management and corporate responsibility, Sandra Waddock (2010) asserts that there are four leadership capacities that can be developed through the cultivation of an aesthetic sensibility (what she also characterizes as “better seeing”):

  • An intuitive grasp of the non-rational or observable elements of situations and decisions;
  • Creativity in imagining solutions or future action;
  • Understanding of relationships among elements in a system in a ‘design’ sense; and
  • The capacity for balancing conflicting elements with the greater good in mind.[7]

And in a similar vein, organizational behavior scholar Nancy Adler (2011) proposes that both “great leaders and great artists” demonstrate courage in three ways: (1) the fortitude and capacity to “see reality as it is”; (2) the daring to imagine new (beautiful) possibilities; and (3) the conviction to inspire others to shift their sights from current reality to imagining what’s possible.[8]

While there is a wide range of literature that has informed the development of this course (laid out in the aforementioned literature review/essay that will be shared in a future post), it builds in particular on Gardner’s construct of the Beauty Portfolio; Tepper’s concept of “bigger-than-me experiences,” Waddock’s premise that aesthetic experiences can help leaders cultivate a different way of “seeing,” and Adler’s vision of “a leadership based more on hope, aspiration, innovation and beauty than on replication of historical patterns of constrained pragmatism.”[9] It also takes as premise (following Dobson 2007) that aesthetic judgment is a critical skill for 21st century business managers and that there is a link between aesthetics, ethics, economics, and quality of life.

***

What do you think about approaching beauty in a business school?

 

* I’m quite pleased that Howard Gardner knows about our course and is enthused we are developing it.

[1] Gardner 2011, p. xi.

[2] Ibid, p. xii.

[3] Dewey, J. (1934). Art as Experience. New York: Penguin Group/Berkeley Publishing

[4] Tepper, S. (2014). Thinking ‘Bigger Than Me’ in the Liberal Arts. The Chronicle of Higher Education, 9/15/2014. Available at http://chronicle.com/article/Thinking-Bigger-Than-Me-in/148739/.

[5] Dobson 2007, p. 46.

[6] Ibid, p. 45.

[7] Waddock 2014, p. 140.

[8] Adler 2011, p. 210

[9] Ibid, p. 208

The Arts in a Civic World Upside Down

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A couple months back I was asked to give a talk on civic leadership to a group of arts leaders participating in the fantastic UK-based Clore Leadership Programme. We tend to take for granted that subsidized arts organizations are, by default, key players in civil society–that is, civic leaders.

But are they?

I believe arts organizations can, and should be, civic leaders but that such a role will require that many organizations pursue a different relationship to their communities.

What follows is an excerpt/adaptation from the full talk.

occupy-wall-street-posterThe Civic World Upside Down

In their article, Thinking About Civic Leadership, David Chrislip and Edward O’Malley convey that in the nineteenth and early-to-mid-twentieth century what generally was meant by civic leadership in America was “those at the top organization levels” that were “part of an elite, guiding force for civic life.”[1]  In other words, a network of white powerful men who knew what was best for their communities, and had ability to get things done. They operated from a position of authority, the authors write, doing things for their communities without input from their communities-at-large.

Among the institutions such civic leaders advanced, in the US, was the arts and cultural sector:  museums, symphony orchestras, opera companies, ballet companies, and eventually regional theaters. This was the era in which private foundations and governments alike justified and promoted such investments on the basis of the ideals of “excellence and equity,” –by which they meant, generally, access for everyone to the art deemed most important by those vested at the time with the power to decided what counts as art.

But Chrislip and O’Malley also suggest that this view of civic leadership—a view that granted power for a small group of elites to control the lives of everyone else—began to be challenged in the 60s and 70s with the emergence and impact of the civil rights movement, the environmental movement, the women’s movement, and other grassroots social movements.

In fits and starts, as movements have emerged, gone underground, and re-emerged, over the past 30 years ideas about what is meant by civic life and who gets to participate in it have been challenged and slowly redefined–most recently in the US by such events as the Occupy Movement.

And today, we are living in “a civic world turned upside-down”—an era in which citizens with the freedom and means by which to access the Internet have the tools to more easily self-organize, mobilize, express their concerns and desires to a global audience, and thereby participate in the civic world (if by that we mean the relationship of citizens to each other and to government) and potentially influence the political decision-making process.[2]

Is this civic world upside down a good thing for the arts?

Our first instinct may be to shout, “Of course!”

But let’s be honest: The old civic world worked pretty well for the fine arts.

