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Expanding The Vision

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By Arlene Goldbard

Many thanks to my fellow bloggers for providing abundant inspiration! The big questions of cultural policy are so vital and matter so much, yet they are seldom publicly discussed even by the people who care most. Who are we as a people? What do we want to remembered for, our vast creativity, or our prodigious ability to punish? How are our answers reflected in the way we do (or don’t) nurture community cultural life?

I was moved by Eboni Senai Hawkins’ beautiful essay on making public space for art. “Dance demands a kinesthetic empathy, a way of experiencing art bodily simply by watching,” she wrote, remarking that “Such empathy has the potential to pierce the layers of urban existence and bring together Oakland’s diverse yet self-segregated neighborhoods.”

Some of the most powerful arguments for art’s public purpose are coming to us now from science, supporting that point. Neuroscientists have have found “mirror neurons” in the human brain. When we observe someone else (or imagine ourselves) experiencing a feeling or performing an action, these nerve cells are activated very much as if we had performed the same actions with our own bodies. Mirror neurons enable understanding of other people’s perceptions, actions, and feelings.

But while this ability to feel empathy is encoded in our physical beings, empathy does not automatically infuse our own life-choices, any more than possesssing the physical equipment for dancing or singing means we will actually do either. Moving from the latent capacity to the practice of compassion must be learned. When we sit in a darkened theater, opening our minds and hearts to stories very different from our own, the tears, laughter, or perplexity we feel activates our motor neurons, setting that learning in motion.

Kenji C. Liu’s essay on art as a human right asks powerfully important questions, such as this:

The ability to work together for a beautiful and just world while being free from economic calculus and quantifiable value is not in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but perhaps it should be. Would our cultural strategies and policies benefit if we framed this kind of “freed art” as a human right and necessary for true democracy, just like education and freedom?

I’m always amazed that the right to culture is rooted in the simplest language of Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.” It seems so innocuous, but as has often been noted, the authors are unlikely to have understood what it would actually take to embody the right to participate freely. I think of the Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei, now incommunicado in detention in an undisclosed location. Imagine what would be required to grant him that right, and we begin to see the challenge.

I wish more US-based artists and advocates would become familiar with the remarkable policy statements the rest of the world is adopting. Read the Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity, for instance, and ponder why the U.S. has not signed it.

Randolph Belle’s thoughtful and moving post on what you might call race-blindness in Oakland’s development (if you don’t want to call it racism, outright) points to indicators that can’t be ignored:

 

….Every African American cultural invention has been subsumed into the larger culture to a point where the source is no longer recognizable, and Oakland, as a traditional center of Black culture and one of a number of “Chocolate Cities” around the country is a petri dish for cultural change. Consider this—Yoshi’s produced a jazz compilation with no Black artists, later apologizing and calling it an oversight. The First Amendment and the Serenader, where the best live blues, jazz and R&B could be heard, are distant memories. Rap can be heard in every corner of the planet, but as a thoroughly co-opted artform, I find nothing redeeming in what’s been deemed commercially viable. No consideration was given to the importance and historical significance of the Lorraine Hansberry Theater when the Academy of Art, (ironically), evicted them from their long time home….

Morally, the challenge he raises brings to mind Martin Luther King’s statement, “We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people.”

In policy terms, I think Randolph Belle has it right: we know in our bones that cultural meaning and cultural fabric are central to lived experience. No one can deny the significance of the examples he cited. Every city has a reservoir of such stories: long-established neighborhoods leveled to make way for sports stadiums or freeways or red-carpet performing arts centers, leaving untold human damage in their wake.

As a result of long and diligent pressure, environmental impact assessment is demanded when a city wants to remove older structures or build new ones. The underlying idea is that the well-being of plants, animals, and aquifers should be a consideration, not just dollars and cents. Imagine for a moment that Oakland and every public entity had to produce a cultural impact study, assessing the effect that proposed actions would have on social fabric and community cultural life. Imagine how different our cities could look today if this had been required—and heeded and enforced—in the heyday of “urban removal.”

Imagine.

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Arlene Goldbard is a writer, speaker, consultant and cultural activist whose focus is the intersection of culture, politics and spirituality. Her blog and other writings may be downloaded from her Web site: www.arlenegoldbard.com. She was born in New York and grew up near San Francisco. Her most recent book, New Creative Community: The Art of Cultural Development was published by New Village Press in November 2006. She is also co-author of Community, Culture and Globalization, an international anthology published by the Rockefeller Foundation, Crossroads: Reflections on the Politics of Culture, and Clarity, a novel. Her essays have been published in In Motion Magazine, Art in America, Theatre, Tikkun, and many other journals. She has addressed many academic and community audiences in the U.S. and Europe, on topics ranging from the ethics of community arts practice to the development of integral organizations. She has provided advice and counsel to hundreds of community-based organizations, independent media groups, and public and private funders and policymakers including the Rockefeller Foundation, the Independent Television Service, Appalshop and dozens of others. She is currently writing a new book on art’s public purpose. She serves as President of the Board of Directors of The Shalom Center.

