Part 3: Six Arguments in Support of the Arts in America
The following are summaries of six arguments and associated strategies in support of the reintroduction of the arts into our community infrastructures. Taken separately, most of them are not new. Their newness has more to do with their perspective than with actual content. Rather than advocating from a position of self-interest, this approach speaks to the perspective of community members as they inevitably ask the question: "How will the arts contribute to our meeting the social, political and economic challenges facing our community?" This approach takes the position that arts supporters cannot and will not find a place at the table until they are able to communicate that the arts are a powerful resource that can be used for everyone's benefit.
1. The Arts Are an Essential Resource for Community Development
"Without creative personalities able to think and judge independently, the upward development of society is unthinkable..."
-Albert Einstein
ECONOMIC IMPACT: Numerous studies show the consistent and dramatic positive economic impact the arts have had on communities large and small. Recent research shows that each dollar spent on the arts generates three to four dollars in non-arts expenditures. Other research has further demonstrated that the arts are a magnet for large corporations and an effective and economical catalyst for the revitalization of urban centers. Rural arts providers, as well, make the case for the arts as particularly useful tool for both economic and social development, particularly in depressed areas.
The selling of cultural destinations, urban and rural, has become a core marketing strategy in the tourism industry. Beyond tourism and community renewal, the arts are big business. In California, the state with the largest economy, the arts and entertainment industry is the third ranked economic segment, generating $3.5 billion in wages subject to taxation.
FUTURE LEADERSHIP: In recent years, the top executives of America's leading companies have complained about the lack of creativity and problem-solving abilities exhibited by entry level workers, managers, engineers and scientists. Similar sentiments are also being voiced in the public sector, where one often hears talk of a leadership deficit. Government and business leaders alike have invested millions of dollars in training programs designed to increase the creativity and teamwork of the American work force.
Education in the arts, for young and old alike offers access to the kinds of skills our next generation of workers and leaders will need. These skills include: harnessing and synthesizing the qualities of logic, organization, flexibility and insight; creative teamwork; learning that problems are opportunities not obstacles; learning to discipline the imagination to solve difficult problems; and learning that "failure" is a functional aspect of discovery.
2. The Arts Are a Basic Educational Reform
Since the publication of A Nation At Risk: The Imperative for Education Reform, educators, parents, and civic leaders have sought reforms in education. In response, school systems nationwide have placed a greater emphasis on the generally accepted "building blocks" of basic education: math, science and the language arts.
A 1989 Assembly Office of Research report, Arts Education In California: Thriving or Surviving?, cites evidence that "a more balanced approach" emphasizing "the arts as well as basic skills" would be more "advantageous." The report also cites "evidence that suggests that in schools where students perform above average academically, they also receive a richer dose of visual and performing arts courses."
Other studies suggest that the arts offer an alternative for success and respectability for students who struggle academically, particularly learning disabled and ESL students. Indications are that the discipline and self-esteem these students acquire often carries over to their study of other academic subjects and provides motivation to stay in school.
The fact of the matter is that education in the arts is a curricular necessity. The creative process is the means we employ to put our basic skills to use. The problem solvers of the future-the explorers, scientists, engineers who will confront tomorrow's challenges- require more than the basics of math, science and language. They need hands-on experience, manipulating the tools of change-taking chances, challenging convention, taking on the impossible.
Educators are only just beginning to acknowledge the complex mix of human intelligences and learning styles. In this context, arts education is educational reform. The pedagogy of the future should not be just arts inclusive, it should be arts-based. Teachers should know and employ the creative process in everything they do. Arts-based education is the laboratory for harnessing the power of the intellect through the discipline and vision of the creative process. Arts-based education will support the growth of the imagination and creativity as tools students must employ to succeed in a complex society.
3. The Arts Provide a Common Language in a Complex Global Culture
"...the ichnography of the Great Goddess arose in reflection and veneration of the laws of nature.... The message here is of an age of harmony and peace in accord with the creative energies of nature which, for four thousand prehistoric years, anteceded the (next) five thousand-a period James Joyce has termed the "nightmare" (of contending tribal and national interests) from which it is now certainly time for this planet to wake."
-Joseph Campbell, from the Forward to The Language of the Goddess by Marija Gimbutas
The ichnography to which Joseph Campbell refers is the symbolic vocabulary embodied in European and African Neolithic art. Although the written language we use daily evolved from these symbols, we no longer recognize these shared roots. The marginalization of the arts in this country has separated the American "tribes" from a powerful common language. As change gives rise to protective and reactive responses, we must rediscover the power of the arts to translate cultural difference as a common bond. We must also acknowledge and learn from those artists now working as agents of community change and builders of bridges.
As these bridges are built, we should focus on the strength inherent in our growing diversity. In her book, Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural America, writer/critic Lucy Lippard describes the changed face of America as an "ajiaco"-the flavorful mix of a Latin American soup in which the ingredients retain their own forms and flavors. She describes this new model as "fresher and healthier; the colors…varied; the taste…often unfamiliar" that "calls for an undetermined simmering period of social acclimation."
Many artists in America, particularly those in California, are beginning to manifest the new American aesthetic. Their work is the product of a media age, in which, for the first time, cultural interaction, influence and change have not been tied to man's ability to move physically from place to place. These artistic dialogues and collaborations are models for the new ways we will have to interact as global citizens.
