{"id":758,"date":"2019-03-17T21:52:26","date_gmt":"2019-03-17T20:52:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/jumper\/?p=758"},"modified":"2019-03-17T21:52:34","modified_gmt":"2019-03-17T20:52:34","slug":"my-remarks-at-the-8th-world-summit-on-arts-culture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/jumper\/2019\/03\/my-remarks-at-the-8th-world-summit-on-arts-culture\/","title":{"rendered":"My remarks at the 8th World Summit on Arts & Culture"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This past week I had the privilege to participate in the 8th World Summit on Arts & Culture<\/a>, produced by the International Federation of Arts Councils and Culture Agencies (IFACCA)<\/a>. The Theme of the 2019 Summit, which took place in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, was Mobile Minds: Culture, Knowledge and Change<\/em>. And the panel on which I spoke was listed as a provocation called: Actors in Change<\/em>. Below is a transcript of my remarks. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Good morning! <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is a privilege and pleasure to be here with all of you and to have an opportunity to offer some reflections today, which are rooted in my personal experiences within primarily a US context and consciousness. My sincere thanks to Magdalena Moreno Mujica, Kiley Arroyo, and others at IFACCA for the invitation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A few weeks back, on a Zoom call, Magdalena suggested that I talk about “cultural leadership”\u00e2\u20ac\u201dmy current focus at both The New School and Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity\u00e2\u20ac\u201dwithin the larger frame of “what makes change difficult.” She then remarked, “It’s important to know that this is not about Arts Practice. It’s about the Policy Space.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I wrote down her statement thinking, “Got it!” <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But later I thought, “Wait a minute<\/em> \u00e2\u20ac\u00a6” <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Because if I\nwere to pinpoint anything<\/em> that is\nmaking change difficult, anything<\/em> in\nwhich I would center cultural leadership at this moment, it would be in\naesthetic values and in practices that we might characterize as artistic. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

So that’s what I have decided to talk about. (This is a 12-minute talk in three sections and the first section is the longest.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

#1. On Controlling the Means of Production<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

On February 28th<\/sup>, the American theater lost an important cultural figure: John O’Neal, who founded with a few friends the boundary-breaking Free Southern Theater, which was part of the Black Arts Movement in the US and allied with the civil rights movement. In a 1964 interview with The New York Times (<\/em>cited in this recent New York Times obituary<\/a>)<\/em>, O’Neal said of his troupe:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We want to strengthen communication among Southern blacks and to assert that self-knowledge and creativity are the foundations of human dignity. \u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 <\/em><\/p>

In the South it has been very hard for a Negro to look at and see anything but a distorted view of himself.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

These words\nfeel even more vital in the US today than in 1964. Between politicized news\nchannels and filtered Facebook feeds, it feels like none of us has the possibility\nof a clear view of self or others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The US is not\nalone in this. In so many places, the social imaginary is a highly contested\nspace; and this is one of the reasons, of course, we need artists. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

John O’Neal’s\nFree Southern Theater was practicing what some would call community cultural development, <\/em>which my friend Dudley Cocke defines\nas: “developing the intellectual, emotional, spiritual, and material traditions\nand features of a community.”[1]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dudley is a\nlegend in his own right and was a longtime friend and theatrical comrade of\nJohn O’Neal. With others he\nformed Roadside Theater in Whitesburg, KY to serve the people of the central\nAppalachian region of the US\u00e2\u20ac\u201dto help them tell their own stories. He and others\nin his company then took their methods on the road to help others tell their\nstories.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If the arts\nhold the potential<\/em> to bring people\ntogether across divides on equal terms, Roadside Theater is one of a handful of\nUS cultural organizations I know that has actually done this for years. Its own\nartistic practices combined with policies in its contracts ensure that for\nevery performance an audience shows up that is representative of the socio-economic\ndemographics of the community. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Last year\nDudley contributed a chapter in the anthology Arts and Community Change<\/em>, in which he wrote, “Those who control\nthe means of cultural production control the stories the nation tells itself.”[2]<\/a> It\nis a common refrain of his.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The work of\nRoadside Theater has been squarely aimed at disrupting this production system\nand fostering the democratic culture that so many of us claim we want to see.\nHowever, in the US, such community-based cultural organizations do not have (and\nhave not had for decades) an equal opportunity to develop and grow. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is in\nlarge part because in the US we still embrace the notion of the democratization\nof elite culture and our notion of excellence in the arts is still largely\nbased in an “aesthetics of dominion” copied from Europe. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

