Recap: A Concept Coined
Doris Sommer | Dec 12, 2022
The arts ignite social change. During the Cases for Culture conference hosted by Cultural Agents at Harvard University, participants put a recurring experience into simple words.
The unapologetic concept of art as a social resource had gestated throughout the Covid-19 lockdown during conversations among heterogenous academics and practitioners who gathered on zoom and decided to launch Renaissance Now. The plague gave us time to think, and we thought about the urgent challenges of social inequity and environmental degradation. Remembering Europe’s medieval plague and Italy’s response as the pandemic waned, when artists and intellectuals left the cloisters to engage with bankers and princes, we worried that today disciplinary silos often keep us from risking necessary collaborations. Renaissance businessmen and politicians risked money and prestige to work with creative artists and thinkers to reshape devastated societies. Later and elsewhere in Europe, the Renaissance would be associated with conquest and slavery. But not in the admirable early period which thrived on private spending for the public good by leading citizens who flouted their prosperity and taste to beautify cities and build institutions. This collaboration between creativity and power is a legacy and a practical lesson for human survival. The future depends on crossing barriers between institutional and artistic structures. Inside the silos change is literally unthinkable. Without curing an aversion to risk, and short of recognizing the arts as agents of change, disciplines will continue to be cautious and to cramp developments in the theory of change.
Cautiously, commentators of even spectacular cases of arts as agency hardly dignify creativity as a resource for policy making. Consider the revival of Bogota, Colombia, when Mayor Mockus dared to “bring out the clowns” as a traffic intervention, before he targeted drug traffickers and reduced homicides by 70%. Consider too how Edi Rama’s public painting projects revitalized Albania’s capital Tirana and led to his election as prime minister. Citizens and observers do not doubt the impact of art in these and other cases. Yet the cases seem charming, or curious, rather than models of administration. Almost grudgingly, economists have by now recognized the commercial value of art festivals and markets. But their celebration of the orange economy seldom factors in added social values of participatory arts: violence prevention, improved mental and physical health, reduction of dropout rates and teen pregnancies. By dismissing art as an engine for change, we waste this renewable resource for making policy. To misconstrue models as mere oddities is to disable the process of turning experience into knowledge. Our conference helped to take that turn and to ground a collective hunch into a usable concept.
Through research and practice in politics, health, education, law, and entrepreneurship, contributors to the conference demonstrated how the arts emerge as game-changers — even when institutions are slow to include art-making and interpretation among available resources for human development and wellbeing. Presentations converged to suggest that a stigma against the arts — and against the corollary pleasures that art enables — guards the gates of scientific discourse. The stigma is felt with every denial of the evident energy that art can channel toward personal, public, and planetary care. Art works to change collective perceptions. In a phrase that Raymond Williams offered, art produces a “structure of feeling.” This refers to a still unnamed sensitivity that can be communicated through literature and other creative practices and that generates the need to coin a new concept. “Structure of feeling” is an updated version of Kant’s reluctant respect for the arts. He acknowledged that art can communicate pre-conceptual feelings and reflections, but Kant worried about the process, precisely because it was unpredictable, potentially ungovernable, and unfairly gifted to talented people. Few can make art, but we can all judge it. Kant’s disciple Schiller disagreed and didn’t worry. Facing real terror in the French Revolution, Schiller promoted art as an alternative to violence. Unlike his master who considered artists to be rare birds, Schiller identified a talent for artmaking in everyone. Our innate “playdrive” can channel possibly violent passions toward beautiful new creations, for ourselves and for society. “Symbolic violence” was the therapeutic name for artmaking proposed by child psychoanalyst D.D. Winnicott in the 1960s. Creative play develops personal autonomy and self-expression, he explained. It enables us to take pleasure in the world, to deflect destructive resentment into healthy engagement.
But an unhealthy aversion to pleasure contracts the heart of capitalist culture, according to Max Weber. Over a century ago, he warned that modernity’s Calvinist stigma against pleasure would snuff out our human capacities for sociability and our care for the world. Note that “to care for” means both to love and to serve. Through a careless and self-serving misinterpretation, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905) has been read more as a manual for heartless accumulation and modernization than as a caution against anhedonic duty. At the Cases for Culture conference, this perverse misstep from Weber’s defense of feeling to dutiful capitalist lockstep came to mind during the morning presentation by James Robinson, an undisputed master of political and economic thought today. Quite boldly, he pointed to a fault-line in the social sciences, namely the inability to account for social change. A culture of capitalism demands to see the numbers but does not tarry at human dynamics which might distract attention from quantifiable evidence. Political science and economics can, for example, document the rise of democratic societies from the 18th century to the present in detailed statistics and attention grabbing graphs. But they do not explain how or why the numbers move from one value to another. There seems to be a hole in the heart of social science.
