“Memo to President Obama, from the arts world: This is not what we had in mind.

During the campaign, candidate Obama raised high hopes among artists and arts institutions: He “got” their importance, even publishing an arts-policy statement. After the election, Quincy Jones fueled expectations with a crusade to create a Cabinet-level Minister of Culture or an arts czar at the White House. Dreams of bigger budgets for, and prominent chairs of, the NEA and the National Endowment for the Humanities, exploded like Twitter….

But the three lesser appointments Obama has so far made in the cultural arena—a Chicago lawyer named Kareem Dale, a Hollywood fund-raiser named Jeremy Bernard, and an Obama Senate staffer named Anita Decker—have been strange at best and, at worst, deflating. None has much arts expertise; what they do have are political connections. Bernard, appointed to a key post at the academically minded NEH, never graduated from college, though he claims a bachelor’s degree on his résumé.”

Read the rest at the Daily Beast.

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So now that I’ve discovered flyover i’m starting to get addicted. my original vision for Culturebot was to have this site be a portal/aggregator for a series of regional blogs (like the Gothamist family of blogs) but I’ve never been able to get the funding to make it happen. If any out of work MBAs with connections to VCs wanna meet with me, I’ve got a helluva business plan just looking for capital. It starts with the Culturebot web presence and builds out from there. Seriously. Even though the economy is in the crapper, this would be low-cost to implement and hugely scalable. Build it now for cheap and be in position when things get better. Seriously.

but anyway – i like the  flyover blog b/c it talks about arts in the flyover regions which most of the arts/culture establishment only hears from every so often. but with the increased costs of culture production in major metropolitan regions i think its important to increase regional presence in the national (and international) dialogue around the arts. in this day and age provincialism vs. cosmopolitanism should be moot.  we are all reassessing the limitations of place and physical presence in the creation of arts and culture – we should be having these discussions more often and more comprehensively.

So – on that note there are two posts on flyover I wanted to comment on. The first is called The Partisan Imagination: Does Being An Artist Make You Liberal? I have posted about that on Cbot numerous times – we hear that question a lot. I used to argue the point with colleagues frequently. But with the 100th Anniversary of Futurism rapidly approaching I think its time to really examine this. (Which is what RoseLee Goldberg will be doing in PERFORMA09 next fall!). But very briefly I will point out that Futurism, Modernist Nationalism and Fascism were deeply interconnected. 

Since the beginning of the 20th century, Italian nationalist movements, from the national radicalism of “La Voce” to futurist nationalism and fascism, fostered one of the strongest waves of European right-wing radicalism. The confrontation between nationalism and modernity is one of the main keys to understanding to the permutations of Italian radical nationalism from modernist avant-gardes up to the fascist regime.

I found the above quote in the precis of a book called “The Struggle for Modernity” and there’s an interesting article in the Harvard Crimson that analyzes the role of the arts at the “flaming motor” of Fascism and Nazism. Ezra Pound, Ayn Rand, Richard Wagner, Knut Hamsun, Leni Riefenstahl…. there are countless examples throughout history of deeply conservative, right wing and reactionary artists. Just because there don’t appear to be so many these days doesn’t mean that there isn’t precedent. Or that, by definition, artists must be liberal.

Its a good discussion – one that should be held on a more public stage and in a more meaningful way then just “empathy” or “democrat vs. republican”. At the end of the day the most salient point is that the arts mean something. it is not frivolity or luxury, the arts are how we express our visions of the world, they are kind of like a collective process of “creative visualization” (a shallow idea, i know, but apt) where we represent ourselves to ourselves and imagine what the world might become. 