We (meaning established arts organizations and their patrons) were among those with authority to dictate what counts as art and culture. Leading in the new civic world is not about dictating what counts as art. Instead, it would seem to require a willingness to relinquish authority; to open up our institutions for citizen engagement, not just in artistic experiences but in governance; to look beyond the preservation, advancement, and interests of our individual organizations; and to use our many assets to serve the larger needs of society.[3]

Indeed, this seems to be one of the grand narratives in the arts these days.

It’s the narrative that tells us that we need to rethink our relationship to the world, come down out of the ivory tower, and work side-by-side with our communities to improve quality of life for all citizens in the places where we live. But there is another narrative that has been exerting a powerful gravitational pull in the opposite direction. It’s the narrative that tells us that the path to salvation is a whole body embrace of the power, wealth, and financial growth at all costs. And in this civic world turned upside down, it seems it is becoming increasingly difficult to manage the tension between these competing narratives. As an example, Mark Ravenhill’s speech at the Edinburgh festival last year highlighted, in particular, the way that the means of some subsidized arts organizations may be in conflict with their supposed ends.

He said:

I think the message in the last couple of decades has been very mixed, in many ways downright confusing: we are a place that offers luxury, go-on-spoil-yourself evenings where in new buildings paid for by a national lottery (a voluntary regressive tax) you can mingle with our wealthy donors and sponsors from the corporate sector and treat yourself to that extra glass of champagne but we are also a place that cares deeply about social justice and exclusion as the wonderful work of our outreach and education teams show. So we’re the best friends of the super-rich and the most disadvantaged at the same time? That’s a confusing message and the public has been smelling a rat. If the arts are for something, who are they for? And what are they doing for them?[4]

The question is being called. What’s the answer if we dig down deep and answer truthfully?

Do we want to be country clubs? Or do we want to be civic institutions?

Ronald Heifitz, the Harvard professor who has led the research agenda around adaptive leadership in the US tells us that the complexity of the ever-evolving challenges in the new world require different, even “unorthodox” responses to make progress. Our status quo has to be disrupted. This means that we need to confront the things we take for granted, including all the attachments we have to our world view. This inevitably entails the loss of our sense of identity, status, and values.[5]

And, as Clay Shirky tells us in his TED Talk, Institutions vs Collaboration, institutions are no different from humans in that if they feel threatened they seek to self-preserve.

Have you noticed that there has been a recurring theme to arts conferences the past five years: How do we survive? How do we thrive? How do we build resilience so we can bounce back? How do we find innovative ways to, essentially, sustain the infrastructure and institutions that we’ve created over the past 100 years?

I’ve asked many of these questions myself.

But what are we trying to sustain, to preserve? Ourselves and our once privileged position in an elite-dominated civic world? Or something that transcends ourselves and our organizations? As the person who wrote a talk a few years back called Surviving the Culture Change, I am here to say I think we need to move on from the narrative in which we are primarily concerned with the surviving and thriving of our individual organizations.

On Civic Leadership

And this, really, brings us to the notion of civic leadership. How shall we conceptualize civic leadership? How is it different from other types of leadership?

Here’s the vision from Chrislip & O’Malley:

Rather than a ruggedly individualistic pursuit of our own ends, we might demonstrate care and responsibility for the communities and regions in which we live. Instead of limiting our conception of what civic responsibility means to that of a passive law-abiding “good” citizen activated only when our backyards are threatened, our first impulse would be to engage others to work across factions in the service of the broader good.[6]

In a similar vein, Mary Parker Follet writes on the topic of power and defines it as “the ability to make things happen, to be a causal agent, to initiate change.” However, Follet distinguishes between power over (power that is coercive) and power with (synergistic joint action that suggests we facilitate and energize others to be effective). The old civic world was power over. The new civic world is power with.[7]

And John W. Gardner writes that we need a network of leaders who take responsibility for society’s shared concerns and that the default civic culture needs to shift from a war of the parts against the “whole” to an inclusive engaging and collaborative one that could make communities better for all.[8]

You can hear the common threads in these elaborations.

To achieve these ends two other scholars, leadership studies scholars Peter Sun & Marc Anderson, suggest that leaders need to add on to their existing skills in transformational and transactional leadership and develop what they call Civic Capacity.[9]

Civic Capacity is made up of three components:

  1. Civic Drive: Do you have the desire and motivation to be involved with social issues and to see new social opportunities?
  2. Civic Connections: Do you have the social capital (i.e., networks) to enable you to engage in successful collaborations with other organizations and institutions in your community?
  3. Civic Pragmatism: Do you have the ability to translate social opportunities into practical reality (i.e., what structures and resources can you leverage to make things happen)?

This is big, demanding work. Our first impulse may be to keep our heads down, to pursue the path of least resistance. While doing so may ensure that our grants continued to be renewed for the time being, it won’t ensure our future relevance or contribute to a better world.