4. The Arts Help Maintain Our Competitiveness in a Technological Age
During the last decade the arts have been dramatically transformed through the introduction of new technologies. In areas such as film, video, music, design and holography, new technologies adapted by artists have produced innovative applications and opened new markets.
As inventors, artists are a breed apart. They are unencumbered by the practical constraints experienced by their more product-minded counterparts. Hardware and software in the artist's hands are merely a technical means to an aesthetic goal. The commercial feasibility of a given solution is often not relevant. But, as has been the case with the artistic exploration of special effects technology and computer graphics, new and unexpected applications emerge. In some ways, the interface of the arts and technology has created an unintended research and development arm for commercial high tech concerns.
The roles of the artist and the technological innovator are often interchangeable. In his book The Paradox of the Silicon Savior, Grant Venerable points out "that the very best engineers and technical designers (in the Silicon Valley) are, nearly without exception, practicing musicians."
In education, the melding of the arts and technology provide a unique training ground for the high-tech demands of the 21st Century. Innovative curricula in video, electronic music, and computer graphics provide an opportunity for students to experience technology as a creative resource. This provides students a particularly accessible and non-threatening way to learn and explore their possibilities. These new technologies are complex tools that will require increasingly facile and creative minds to put them to their best use. Students who are familiar with the creative applications of new and emerging technology will be an invaluable resource in the new industrial age. John Scully, Chairman and CEO of Apple Computer, Inc., speaks forcefully on this point: "As a chief executive of a technology company that thrives on creativity, I want to work with people whose imaginations have been unleashed and who tackle problems as challenges rather than obstacles. An education enriched by the creative arts should be considered essential for everyone."
5. The Arts are a Proven Strategy for Healing. Prevention and Empowerment
"They speak of changes; changes in attitude, changes in self image and often changes in behavior. They say it is as if some new power, positive, creative and constructive, had at long last forced itself into their consciousness, an expression from the heart and soul of the artists's experience."
-Senator Henry Mello, from the catalog for 1988 prison art exhibition, Light From Another Country
Artmaking-the study and practice of the creative process-is inherently empowering. Each day the artist engages the muse, he/she does battle with the new and unexplored. All artists-student or master, young, old or infirm-are creative pioneers and adventurers. The challenge is to work honestly, with self-discipline, owning the success or failure of one's endeavors.
In the early '70s, a time when traditional arts education was beginning its decline, many professional artists began to look to society's neglected corners for a new constituency. The results of their work with youth at risk, people with physical and mental disabilities, prisoners, patients, seniors and others have shown that the arts can make a significant positive impact in the lives of these largely forgotten citizens. In California, the establishment of permanent comprehensive arts programming by the Departments of Corrections, Youth Authority and Mental Health is testimony to the effectiveness of these efforts.
The variety of problems being addressed by the increasing numbers of artists engaged in this work has valuable implications for educators, social service providers, and community leaders. Artists working and succeeding in these "other places" have generated a new technology for problem solving, communicating, building self-esteem and much more. A significant body of research in the field shows the practice of the arts is, in itself, a healing, transformational, therapeutic activity that, in some cases, may be more effective than traditional approaches. Documentation further shows the arts to be an effective and cost-beneficial resource for reducing violence, recidivism and psychopathology.
6. The Arts Help Us Communicate about Transcendent Values and Issues
"The artist as shaman becomes a conductor of forces that go far beyond those of his own person, and is able to bring art back in touch with its sacred sources.… (The shaman) develops not only new forms of art, but new forms of living."
-Suzi Gablick, Has Modernism Failed?
In the dying shadows of the prehistoric ritual fire, the shaman beseeches the gods on behalf of the gathered tribe. The year's final hunt is about to begin. The future of the community rests on the potency of the shaman's powers.
Today, although the artist has been cast out from the center of community life, he/she continues to sustain a vital link to the transcendent-to provide the imaginative sustenance and vision for the quest for truth and meaning, beyond the material. The artist, says psychologist James Hillman, "bears sensate witness to what is fundamentally beyond human comprehension."
The trivialization of the arts in America has produced many negatives. But none has been so damaging as the undermining of this connection between man and the artistic illumination he needs to explore the transcendent. Losing it, Hillman continues, "diminishes our ability to love the world." Our alienation from and abuse of what artist Isamu Noguchi has called "our temple," the earth, is but one symptom of this condition. The artist at work in these realms mediates the moral, the rational and the spiritual; the artist sensitizes us to the presence of social and material toxicity.
There is no doubt that a new artistic process has started asserting itself in response to what many feel is a spiritual vacuum. Critic Suzi Gablick sees great hope in the work of artists such as Anselm Keifer and Joseph Beuys, who have "placed primary value on (the artist's) function as a…bridge builder between the material and the spiritual worlds. Beuys and Keifer are part of the long but largely ignored history of "artist shamans" working in a century that has been dominated by science and material progress.
As we tire of our fascination with material flash and velocity, the need intensifies for the aesthetic bridge to what Alexis de Tocqueville termed "the mystical forces that govern ordinary events." A connection, he declared, which is "functionally necessary to society." In the Greek cosmology the gods could not appear in the material world without the presence of Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty, love, and fertility. She made manifest the divine mind. In the 21st Century, that presence will be needed as never before, as we continue to lift the veil on the mystery of creation and struggle to stop ourselves from destroying our temple.