The other post I wanted to comment on is called “Obama, Millenials and the ideals of Web 2.0“. Part of me is thrilled to see this discussion happening in the press outside of a big city. The little green monster of envy in me is shouting out because I have written so extensively about this and I’m just vain enough to feel that I, Culturebot, should be a talking head about this stuff in the MSM. Say it with me now, “Book Deal! Book Deal! Book Deal!” Maybe some creative visualization will manifest it for me. Oh and I’ve revised the essay referenced above but I need to revise it again – and tweak it for a more general audience. I know – I should really be publishing finished content on the blog … but there should be enough raw material in the five years of doing this to merit a small advance and an editor! Dude. The stories I could tell of a life in the downtown arts world! Sex! Drugs! Feuds! Debauchery! Jealousy! Genius! Its good stuff, people.

And now for something completely different… I saw an advert for the movie Underworld, Rise of the Lycans. I saw the first one and all of these movies baffle me. The kids, the millennials, they can access this stuff, but me, its just an incomprehensible clutter of images and loud noises. Not being a gamer I don’t understand video game logic and I either can’t follow the convoluted plot twists or there is a whole bunch of backstory that I’m not privy to.  I point this out because it freaks me out – I am actually old enough to “not get it”, to have almost no access point into this particular form of entertainment. I like werewolves and vampires, I like sci-fi and monster stuff, I like trashy movies and its not that I can’t enjoy the movies in some kind of A.D.D. way but I’m not going to suggest that I can make heads or tails out of what I’m watching.

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Just got this email:

People – Would you take a minute to sign in support of Quincy Jones’ brilliant idea for a US Secretary of the Arts? Quincy Jones has started a petition to ask President-Elect Obama to appoint a Secretary of the Arts.  While many other countries have had Ministers of Art or Culture for centuries, The United States has never created such a position. We in the arts need this and the country needs the arts–now more than ever. Please take a moment to sign this important petition and then pass it on to your friends and colleagues.

www.petitiononline.com/esnyc/petition.html

 This is long overdue. A Secretary of the Arts would further legitimize America’s place in Art History and in the international dialog through the many disciplines of art – a language itself.  People yearn for arts & culture and if they don’t, most are missing out on education, exposure, self-expression, & a creative outlet for internal strife versus unconstructive outlets that are too often used in our society. Production of art can be both a creative & an intellectual pursuit. Exposure to art has numerous benefits, one being for society as a whole to be elevated. Let’s put an arts leader in the Cabinet to start measuring up to other governments’ commitments to arts & culture. This will benefit individual artists, arts organizations, the fine art, film & performing arts industries at large, patrons of the arts, society at large, & the international community. For example, the Secretary could foster international dialog and commission collaborative projects between artists worldwide – there could be creative, spiritual, intellectual, social, economic, political, historical & community value.

Pass it on.

Right on! Secretary of the Arts. And if Quincy can’t do it, your man Culturebot is ready to serve his country! If Sanjay Gupta can get a job, then certainly yours truly – a pioneer of web-based grassroots arts advocacy – would be a good pick to go to Washington!

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So I was thinking about the financial industry bailout and the auto industry bailout and the subcontracting of the War in Iraq to companies like Blackwater. And I was thinking about Madoff and his scam and corporations and media manipulation and box stores like Walmart eradicating competition and independent small business owners (all aided and abetted by the Republicans) and I was thinking about agribusiness and America’s health challenges and I realized that – if you take the long view – this financial crisis is an enormous opportunity to completely start over. Now that the lies of the viability of unfettered, unregulated corporate capitalism and so-called “free markets” have been revealed to be an enormous Ponzi scheme perpetrated by the extremely wealthy on the middle and lower classes, perhaps we can actually take some time to get our priorities in order and re-build a civil society. To use the metaphor of addiction – we hit rock bottom, now we have to start on the 12 Steps. Or to use a slightly different psychological metaphor, we have suffered a profound identity crisis and “nervous breakdown” where our existing assumptions and ego-constructions have proven to be inadequate and unrealistic. Now we can begin the long, arduous but ultimately redemptive process of reconstructing our collective identity as a nation.