Awhile back I read philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s book Not for Profit, Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, in which she makes the case for liberal arts education, and in particular the importance of the arts and humanities. In it she asks what abilities a nation would need to produce in its citizens if it wanted to advance a “people-centered democracy dedicated to promoting opportunities for “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” to each and every person.[10] She answers with such things as:

  • The ability to think about, examine, reflect, argue and debate about the political issues of the nation.
  • The ability to recognize and respect fellow citizens as people with equal rights, regardless of race, gender, religion or sexuality.
  • The ability to have concern for the lives of others.
  • The ability to imagine and understand the complex issues affecting human life by having an understanding of a wider range of human stories (rather than just data).
  • The ability to think about the good of the nation, not just one’s own group.

The arts have so much to offer to the advancement of such goals; but only if we step up to the work.

Change is needed.

Conclusion

Back in June, I went on 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 common values in society—values like A World of Beauty, Social Justice, Equality, A Meaningful Life.[11]

At the first gathering when we went around the circle and talked about why we had chosen to come on the training and I said something to the effect of:

I’m here because I’m trying to figure out what I’m laboring for that transcends arts and culture. I’m here because I feel like I’ve been talking in a closed circuit and I want to join up the conversation we’re having in the arts with the conversation others are having about the environment, or human rights, or education. 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.

There is a challenge/opportunity before all of us.

I leave you with two final questions:

  1. What are you laboring for that transcends your organization and your position within it? What values, goals, or progress in the world?
  2. And what are you going to do about it?

***

[1] Chrislip & O’Malley 2013, p. 3

[2] Chrislip & O’Malley, p. 5.

[3] The theory of basic human values was developed by Shalom H. Schwartz and is the basis for a framework developed by the advocacy organization Common Cause. More information may be found in the Common Cause Handbook, published in 2011 by the Public Interest Research Center (Wales).

[4] Ravenhill, M. (2013). “We Need to Have a ‘Plan B’”. Published in The Guardian 3 August 2013 and available at: http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2013/aug/03/mark-ravenhill-edinburgh-festival-speech-full-text.

[5] Chrislip & O’Malley, p. 7

[6] Chrislip and O’Malley, p. 11

[7] Chrislip and O’Malley, p. 7

[8][8] Chrislip and O’Malley, p. 7

[9] Sun, P.Y.T. & Anderson, M.H. (2012). Civic capacity: Building on transformational leadership to explain successful integrative public leadership. The Leadership Quarterly 23 (2012), 309-323.

[10] Nussbaum, M. C. (2010). Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities. Princeton: Princeton University Press. (See pages 225-26).

[11] Public Interest Research Centre (2011). The Common Cause Handbook. London: PIRC.

Change in the arts sector. Can we speed it up or must we wait it out?

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EvolveFish

 

Devon Smith has written a smart, provocative post on a debate she engaged in at the recent Americans for the Arts Conference in Nashville. It’s called We Should Allow Failing Arts Organizations to Die and it has lit up the arts blogosphere, Twitter, and Facebook the past few days. So much so that she has added a second post responding to the internet comments. This topic is close to my heart. In 2009 I was on a panel at the Grantmakers in the Arts Conference alled Graceful Exits,What Can Funders Do When It’s Time to Pull the Plug. In 2011 I was interviewing Rocco when he made his now infamous supply and demand comment. And over the past few years I’ve written four Jumper posts on the subject.***

While one could argue that I’ve had more than my say on the topic, Devon’s terrific post, along with a recent academic article recommended by one of my PhD advisors, has inspired me out of an extended hiatus from Jumper (during which I’ve been working on my dissertation). I thought I would reflect on the following issues related to ossified organizations that fail to change or die: (1) why organizations arise in the first place; (2) why inertia sets in; and (3) how organizational change happens.

The academic article that I’m referencing is called Structural Inertia and Organizational Change and it is by Mike T. Hannan and John Freeman (who work in a realm of the social sciences known as organizational ecology).

Why organizations arise in the first place:

One of the many provocative points that Devon makes is that a lot of what counts as culture, captures our interest and imagination, and gives meaning to our lives does not, necessarily require an arts organization to be created or delivered. She writes:

I don’t have the stats to support this, but for every hour of “traditional” nonprofit arts that a consumer experiences this year, they’ll spend 20 or 30 times times that experiencing “nontraditional” arts and culture. Those experiences that reveal or question our humanity. That enable us to see the world and each other in a new light. Those experiences that delight our mind and our senses. That teach us about other cultures and expand our capacity for imagination. Because for me, those “nontraditional” experiences include going to a folk music concert, funding a poetry book on Kickstarter, appreciating the aesthetic design of an especially beautiful video game, the art of a pulling a great shot of espresso, and the craft of a great pair of raw denim jeans. All things that I’ve done these past 3 days in Nashville. And none of those experience required an arts organization to support them.

