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Special Valentine's Day Issue:
Imagining a World that Loves Artists & Women
• Valentine's Message From the Executive Director
• Arlene Goldbard on the Value of the Arts
• About Arlene Goldbard
• About WomenArts
From the Executive Director
Introducing Arlene Goldbard
Part of our work at WomenArts is to try to imagine a world that will truly love and respect artists and women. We are constantly on the lookout for people who model that attitude, and artist and activist Arlene Goldbard is one of our favorites.
For Valentine's Day we want to share some excerpts from a keynote address that she gave at the California Arts Advocates' Visioning Retreat in January 2010. We love the way Arlene challenges us to think about the true meaning of the arts in our lives, and we hope you will too.
In a world where funders routinely ask artists to express the value of our work in economic terms, Arlene reminds us that trying to explain the arts with numbers "is like trying to describe a rainbow without mentioning color." She invites us to claim a much larger frame of reference and purpose.
If you like these excerpts, we encourage you to read the full speech and to check out Arlene's other writing at www.ArleneGoldbard.com. As always, we welcome your comments on this essay. We will be happy to forward your responses to Arlene. Contact Us>>
Happy Valentine's Day!
Martha Richards, Executive Director
WomenArts
Arlene Goldbard: Excerpts from "Sensing the Demand"
Keynote address delivered to the California Arts Advocates Visioning Retreat, 1/13/2010
Read the full text at: http://californiaartsadvocates.org/docs/GoldbardCAAKeynote.pdf
. . . Regardless of our individual stories, behind the choice to live one's life in the arts, as a maker of beauty and meaning or one who supports that process, there is always an awakening that must be characterized in spiritual terms, as an encounter with the ineffable, with something that can never be adequately expressed, but which ignites in our hearts the desire to keep trying.
The specifics of these encounters will be known to each of you. Perhaps you were taken for the first time to a theater, a film, or a concert, transported in that darkened space to a time and place markedly different from ordinary life, where your entire being was concentrated on receiving something, where your body, feelings, mind and spirit came for the first time into absolute, coherent focus, and where, when the lights went up, you knew you wanted to return as soon and as often as possible. Perhaps you lifted your own voice in song, or raised a charged brush to make a mark on paper, and in the moment of creation felt time standing still, with you at its center, completely awake and completely dissolved in the experience. . .
Every human being has experienced this. It is the way we feel in the full flow of creativity, when overcome by love, when gazing into the heart of a rose, when standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon or the Pacific Ocean, bathed in the light of the setting sun. It is one of the essential experiences of being human.
Arts advocates have been trying to pour the vast personal and social importance of this experience into containers - into language, slogans, arguments, strategies - far too small to hold
it. The result has been almost unbearable frustration at being unable to put our point across. After long exposure to the framework of understanding that insists on privileging material value and things that can be counted, weighed and measured over all other forms of value, we have been reduced to making weak, even desperate arguments that do not do justice to the powerful truths contained in those experiences of the ineffable that set us on our paths in the first place.
More than three decades of trying to justify art's value with flimsy data-based arguments such as the economic multiplier effect, or the relationship between participating in the school orchestra and scoring high on the SATs, have yielded a net loss of more than half the real value of federal arts expenditure.
Accepting the terms of the debate as primarily economic has made it unwinnable. Is there anyone here who hasn't been to a zillion briefings and absorbed a gazillion pointers on how to argue for the arts' economic impact, because getting it right will be the golden key to public funding? Do you really think that after all this time, the problem is that we still haven't discovered exactly the right charts and graphs to hit the jackpot?
On this point, we truly do have enough data: It is intrinsically impossible to justify public investment in creativity using these tools, because art's essence is its ability to engage us fully in body, emotions, mind and spirit, to create beauty and meaning, to cultivate imaginative empathy, to disturb the peace, to enable grief in the face of loss and hope in the face of grief. Trying to explain or demonstrate this with numbers is like trying to describe a rainbow without mentioning color. It is ineffective, discouraging and unworthy of who we really are to keep trying the same failed approach over and over again. If we force ourselves, our trying can't help but turn half-hearted.