Let’s dismantle agribusiness and subsidize local farmers; subsidize in-region distribution channels for local food so it is as inexpensive to buy an egg that is grown upstate as it is to buy an industrial-grown egg that has traveled 1000 miles. Subsidize the small business people and use the power of the federal government to build lots of stable, self-sustaining, small communities that don’t rely on huge corporations and industries for jobs. We are all connected via the internet now anyway, let’s use the small-donor, grassroots model for building the economy and re-building the nation. Think globally, invest locally – in infrastructure, education, business, finance and everything. Give people the tools, support and incentive to be self-reliant, roll back the Industrial Age indentured servitude of the working class to huge corporations. 

To go back to the psychology metaphor – this is a process of individuation, not self-improvement. I’ve been thinking a lot about the role of arts and culture in the process of constructing personal identity and thus I’ve been thinking about the notion of individuation. According to Jung individuation is defined thus: “In general, it is the process by which individual beings are formed and differentiated; in particular, it is the development of the psychological individual as a being distinct from the general, collective psychology.” (C.G. Jung. Psychological Types. Collected Works Vol.6., par. 757). It is s complex, nuanced idea – one that requires a commitment to the arduous path of seeking self-knowledge and the acceptance of a certain amount of fluidity in the construction of the Self. It is not easily reconcilable with the culture of profit/loss statements and “bottom line” evaluation, quantifiable statistics and demographic analysis to maximize market penetration. Individuation is a far cry from “self-improvement.”

The notion of self-improvement, as pioneered by Dale Carnegie and endlessly modified and recapitulated by countless others, is like the Reader’s Digest form of Individuation. And while I don’t want to be a snob, what the country needs now is not shall bromides and platitudes but a profound reconstruction. We need to dig deep into the Big Ideas and dare to live up to them. What does it mean to be a Democracy? Must Democracy necessarily be expressed through unfettered free market capitalism, or is it “government by consent of the governed”? If it is the latter – then why isn’t it “one person/one vote”? Why can’t the governed vote to create a government that supports the betterment of the whole rather than the enrichment of the few? Why can’t the governed embrace civil liberties for all citizens – keeping the government out of our private lives – while providing access to civic/public life for all? Why can’t the governed demand from the government a commitment to civic stability, to economic prudence, to social order and increased dialogue?

I forgot where I was going with this one. Except that “Self-Improvement” – tied as it is to a “quick-fix” mentality where one improves oneself mostly in the hope of financial gain – is not sufficient. If we are to rebuild America we must commit to the challenge of individuation, acknowledging that there is no simple path to adulthood and accountability, there is only a lifelong commitment to the journey itself and the belief that by pursuing self-knowledge and “right action” we improve not only ourselves but the world around us.

 And the ARTS and CULTURE are important parts of that. Like Michael Chabon said in his arts policy essay:

“Every grand American accomplishment, every innovation that has benefited and enriched our lives, every lasting social transformation, every moment of profound insight any American visionary ever had into a way out of despair, loneliness, fear  and violence—everything that has from the start made America the world capital  of hope, has been the fruit of the creative imagination, of the ability to reach  beyond received ideas and ready-made answers to some new place, some new way of seeing or hearing or moving through the world. Breathtaking solutions, revolutionary inventions, the road through to freedom, reform and change: never in the history of this country have these emerged as pat answers given to us by our institutions, by our government, by our leaders. We have been obliged—to  employ Dr. King’s powerful verb—to dream them up for ourselves.

America’s artists are the guardians of the spirit of questioning, of innovation, of reaching across the barriers that fence us off from our neighbors, from our allies and adversaries, from the six billion other people with whom we share this dark and dazzling world. Art increases the sense of our common humanity. The imagination of the artist is, therefore, a profoundly moral imagination: the easier it is for you to imagine walking in someone else’s shoes, the more difficult it then becomes to do that person harm. If you want to make a torturer, first kill his imagination. If you want to create a nation that will stand by and allow torture to be practiced in its name, then go ahead and kill its imagination, too. You could start by cutting school funding for art, music, creative writing and the performing arts.”