Many of them did, however, require organizations (video game companies, coffee houses, fashion houses and manufacturers, etc.). This raises a couple interesting questions. Why do organizations arise, generally? And why do we see a sector made up of arts organizations more so than a sector made up of artist collectives that are not permanently structured into organizational form?

If I asked a room of arts conference attendees this question they would probably answer that you can only get grants if you are formed as an organization and this may, indeed, be a significant part of the story. At the heart of it, organizations are means by which a collective of individuals can pursue common goals and also aggregate resources. While economists tend to explain the emergence of organizations in terms of efficiency organizational ecologists looks at it differently. They argue that organizations are favored over loose collectives because they are reliable (i.e., they can reproduce a given product at a certain level of quality) and they are accountable (i.e., they are able to rationalize their decisions and account for their actions to customers, investors, governments, et cetera).

The nonprofit organizational form, in particular, was not heavily utilized in the US until the mid-twentieth century when it became authorized (the IRS began to approve its use among arts organizations), legitimate (donors and others had begun to recognize arts organizations as having a valid educational or charitable social purpose, worthy of contributions), and materially beneficial (there were actually sources of funding that opened up that made the nonprofit form preferable to the LLC or other forms).

Why inertia sets in:

In the article mentioned above, Hannan and Freeman make the case that structural inertia (meaning a failure to change, or change fast enough, in response to changes in the environment) is an outcome of a system that tends to select organizations (over unincorporated collectives) and certain kinds of organizations (those perceived as reliable and accountable) over others.

In the arts sector, with the emergence of grants from government agencies and funders came the emergence of eligibility requirements: the presence of managerial staff, minimum number of years in existence, minimum number of weeks of programming per year, track record of producing good works as demonstrated by positive reviews, a minimum level of annual operating budget, stable operations (lack of turnover), a persuasive mission statement, clear organizational goals, and a long-range plan. These are basically signs of reliability and accountability.

And it stands to reason that within a given field it is often the oldest organizations that are perceived to be most reliable and accountable. So funding tends to gravitate toward them–funding which enables them in many cases to build buildings or hire staff, which further contribute to their structural inertia.

Not only does structural inertia increase with age and size but transformation is a gamble for organizations as it may jeopardize their perceived reliability and accountability. Big change seems to have paid off pretty well for Diane Paulus at American Repertory Theatre, but not so well at New York City Opera, where attempts to reinvent in the final years (when the organization was already in a weakened state financially) resulted in a loss of confidence among stakeholders.

For this reason, large, old under-performing organizations often resist transformation. This is the idea at the heart of the book, Permanently Failing Organizations, in which the authors essentially ask why low-performing organizations persist. They answer that it’s largely due to the fact that those who rely upon the organization for a livelihood and also have the power to make decisions (i.e., managers) keep organizations alive (so they can continue to earn a living) but fail to make necessary changes that might lead to higher performance because doing so is a gamble that could result in outright failure.

Other internal factors that contribute to structural intertia are sunk costs; political alliances; and the tendency for precedents (things that worked once) to become norms (the way things are done around here).

There’s much more I could write as it’s a complex subject but these are the key points that seem relevant for the current conversation.

How organizational change happens:

So if inertia is a consequence of these external and internal factors, and seems almost inevitable, how does change happen?

I’m oversimplifying things, but there are basically three major points of view on this: individual organizations can make conscious decisions to adapt to their environments (rational adaptation); individual organizations do change but often such change is random, rather than in rational response to goals or the external environment (random transformation); and that change tends to happen at the population level, rather than at the individual organization level. Meaning, change happens with the death of some organizations and their replacement by those with different traits (more suitable or favored in the current environment).

The last perspective is that of population ecology and the one advanced by Hannan and Freeman.

While these are divergent points of view on organizational change it is also fair to say that all three types of change can be observed. Those who advance the idea of population ecology, for instance, also recognize that there are types of organizations, and points in the life cycles of organizations, when organizations can and do change individually. A population ecology perspective would also suggest, however, that this type of change can be challenging and risky (as noted above).