Take a minute to let yourself feel the weight of that frustration, that self-doubt. Where do you feel it? For me, it pinches like a pair of shoes long outgrown. The remedy is to step out of our old thinking, a container too small to hold the truth that needs telling now, and to walk on. . .
Everything we know about the centrality of story, the universality of artistic creativity and its roles in human and social development is demonstrably true, yet we are still laboring under the social superstition that says art has nothing to do with the serious problems we face, that creative work is trivial and negligible, meaningful only for its commodity-value. Open the arts section of any major U.S. daily: if you eliminate the reviews and announcements, you will find that this is the main focus: which TV shows drew the most viewers and sponsors, which movies and plays earned the largest box-office revenues, which songs sold the most copies, which performers made the largest fees. We are trapped in an economistic frame. If all you have is a cash register, everything looks like a sale.
But the big frame we need now is this: that art is the secret of survival, that if our resilience, creativity and future sustainability are riding on the stories that shape us, we had better invest in
our collective capacity to create and share stories. Many people are approaching this now in their own ways and their own communities. I am eager to work deeply on this with anyone who wants to give it serious attention, so I invite you to call on me.
Even mundane things can be lifted up if undertaken with a sense of larger purpose and meaning. We could look at this effort as some people have, as "rebranding" the arts, or as becoming better marketers and better lobbyists. But that would deprive us of the opportunity this moment presents, to be part of a seismic shift in human history, in which the things that have been shunted off to the margins-beauty, meaning, reflection, creativity, facing loss and finding resilience - in which these important things will be given their true value. Forms of work not
previously recognized as having social utility will emerge as worthy, in part because the old jobs are disappearing, necessitating a redefinition of work. New creative technologies will emerge to seize public attention, and older technology will be repurposed, but not forgotten. Whatever happens, art will foreshadow, portray and interpret it, lifting countless lives from the merely bearable into beauty.
We can't predict how things will morph over the next decade or two. But because so much is unknown, if we come to the fore with energy and vision, our ideas can have influence. I don't think there is one right answer to the inquiry we are undertaking. We need to engage many questions, generate many ideas, to experiment, make mistakes and learn from them. I hope to have dozens of mind-blowing conversations about these essential questions, to clear out all the cobwebs and the old answers, and with others as excited by these challenges as I am, to come at this task with fresh energy and vision.
"This is the most important experience in the life of every human being," Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, "something is asked of me. Every human being has had a moment in which he sensed a mystery waiting for him. Meaning is found in responding to the demand, meaning is found in sensing the demand."
I'm honored today to address a roomful of people whose course in life has been set by sensing and responding to just such a demand. It is clear that something is being asked of us now, and if we accept the challenge, I know that we will be equal to it.
To read the full text of Arlene's keynote address, please visit:
http://californiaartsadvocates.org/docs/GoldbardCAAKeynote.pdf
To read Arlene's introductory remarks for the conference, please visit:
http://californiaartsadvocates.org/docs/GoldbardCAAIntro.pdf
We welcome your comments on this essay and we will be happy to forward them to Arlene. Contact Us>>
About Arlene Goldbard
A provocative independent voice for our times, Arlene Goldbard is a writer, social activist, and consultant who works for justice, compassion and honor in every sphere, from the interpersonal to the transnational.
Arlene’s essays have appeared in such journals as Art in America, The Independent, Theatre, High Performance and Tikkun. Her books include Crossroads: Reflections on the Politics of Culture; New Creative Community: The Art of Cultural Development; Community, Culture and Globalization; and her novel Clarity. Read Arlene's full bio at: www.ArleneGoldbard.com/about
Also, be sure to check the excellent five-point manifesto about ways that artists could participate in our country's recovery, which Arlene helped to draft: Art & the Public Purpose: A New Framework at www.newculturalpolicy.org.
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