 Onward!

OH and remember – unfettered access to knowledge and information is one of the cornerstones of democracy – so KEEP WIKIPEDIA FREE:

Donate to Wikipedia

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A few quick thoughts:

On Mediation and Live Experience

As mediated experience (mobile phones, internet, chat, Second Life) becomes normalized – how do we, as artists, address the unmediated experience? I didn’t get to see the Living Theater’s new piece but it got me thinking about the thrilling immediacy and intimacy of non-4th-wall performative engagement. Jerome Bel’s The Show Must Go On was most stunning in the moments when the audience became a part of the piece. As much as multimedia and hybrid performance/theater is an expression of our times, it will be interesting to see how we can re-value and re-interpret the unmediated live experience. And by this I am not referring to the ever-popular “staged television” of mainstream, repertory, regional theater.

On Identity and Multiculturalism

If you get a chance, please read my massive essay on culture, identity and the arts. It is already a little dated since it was written before the election, but I think it is relevant. The idea I’m wrestling with is the intersection of Third Wave Identity Politics contemporary art, personal agency, Diaspora models as applied to a globally networked society.

I remember not too long ago, maybe three or four years ago, meeting countless non-Americans in arts culture and business who found American Identity Politics and multiculturalism to be laughably parochial and hopelessly naive. Now they are discovering that the the battles we fought in America over civil rights, multiculturalism and identity  are becoming the most important discussions on the global stage. If it wasn’t for where we’d been, we would be unable to have the sophisticated, contemporary discussions we are beginning to have now.

My theory is that America has been through two major waves of identity politics thus far:

The First Wave was the introduction of the idea of the “oppressed minority”, which was a major turning point and was manifested in mass Civil Rights movements. (I’m currently developing a project that examines that idea in the context of Gay History).

The Second Wave was the “Personal is Political” wave of Identity Politics in which minorities asserted their cultural identity as a primary identifier in opposition to the majority and demanding a place at the table. That covers the 80′s and 90′s.

Now we are at the Third Wave where a number of factors have converged to create a major shift in perspective. First – demography indicates that non-whites will be the majority soon. Second, the traditional lines of identity are being blurred by people of mixed ethnicity, by proximity of different cultures and that individuals feel empowered to construct their identity according to their own priorities. Third, people experience identity as fluid. Fourth – the technology of the information age and the cultural displacement resulting form a global economy has placed more people of various identities in unexpected contexts than ever before.

So the big question before all of us is, how do we negotiate identity in this new world?

(Relevant Sidenote: YJ Lee’s The Shipment just premiered at the Wexner to great reviews. I got to see a work-in-progress showing of it a few weeks ago at my theater, IRT, where YJ has been working on the show as an artist-in-residence and can say that it is very, very good. It comes to The Kitchen in January).

On Place

With mediation of experience comes a re-negotiation of Place. I am on the street in NYC but I am on the phone with London and I am texting China. I am on the internet – I am everywhere at once. My relationship to physical place is different than before, my identity is less predicated on place than before. Admittedly this is only true for the technologically enabled world, but one imagines that over time these advances will spread. Additionally, people from disadvantaged nations will continue to migrate to advantaged nations seeking a better life. They will bring their cultures with them. They will exist in Diaspora.

How can we learn from prior Diaspora narratives to ameliorate the inevitable culture clashes, alleviate the financial and psychological stressors of those living away from their homelands and facilitate assimilation?

The Role of Art

Art is the Pure Research of Culture. Insofar as these problems must be addressed logistically by social workers, economists and politicians, the artists and scholars need to work through these things in a different way, by engaging with these issues and ideas in their work and by collaborating with artists and scholars from other cultures to develop sophisticated, contemporary investigations. It is an exciting time.

[it is in moments like these that I wish I had an editor or some kind of access to MSM]

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Applications are now being accepted for the Conflux Festival 2008. Conflux is the art and technology festival for the creative exploration of urban public space.

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