So if I put this all together and reflect on Devon’s post, here’s the picture:

  • Generally speaking, organizations are favored over those entities that are not organized.
  • Selection systems also tend to favor organizations that are older as they are perceived to be both more reliable and accountable.
  • Structural inertia is a consequence of both this selection process (which favors older organizations) but other internal factors.
  • While it is possible for arts organizations to change, generally speaking change (particularly in attributes of an organization that are deeply tied to identity) is likely to be resisted. Why? Because of the expectations of funders, donors, and audiences for reliability and accountability, because of investments in large concrete venues, because managers and musicians want to keep their jobs, because board members want to protect their investments and social standing, and because the general lack of risk capital in the sector makes it less likely that any change that is attempted will be successful (and more likely that the organization will fail).
  • Thus, it is perhaps more likely that change in the arts sector will happen at the population level, with the death of old forms and the birth of new ones.

Can we facilitate or speed up the death of old forms?

The short answer, from what I’ve read, is that permanently failing organizations are hard to kill. Having said that, I do wonder whether there are changes that could be made at the field level that might influence the pace of evolution in the sector.

Here are a few ideas:

(1)    Shift grants away from large organizations to midsized and smaller ones: If you are an avid reader of the annual Grantmakers in the Arts funding reports you will have noticed a couple stagnant trends the past ten years: the “average” arts grant is (and has been for some time now) around $25,000 per year and the majority of contributed income tends to flow to the largest organizations in the sector. When I was still at Mellon I began to wonder whether the arts sector would look different today if (over the past 30 years) arts organizations with budgets over a certain threshold (say $10 million for argument’s sake) had not been eligible for grants from government agencies or foundations.

The rationale for such a norm in the arts sector is that if an arts organization has been able to grow its annual operating budget to $10 million (perhaps larger in some disciplines) it has most likely done so either through increased earned revenues or individual contributions. This leads me to a normative proposition: organizations that have the capacity and stature to attract financially and socially elite board members, large individual contributions, corporate sponsors, or large levels of earned income should cease to be the recipients of grants from government agencies and private foundations. Instead, such funding should be channeled to organizations that do not yet have the stature or size to garner such support from their communities or whose mission prohibits earning large revenues.

If such a threshold (as I’m proposing) were normalized then donors would not interpret the loss of NEA and foundation grants, for instance, as a demerit or loss of legitimacy (which is often the rationale for maintaining tiny NEA grants to big organizations); they would see such as loss as a natural consequence of growth. Funds redistributed to smaller organizations could help to encourage the scaling of artistic innovations and the development of new forms of organization (which often fail to gain traction because they are unable to capture significant grants). And in the long run, perhaps such a rule would also act as a counterweight to the general incentive toward growth that is embedded in the system. How many organizations might cap their growth at the $5-$10 million level if such a norm were to be enacted?

(2)    Taxing the assets of the big and redistributing in the form of income to the small: I’ve just started Pikkety’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century and so am thinking quite a bit about assets versus income, the problem of inequality, and (related to this post) how a small number of organizations in the arts sector accumulate signicant assets while the rest of the sector is living in relative poverty. In the nonprofit arts sector, in many states, 501c3 organizations are freed from the burdens of both property tax and income tax. What if a property tax on arts facilities were instituted, paid to the local authority, and then redistributed in the form of grants to organizations that do not own buildings but do pay rents. As a side benefit such a shift might provide a nice disincentive for continued facility expansion in an already overbuilt arts sector.

(3)    Term limits in most organizations: What if the following positions were all limited to 7 years: artistic leaders (once the organizational founder has left), managing/executive leaders (once the organizational founder has left), board members, foundation program officers, and government agency program directors? The benefits of term limits are not only the opportunity for a fresh perspective in the organization but also an opportunity for “gates” in the system to open to those not favored under previous regimes. Funders and artistic directors amass considerable power (whether by design or not) and term limits are a way of dealing with that inevitability. This is a sensitive proposition (particularly given that not many people working in arts organizations have pensions); but if we are resistant to it I think it is important to put on the table the reasons why, beyond job security (which is valid, but may not be a sufficient reason for avoiding term limits).

***

So after thinking through these options, and possible reactions to them, it occurred to me that there is another option.

We could wait out the change that is coming.

Population ecology theory tells us not only that change often happens at the population level (rather than at the individual organizational level) but also that it often takes a long time.

So here’s an alternative vision.

There will continue to be the occasional deaths (and I suspect they will increase over the next 15-20 years) and new organizations will continue to be born. And some of those new organizations will have different traits–traits potentially more suitable for the 21st century. There is and will continue to be turnover at foundations and government agencies. There will also be an inter-generational transfer of wealth. New people—with new perspectives and views on the world–will be hired to run organizations, or will serve as grants managers and board members, or will have significant personal resources to invest in the sector. Some (maybe many) will see the merits in new organizations that are cropping up and will choose to redirect money to them. Dynamic leaders running these younger arts organizations will garner attention and legitimacy and either their organizations will grow in stature and size, or they will be hired to bring their values, ideas, principles, and new modes of operating to larger organizations already in existence.