What do I mean\nby that?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Aesthetics of dominion” is a powerful, poignant phrase I first heard used by composer Ashley Fure<\/a> the evening before I flew to Kuala Lumpur. She used the concept within the context of a brief but extraordinary talk on the long-term cultural consequences of music notation\u00e2\u20ac\u201dwhich (as some of you may know) emerged from Charlemagne’s desire to control the means and quality of church music production in his empire. As her talk clearly demonstrated, we are living with these consequences to this day.[3]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not dissimilar\nto the influences of Charlemagne’s intervention, one can see in the US the\nlong-term cultural consequences of the desire of organized philanthropy and\ngovernment agencies to ensure high quality throughout their “empires” by\ndeveloping criteria, models, and indicators of success that have basically resulted\nin the exponential growth of a small number of large, well-housed, historically\nwhite institutions, who to this day capture most of the sector’s resources. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

To wit, A 2011 report from\nHelicon Collaborative<\/a> found that more than half of the sector’s revenue\ngoes to less than 2% of cultural institutions. These larger, prestige institutions\n“focus primarily on Western European art forms, and their programs serve\naudiences that are predominantly white and upper income.” A second study\nreleased in 2017<\/a> found the picture had only worsened.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

If the flow of\nmoney determines to a great extent who controls the means of cultural production,\nin the US we seem to be dominated by commercial interests (on the one hand), or\nelite interests advanced through the nonprofit industrial complex (on the\nother). Imagine what distorted stories our nation continues to tell itself as a\nresult? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even though\nwe’ve lately seen an embrace of “social justice” ideals across the sector, it\nis quite difficult to trust this turn\u00e2\u20ac\u201din part because if historically powerful\ninstitutions are the evident backers of this “social justice movement” one can\nbe almost guaranteed that they will design their interventions to contain any possibility\nof actual revolution in the cultural sector and any genuine shift in the power\nbalance.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

We can’t keep\ndolling out small grants to the actors of change in Horizon Two and expect\ncontrol of the means of cultural production to shift. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

No matter the\nrhetoric about arts and social justice, or cultural democracy, the status quo\nwill persevere as long as corporate and elite interests continue to control the\nflow of resources and continue to funnel a majority of those resources to\nsustaining Horizon One institutions\u00e2\u20ac\u201dwhose economics, aesthetics, and ethics are\ndecreasingly fit for future purpose.[4]<\/a>  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

#2. On Beauty in a Business School:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A few years\nback I designed and taught an experimental course in aesthetics and beauty for\nbusiness students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The course was an\nopportunity for those trained to look at the world through an economic<\/em> lens, to practice seeing the\nworld through an aesthetic<\/em> lens and thereby\nlearn a different basis for valuation and decision making.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

To be clear,\nthis was not a course in arts appreciation. I was not concerned with having\nstudents experience a canon of great works. A premise of the course was that\nbeauty is whatever wakes you<\/em> up,\ngrabs your<\/em> attention and breath,\nstills your<\/em> mind and heart, and\ndecenters you<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A child. A whale\nsurfacing. A Giacometti sculpture. A tattoo. A story. The closing argument in a\ncourt case. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The beautiful\nexperience was also not the end\u00e2\u20ac\u201dit was the means, the spur, the teacher, the\nstimulus intended to stir these business students to imagine, create, and one\nday perhaps work to build a better world. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

When asked how\nthe course had affected them, students said:<\/p>\n\n\n\n