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A response to "Kristi's Rant"

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by Sanjit Sethi

Kristi,

Thanks for your thoughtful remarks. When you state “we need to change something” I am reminded of the quote from the Sufist scholar Rumi that says new organs of perception come about as a result of necessity, therefore in order to increase one’s perception one needs to increase necessity. As you accurately point out Oakland (and other communities) needs more compassion, opportunity, and investment. We may very well be at the state that Rumi speaks of, of increasing our necessity through response to rampant violence, devastating budget cuts, and a society that favors a corporate culture over a creative culture. All of these things have pushed our necessity, as a larger community, further. With an awareness of this new reality comes (ideally) a rich and vigorous conversation on values. What is legal vs. illegal? (You speak compellingly of graffiti artists and their ability to legitimately express a voice.) Cultural vs. commercial? (We see great examples from social entrepreneurship that these can be combined.) And finally, political vs. civil? (The ability to creatively protect people’s physical integrity and safety as well as protecting the right to express oneself and the right to assemble).

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Sanjit Sethi is Director of the Center for Art and Public Life, and the Barclay Simpson Chair of Community Art at California College of the Arts.  Sethi received a BFA in 1994 from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University, an MFA in 1998 from the University of Georgia, and an MS in Advanced Visual Studies in 2002 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Sethi has been an artist in residence at the Banff Centre in Alberta, Canada and a Fulbright fellow in Bangalore, India, working on the Building Nomads Project. Sethi continued his strong focus on interdisciplinary collaboration as director of the MFA program at the Memphis College of Art. His work deals with issues of nomadism, identity, the residue of labor, and memory. Sethi recently completed the Kuni Wada Bakery Remembrance, an olfactory-based memorial in Memphis, Tennessee; and Richmond Voting Stories, a collaborative video project involving youth and senior residents of Richmond, CA. Sethi’s current works include Indians/Indians, the Urban Defibrillator, and a series of writings on the territory of failure and its relationship to collaborative cultural practice, all of which involve varied social and geographic communities.

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

TOMORROW

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by Sanjit Sethi

I want to make a distinction between spending the resources to fund or not fund a specific cultural project and the ability to devote resources to think about the long-term direction of where one wants to allocate resources towards cultural cultivation. Inherently cultural policy is a process of navigation. Navigation is about knowledge, the knowledge of the terrain, but just as importantly, it’s the ability to apply a series of skills to ascertain the direction one would like to go based on a range of factors some of which are in your control and some of which are outside of your control. Individuals or organizations that drive cultural policy should see themselves at the helm of a vessel where one is taking into account the determination to go in a particular direction, while at the same time accounting for multiple factors, which try as we might, are uncontrollable. The boat may be under your control, the engine may be under your control. There are many things that are under your control but those aren’t the only factors affecting your journey, and one needs to consider and think through those factors. Cultural policy should work in the same way.

Cultural policy becomes staid and automatic the moment it thinks it is the sole driver for any form of change. Similar to the navigator, the best drivers of cultural policy are ones that act with a degree of humility and with the acknowledgment of the forces they cannot change yet need to exist within. To my mind the two key ingredients to cultural policy for the next ten years are innovation and ethics. Oftentimes it can give us comfort to feel that policy drives programming. I think this is a mistake. Instead innovative programming should provide us with real world examples of how something works or doesn’t work, which then can determine a new direction in which policy itself can move. In the day of the 24-hour news cycle and twitter it is easy not to focus on the details; we can get caught up with the large picture, the big event. As millenials assume their place as the next generation it is important to take note of the many aspects that drive them, of cultural diversity and collaborative models of education, to name a few. The test of cultural policy of the future will be to harness innovation in a manner that continues to involve those individuals not already at the table.

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Sanjit Sethi is Director of the Center for Art and Public Life, and the Barclay Simpson Chair of Community Art at California College of the Arts.  Sethi received a BFA in 1994 from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University, an MFA in 1998 from the University of Georgia, and an MS in Advanced Visual Studies in 2002 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Sethi has been an artist in residence at the Banff Centre in Alberta, Canada and a Fulbright fellow in Bangalore, India, working on the Building Nomads Project. Sethi continued his strong focus on interdisciplinary collaboration as director of the MFA program at the Memphis College of Art. His work deals with issues of nomadism, identity, the residue of labor, and memory. Sethi recently completed the Kuni Wada Bakery Remembrance, an olfactory-based memorial in Memphis, Tennessee; and Richmond Voting Stories, a collaborative video project involving youth and senior residents of Richmond, CA. Sethi’s current works include Indians/Indians, the Urban Defibrillator, and a series of writings on the territory of failure and its relationship to collaborative cultural practice, all of which involve varied social and geographic communities.

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

TODAY

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By Sanjit Sethi.

The landscape of cultural policy is a constantly shifting one. Not unlike the rapidly changing face of our planet we can similarly see changes in cultural policy by looking at both larger national / global policy as well as by examining more intimate local policy as it relates to specific communities. While the phrase “think globally, act locally” is somewhat tired and overused, it still holds relevance to an approach towards enhancing a community’s ability to celebrate who they are – one of the cornerstones of cultural policy. Due to factors including, but not limited to, the economic downturn, the housing crisis, and state / local / national governments feeling budgetary constrictions, it is easy to lose any semblance of a thoughtful process in examining the direction that cultural policy is headed. In many ways these factors, these seemingly uncontrollable forces, shape and shift any attempt towards enacting cultural policy both on the national / global scale as well as in our own backyards.

Currently art and government organizations are trying to stay alive. They are trying to meet a varied and diverse constituency with limited resources. Painting with a broad brush, many organizations operate in a manner in which the policy and decision making is far removed from the day-to-day aspects of programming. Cultural policy cannot separate itself from issues of immigration policy, social justice, human rights, and equity. It is ideally a celebration of diversity, a celebration of sameness and difference. And yet cultural policy is very much under attack by a jingoistic backlash in this country (best witnessed by the Tea Party Movement) that seeks to homogenize and polarize.

 

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Sanjit Sethi is Director of the Center for Art and Public Life, and the Barclay Simpson Chair of Community Art at California College of the Arts.  Sethi received a BFA in 1994 from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University, an MFA in 1998 from the University of Georgia, and an MS in Advanced Visual Studies in 2002 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Sethi has been an artist in residence at the Banff Centre in Alberta, Canada and a Fulbright fellow in Bangalore, India, working on the Building Nomads Project. Sethi continued his strong focus on interdisciplinary collaboration as director of the MFA program at the Memphis College of Art. His work deals with issues of nomadism, identity, the residue of labor, and memory. Sethi recently completed the Kuni Wada Bakery Remembrance, an olfactory-based memorial in Memphis, Tennessee; and Richmond Voting Stories, a collaborative video project involving youth and senior residents of Richmond, CA. Sethi’s current works include Indians/Indians, the Urban Defibrillator, and a series of writings on the territory of failure and its relationship to collaborative cultural practice, all of which involve varied social and geographic communities.

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