It wouldn’t be entirely smooth and it wouldn’t be fast. There would be failures, tragic deaths, and some zombies would go on stalking the landscape. But change would happen.

So am I suggesting we just wait it out?

While I tend to be in favor of making structural changes to influence both the direction and the pace of change (I’d love to see all three of the ideas above explored and debated) I also recognize how difficult such changes (and those Devon suggests) would be in reality.

Waiting it out may be the only realistic option.

Does this depress me?

Not really–in large part because I have tremendous faith in the younger leaders that I see coming up through the ranks of larger institutions, or leading their own enterprises, or stepping into influential policy and funding positions. Last week I gave a talk on Civic Leadership for the fellows of the renowned Clore Leadership Programme in the UK. I was utterly impressed by the work these fellows are doing, by their deep thinking, and by their energy and courage. I see that young leaders have (in spades) the motivation and desire, networks, and capacity to potentially lead the changes that are needed. Smart boards and organizations are already investing in these young leaders (and young, in my mind, ranges from 25-45) and implementing their ideas.

In the meantime, I think that Devon has given us such great food for thought.

We are all accountable for the shape of our sector. 

Whenever a permanently failing organization is allowed to continue cranking out mediocre programming while capturing precious sector resources it should trouble us. I imagine that many of us recognize these organizations in our midst. Some of us shrug our shoulders and some of us blog about them in the abstract. But perhaps these are cowardly moves. It’s easy to criticize in the abstract and it’s easy to shrug off truly discouraging developments in organizations as inevitable. I’ve been guilty of both.

Calling out the zombies (in the blogosphere, in any event) seems mean and destructive and I’m not sure it would lead to any positive developments.

Perhaps a better route is to ignore them entirely, trust that they will die or change eventually, and (as Devon suggests) turn our attention and channel our resources to the those that are knocking our socks off. I think if foundations, government agencies, corporate sponsors, high profile artists and arts leaders, traditional arts media, bloggers, and influential board members led the way, and shifted their attention and resources, they would have tremendous influence on others.

And such a shift doesn’t have to happen en mass.

One person at a time will work, too.

*** Previous Jumper posts related to this topic: 

  • Overstocked Arts Pond: Fish Too Big & Fish Too Many;
  • Supply and Demand Redux: Rocco’s Comment and the Elephant in the Room;
  • Nonprofit Arts Orgs & the Boards That Love Them; and
  • Are We a Sector Defined by our Permanently Failing Organizations?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Beyond repair? On the loss of structural integrity …

[contextly_auto_sidebar id=”HUGScEGqXpFlTgmFU2f6jVTqnbt4ymzt”]

geodesic dome and fullerThere is an arts story that has been nagging at me the past couple months. It’s the recent announcement of the revised plans for the NYC Performing Arts Center planned for the former World Trade Center site.

The plan for an arts center at Ground Zero began more than ten years ago. At first the center was to house four arts organizations but three of the four were tapped out several years ago. Only one (the Joyce Theater) still remained as of last year. The project has never really gotten off the ground and plans have changed so many times I couldn’t begin to recount them all. The February announcement basically conveyed that things are changing again: a temporary artistic director (David Lan from the Young Vic in England) has been hired; rather than creating a dance center the new plan is to create a music, theater, and dance center on the model of the Young Vic, but more ambitious; the estimated costs of the project are unknown (though previously were projected between $300 and $700 million); it seems the lack of clarity about the budget may be related to the fact that the architectural design by Frank Gehry may need to be ditched because it was created when the plans for the project were still hazy (hmmm, that’s an expensive mistake); Gehry himself didn’t seem to be aware of this, though, since no one involved with the project had spoken to him in months; and the Joyce Theater may or may not have a future programming role, depending on who you ask.

The situation at the WTC PAC is frustrating and disheartening on multiple levels. I respect many of the people involved, so this is not a concern about individuals or their capacities as directors. Specifically, it’s not about a British director rather than an American being hired for the project (although given the symbolic significance of this project, I am surprised they did not hire someone from New York). And it’s not about whether or not a multi-disciplinary space with three small theaters and a cafe is better than a dance space with 1,000 seats and classrooms, or any of the other plans for the PAC site that have been presented over the years.

It’s about the time for this project having come and gone.

It’s about organizers having, long ago, lost the plot.

More than anything, it’s about having used up all of the do-overs a single entity can reasonably ask of its community.

Not that the community was ever consulted.