Don’t miss Reframing the Arts : Advocating for the Public Culture at Oakland Museum of California (OMCA)on Saturday, April 16! Register here.

 

 

Who Can We Be?

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by Arlene Goldbard

In my first post, my goal was to expand our narrow debate over arts funding to include the large and urgent questions of value that should drive cultural policy. I brought up really big issues (such as the fact that we spend more than two annual National Endowment for the Arts [NEA)] budgets on war each day, seven days a week). But even if you want to stay more tightly focused on questions of art and culture, it’s a big landscape.

Every public sector has a cultural policy, whether they say so or not. In some places, it’s explicit. For instance, some nations mandate a certain amount of domestically produced content on TV or in movie theaters, to support their media sector and keep from being overwhelmed by U.S. product. In other places, policy is implicit: what can you deduce about U.S. cultural policy from looking at arts education in elementary schools today? No one has to say it’s totally expendable for us to get that message; public actions do the talking.

Cultural policy is always driven by values. As a nation, what are our goals for cultural development? Whose culture counts? What do we want to preserve, protect, or promote? Values are encoded in the way we allocate funds, in zoning and regulations, in the priorities reflected by our history books and museums.

A couple of years ago, I teamed up with other artists and activists to articulate Art & The Public Purpose: A New Framework putting forward five key elements of a new national policy recognizing culture’s central role in stimulating social imagination, empathy, and national recovery.

The Framework didn’t take off the way we hoped. It turned out that the Obama administration was as reluctant as its predecessors to invest in artists and cultural development. The right has been successful in making the arts a toxic issue, and no administration has been brave enough to buck that. But despite officials’ trepidation, the five initiatives articulated there are still key to a viable, democratic cultural policy. And if I had to name the three most important things to do to improve U.S. cultural policy, I’d choose these three underlying principles of the New Framework:

Create a “new WPA,” a public service jobs program addressing all our national goals—clean energy, excellent education, sound economy, good health and more. It should include putting artists and creative organizers to work for the common good using every art form and way of working: providing well-rounded education, sustaining and caring for the ill, engaging elders in creativity, rebuilding community infrastructure to reflect our best. Seventy-five years ago, the WPA supported five arts programs as part of FDR’s program to recover from the Great Depression. It worked. Today, unemployment is a scandal and a shame, and jobs are still the engine of prosperity; when tied to public purpose, no investment brings greater impact.

Invest our resources to promote cultural equity. The right to culture—to honor those who came before, express ourselves and take part in community life—is a core human right. Our national policy should mandate equal opportunity to contribute to and benefit from cultural life, whether our families are indigenous to this land, have lived here for many decades or just arrived; whether we live in cities or the countryside; regardless of color, creed, orientation or physical ability. The way we support, protect and promote culture should reflect our best, our national commitment to equity, fairness and inclusion, instead of favoring the wealthiest and whitest institutions above all others.

Make culture count in public policy. Every community’s cultural fabric is made of shared places, customs, values and creative acts. The stronger it is, the more likely that kids will stay in school, businesses will thrive, neighbors will celebrate and learn from each other. When we forget this, we pay a price. How would our cities be different if policy-makers had considered the cultural lives of the neighborhoods leveled to make way for new stadiums, performing arts complexes and freeways? Cultural policy should be modeled on laws assessing environmental impacts, considering the human and cultural cost of public actions—and not just dollars and cents—before approving plans.

Sometimes simple solutions are the most powerful. Just adopting these three principles would completely transform our national cultural policy from a weak and vulnerable system modeled on private patronage to an engine of cultural democracy.

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Arlene Goldbard is a writer, speaker, consultant and cultural activist whose focus is the intersection of culture, politics and spirituality. Her blog and other writings may be downloaded from her Web site: www.arlenegoldbard.com. She was born in New York and grew up near San Francisco. Her most recent book, New Creative Community: The Art of Cultural Development was published by New Village Press in November 2006. She is also co-author of Community, Culture and Globalization, an international anthology published by the Rockefeller Foundation, Crossroads: Reflections on the Politics of Culture, and Clarity, a novel. Her essays have been published in In Motion Magazine, Art in America, Theatre, Tikkun, and many other journals. She has addressed many academic and community audiences in the U.S. and Europe, on topics ranging from the ethics of community arts practice to the development of integral organizations. She has provided advice and counsel to hundreds of community-based organizations, independent media groups, and public and private funders and policymakers including the Rockefeller Foundation, the Independent Television Service, Appalshop and dozens of others. She is currently writing a new book on art’s public purpose. She serves as President of the Board of Directors of The Shalom Center.