Here are my questions:

  1. Who still wants this space? Whose interests does it/will it serve? And given the numerous changes should the citizens of NYC have the opportunity to voice their thoughts on whether this project should still go forward?
  2. What role will it fill in the cultural landscape that is not already being more than adequately filled by other (potentially under-capitalized) organizations? As the article rightly points out the landscape has changed dramatically in the past ten years and there are spaces now available–Park Avenue Armory, the new TFANA space in Brooklyn, the Lincoln Center theater that was previously housing NYCO–that were not available when the PAC was first being planned.
  3. How much has been spent on this project over the past ten years? And on what? Should the public be given an accounting of all the private, tax deductible contributions and government funds that have been received and expended to date?
  4. Is the center the best use of half a billion dollars, or however much it will cost, given other options? And after raising the money to build it, how will it be sustained–particularly if it has a programming strategy modeled on the Young Vic (which seems to be suggested in the article). +
  5. Finally, why has this project had such an extraordinarily difficult time getting off the ground? Shouldn’t this be understood and addressed before additional resources are invested?

On Buckminster Fuller and Structural Integrity

About a month ago, I was reading about Buckminster Fuller and came across a concept that he applied in both his work as an engineer (designing the geodesic dome) and also in his quest as an “ordinary human being” trying to have positive influence in the world. It is the performance characteristic called structural integrity. From an engineer’s perspective structural integrity refers to the ability of a given structure to withstand a designed load under anticipated conditions. In a more metaphorical sense, Fuller used the term structural integrity to refer to a person’s accountability (to the ability to be counted on to do what one has said one will do).

Further describing Fuller’s take on integrity in his 2011 book, A Fuller View, L. Steven Sieden writes:

Bucky’s definition of integrity is structural. Anything that has integrity holds its shape regardless of external circumstances.

In the same book, Jim Reger and David Irvine also reflect on Fuller’s concept of structural integrity, and how it relates to leadership:

Integrity comes from the word “integer,” which means wholeness, integration, and completeness. Being integrated is a necessary condition for self-respect, and self-respect is the basis for creating a respectful environment. Integrity means having clear, explicit principles and doing what you say you’re going to do. It’s about being honest with yourself and others.

After reading these essays on Fuller I began thinking about two things.

The first was about accountability and how this manifests in organizations with no owners. Do nonprofit arts organizations feel accountable to the public? I’m not sure they do. When civic leaders and other community members pleaded for an end to the Minnesota Orchestra lockout, which was harming the local culture, did MSO, Inc. (i.e., the board and leadership) feel accountable to end the lockout and make good on its mission to “enrich, inspire and serve its community” by producing the concerts it had promised (and accepted tax-deductible funds to produce)?  It certainly didn’t look like it from the outside. The musicians did play concerts, however–and the community, unsurprisingly, largely stood behind them. More recently, San Diego Opera didn’t seem to feel the need to keep its community informed about its apparently rapidly deteriorating finances. A couple weeks ago it sent out a puzzling announcement about plans to shut down–a decision that seems to have taken its community by surprise and to have raised hackles, particularly given that everyone had been led to believe that the opera company was doing quite well. Arts organizations talk about accountability to the public; but do they feel it?

The second thing I began to think about after reading a bit on Fuller’s concept of structural integrity centered around the causes of structural failure in nonprofit cultural organizations. When organizations or projects collapse there is a tendency to scrutinize the actions of the current cast of characters and the financial and programming decisions made in recent years; but perhaps in nonprofits–perhaps in cultural nonprofits in particular–the fatal mistakes are the ones we don’t tend to flag … because they don’t hit the P&L statement and the box office totals in the short term.

Perhaps they’re the ones that destroy something more essential to a cultural organization.

Its soul.

Its relationship to its artists and its community.

Its integrity.

The quiet harms that are done to those nonprofits exist to support and serve–the neglect, the taking for granted, the opportunism–may take time to fully register. But when they do, perhaps there is no going back and fixing the damage that has been done.

***

I don’t know when it happened, or how, but (from where I sit) the PAC at the World Trade Center site long ago lost its structural integrity. Or perhaps it never had any? I don’t know. The question now is, can this ever-collapsing structure be turned into something beautiful for the city of New York and the rest of the world, or would it be best to let this cursed project go and allow for the possibility of something entirely new to be created from the ground up.

 

+According to an annual report from 2006 that I located, the Young Vic cost 12.5 million (gbp) to build and its annual turnover was around 3.6 million in 2006, about half of which was funded from the government. It still receives about 1.75 million per year.

 

 

 

Can arts organizations be both art-focused and community-focused?

 

False Dilemma-thumb-300x254-153811[1]Doug Borwick has a new post (inspired by comments made by Lyz Crane at the Creative Placemaking Summit) on the “central disconnect” between arts organizations and community engagement. The cornerstones of his argument appear to be that the “art world” exists to do what it wants to do (in contrast to most of the social sectors that exist to solve a problem or need); that arts organizations, therefore, depend upon true believers that are willing to support them in their self-interested pursuits; that community engagement requires seeing art (not as an end in-and-of itself but) as a tool for social change; and thus, ipso facto, given their we-want-to-do-what-we-want-to-do orientation there is little possibility for arts organizations to extend their reach and work to advance their communities.

[contextly_auto_sidebar id=”1A7B3Gcrbg4kK2PBSza7iEfMVb5P5Sfk”]I’m a fan of Doug’s writing on Engaging Matters, generally, but I’m not sure I buy the argument in this instance.

First, the “art world” (his word) encompasses (or more accurately various “art worlds” encompass) much more than artists, art, and arts organizations. As Howard Becker asserts in his book of the same name, art worlds are made up of artists; organizations and individuals of various types that support them; the media and the cultural elite who legitimize and often patronize them; and the audiences who choose (or not) to pay attention to them. In other words, and this is an important point made by Becker, the audience is not only part of the art world, it has a critical role to pay: in giving attention to art works and experiences, audiences “reconstitute” (Becker’s word) them on a daily basis. That is, art lives only to the degree that it receives attention.

Following from the point above, one of the primary roles of nonprofit arts organizations, in particular but not exclusively, is to encourage people to pay attention to art works or artists that they might otherwise disregard or miss because they are not being produced and promoted for the masses by commercial firms. Doug seems to suggest that there is a limited pool of “true believers” that are the prime targets for any arts organization; while that may be true it is also true that nonprofit arts organizations exist to provide “education” and to encourage “taste formation”. They work to create more “true believers” in the arts experience (i.e., people for whom the experience matters, is relevant, or meaningful).

Another role is to serve markets (whether based on taste, income, geography or other factors) that are typically too unprofitable to be of interest to commercial producers and distributors. Thus, it’s debatable whether arts organizations are primarily “doing what they want to do”; rather, it’s arguable that nonprofit arts organizations are generally doing things (they perceive to be important or of value) that would not otherwise get done by commercial firms, but for which there is value to society. I would concede that perhaps too many of these things appeal to the eccentric tastes of upper middle class white people (and too little to the tastes of others in society); but that is a topic for another day. The main point is that, in and of itself, paying attention to markets or goods that the commercial world ignores, and getting others to pay attention to them, as well, are two of the great values of mission-based, nonprofit arts organizations. Moreover, these would seem to be (at least two of) “the problems” many arts organizations exist “to solve.”

Finally, I don’t buy that it is near-to-impossible for arts organizations to pursue a community engagement strategy. We are living in a period in which longstanding dichotomies (many tangentially related to this topic) are being challenged left and right: the assumption that you are either a professional or an amateur (and that the two should not work together); that one is either a maker or a consumer; that the focus is either on the product or the customer; and that as a business you either exist for financial profit or social profit. There is growing evidence such dichotomies are false and divides can be bridged. Indeed, a potential value for arts organizations is to make connections between amateurs and pros, between making and consuming, and between producers (i.e., artists) and consumers (i.e., patrons). Yes, there has been a pervasive sentiment for decades that nonprofit arts organizations either exist to advance art or the community. I would argue that we should add this to the list of false dichotomies above and start from the assumption that it is possible to do both.

Do you agree? Do you have examples to share?

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A Few Things I’ve Written

"Surviving the Culture Change", "The Excellence Barrier", "Holding Up the Arts: Can We Sustain What We've Creatived? Should We?" and "Living in the Struggle: Our Long Tug of War in the Arts" are a few keynote addresses I've given in the US and abroad on the larger changes in the cultural environment and ways arts organizations may need to adapt in order to survive and thrive in the coming years.

If you want a quicker read, then you may want to skip the speeches and opt for the article, "Recreating Fine Arts Institutions," which was published in the November 2009 Stanford Social Innovation Review.

Here is a recent essay commissioned by the Royal Society for the Encouragement of the Arts for the 2011 State of the Arts Conference in London, "Rethinking Cultural Philanthropy".

In 2012 I documented a meeting among commercial theater producers and nonprofit theater directors to discuss partnerships between the two sectors in the development of new theatrical work, which is published by HowlRound. You can get a copy of this report, "In the Intersection," on the HowlRound Website. Finally, last year I also had essays published in Doug Borwick's book, Building Communities Not Audiences and Theatre Bay Area's book (edited by Clay Lord), Counting New Beans.

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