Don’t miss Reframing the Arts : Advocating for the Public Culture at Oakland Museum of California (OMCA) on Saturday, April 16! Register here.

Who We Are

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By Arlene Goldbard .

I admit it: I’m obsessed. I turn my attention to the way we spend our commonwealth as a nation, and like a song you can’t get out of your head, the cultural policy questions that matter most to me keep cycling through: Who are we as a people? What do we want to remembered for, our vast creativity, or our prodigious ability to punish?

Most mainstream debate about cultural policy in the U.S. actually focuses on one question, arts funding. Recently, the focus has been on cuts to the budgets of state arts agencies and the National Endowment for the Arts. (If you’re interested, check out my 3-part series on the subject, “Life Implicates Art.”)

Cultural policy is much, much bigger. It’s the aggregate of public statements and actions affecting cultural life. That includes support for artists and arts organizations; regulations and other policies affecting the commercial cultural industries (for-profit film, TV, music); telecommunications policies that regulate the internet, TV, and radio; education policies affecting what is taught, whose culture is deemed worth learning—and much, much more.

The tiny portion of public funds going to arts and culture has been accurately described as the equivalent of a rounding error in categories like public spending on the military or prisons. Nevertheless, when budget-cutting happens these days, culture is treated like a significant center for cost-savings. Politicians use the arts as a form of symbolic speech, to signal a get-serious attitude. In return, they get a lot of credit for almost no impact on the deficit.

It reminds me of a joke that’s making the rounds, inspired by recent events in Wisconsin: a CEO, a Tea Party member, and a union member are sharing a plate of cookies. The CEO takes 11 of the 12 cookies, then turns to the Tea Partier and says, “Watch out! That union member wants a piece of your cookie.”

The truth about arts funding is even more stark: for the last decade, we taxpayers have been spending the equivalent of two annual NEA budgets a day, seven days a week, on war. In the recent legislation extending Bush-era tax cuts, the U.S. Treasury lost $225 billion in revenues from tax breaks specifically tailored to benefit high-income taxpayers. In our version of the joke, the CEO is the world’s largest war and prison industries; the union member is an artist; and the Tea Partier is all the other social programs duking it out. But it isn’t one cookie out of a dozen we’re fighting over; it’s barely a crumb.

People who specialize in framing public issues—campaign advisors, for instance, and other strategists—tell us it’s not the facts and figures of an issue that matter most, it’s how the issue is framed. How big is the picture? Who is in it? How do the pieces connect? One popular way of explaining this is to show a group of people two pictures. In the first, group members see a bunch of sick-looking cattle in a field. When asked why the animals are ill, they speculate that the farmer has neglected them, or they have a virus, or they don’t have enough food. Then the picture is switched. In the second image, the frame is enlarged. Behind the hill, group members see a huge factory, belching black smoke. Suddenly, other reasons for the cattle’s illness occur to them: the air is polluted, chemicals are in the animals’ drinking water, and so on.

Our arts funding debate is like the first picture, a frame far too small to hold adequate information. What do you want to fund, politicians ask, school lunches or the arts? Health care or art? But when we pull back for a long shot, we see that those aren’t the choices. Officials are choosing tax breaks for the wealthiest over cultural funding; they are building prisons faster than schools and quibbling over an NEA budget that equals half a day’s worth of war funding.

If we bring the big picture into the frame, what values are driving our current cultural policy? I’m ashamed to say that they are the same values the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., listed 44 years ago in his famous speech at Riverside Church: “the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism.”

We can change this, but we have to start by telling the truth about what’s at stake. Who are we as a people? What do we want to remembered for, our vast creativity, or our prodigious ability to punish?

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Arlene Goldbard is a writer, speaker, consultant and cultural activist whose focus is the intersection of culture, politics and spirituality. Her blog and other writings may be downloaded from her Web site: www.arlenegoldbard.com. She was born in New York and grew up near San Francisco. Her most recent book, New Creative Community: The Art of Cultural Development was published by New Village Press in November 2006. She is also co-author of Community, Culture and Globalization, an international anthology published by the Rockefeller Foundation, Crossroads: Reflections on the Politics of Culture, and Clarity, a novel. Her essays have been published in In Motion Magazine, Art in America, Theatre, Tikkun, and many other journals. She has addressed many academic and community audiences in the U.S. and Europe, on topics ranging from the ethics of community arts practice to the development of integral organizations. She has provided advice and counsel to hundreds of community-based organizations, independent media groups, and public and private funders and policymakers including the Rockefeller Foundation, the Independent Television Service, Appalshop and dozens of others. She is currently writing a new book on art’s public purpose. She serves as President of the Board of Directors of The Shalom Center.

 

Don’t miss Reframing the Arts : Advocating for the Public Culture at Oakland Museum of California (OMCA)
on Saturday, April 16! Register here.