At this opening, Robinson introduced Jose Falconi, professor of literature and visual arts, who suggested that aesthetics may be the missing piece. Falconi illustrated how the surprise effect of an artwork – the “pow” of a film, or a museum visit, or a poem — breaks through the lethargy sedimented by habit to deaden human associations. The excitement and confusion sparked by art’s novelty enliven dialogue and stimulate collective conversations. People are eager to talk with one another, to interpret and to speculate, once they experience works of art or beauty in nature. They feel and think differently on hearing others speak freely and imagine new engagements. By the afternoon, when economist Pier Luigi Sacco spoke about today’s Culture 3.0 – in which anyone can produce as well as consume art – Schiller’s universally available playdrive was in full gear and urgently required to address otherwise stagnant structures.
Renaissance Now had already noted the longstanding alliance between art and social development. In fact, they are coeval and codependent. In the middle of the 18 th Century, modern democracies and the new philosophy of aesthetics were born together, in symbiosis. Self- governing societies depend on an innate faculty of disinterested judgment, and free judgment depends on the autonomy granted by democratic societies. To follow Kant, aesthetics is the cognitive pleasure of judging, not the initial thrill of perceiving beauty or the sublime. For Kant, the excitement sparked by natural or artistic beauty does not count as aesthetic pleasure. The emotional rush is an entry point, an interruption of routine that triggers a personal reflection which can lead to collective aesthetic judgment, necessarily collective for Kant. The faculty to judge is innate and universal. We can all judge freely — without economic, moral, or intellectual investments – but this mental muscle had atrophied over centuries of censure in monarchies and churches. Schiller agreed, but he added that art was a better trigger than nature. It is more reliable. Art is intentional and doesn’t depend on seasons or situations. It is a ubiquitous resource to generate curiosity and the desire to talk with others. For both Kant and his spirited disciple, beauty and the sublime lead to reflection and sociability. In other words, art triggers processes that can change political opinions and behaviors.
Highlights of the stellar contributions shared in Cases for Culture can be appreciated in the recorded talks that will soon be available on our website. See the program to appreciate the range and stature of the participants. Please prepare to write your own Case for our collection in Renaissance Now. Professor Rob Austin, formerly at the Harvard Business School and currently at the Ivey School of Business will host a training session for us in the New Year. Stay tuned!
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That’s why we’ve organized a spectacular lineup of artists, educators, engineers, political leaders, entrepreneurs and educators in a day-and-a-half encounter on December 2 and 3 to share Cases for Culture. Our goal is to generate evidence-based studies about the social and economic advances that art enables. The contribution that we can make together is to produce more HBS-type cases that can guide policy decisions by identifying the arts as resources for personal and collective wellbeing. Guidance is in order, José Molinas, former Minister of Development in Paraguay, observed in a conversation about what art means. The new Certificate in Arts and Policy responds to his change of mind. He reflects on missed opportunities by overlooking the arts as drivers of positive change. Brief teaching essays that combine narrative with evidence can make the case for the arts in policy. Exemplary cases exist and several appear on the website Renaissance Now, but “cases for culture” still sounds unfamiliar both in professional schools and in artist studios. On the one hand, the arts don’t appear among the categories recognized in catalogues of cases. On the other hand, many artists remain indifferent to practical fields and to statistical measurement, protecting artistic freedom against “instrumentalization.”
I believe that to persuade both artists and skeptical decision makers. ministers, mayors and CEOs, we must produce more cases for culture to render redundant a defense for artmaking. Writing more illustrations of the arts as responses to stubborn challenges will confirm the connection between participatory arts and development. Cases for culture are teaching tools for academics and for civic leaders who can consider how and why participatory arts address intractable problems. Climate disaster, inequality, violence and depression are transversal across disciplines and across populations. The arts can weave among disciplines and people to link broad bases of participants to a range of experts through engaging activities that develop care for one another and for the earth.
Consider a Paraguayan youth orchestra that recycles garbage from rivers to interrupt environmental degradation. The young musicians also travel to perform concerts—at schools, hospitals and community centers internationally—so they count on services of transportation, security, public health, education and economic development. Consider too Mexico’s post Revolution Secretary of Education José Vasconcelos who managed to rebuild the devastated country by combining arts with education. Opportunities like these to bridge fields in complex arrangements are not rare, but they need to be more evident and compelling by adding quantitative documentation in cases for culture. Otherwise, for many decision makers the arts may stay undetected as effective if indirect interventions in urgent challenges.
Members of “Sounds of the Earth,” Orquestra H20, Paraguay, a social and community integration program. Photo courtesy of Doris Sommer.
With a keynote speech delivered by Salvador del Solar—actor, director, and former Prime Minister of Peru—the stage is set to consider what art brings to leadership. Del Solar celebrates the exquisite everyday cuisine of Peru that has boosted tourism and inspired pride of place for Peruvians. This is an opening moment for us to consider the social and economic effects of participatory arts in general [cooking, music, theater, murals, poetry, singing, storytelling, etc.] For some, these arts seem immeasurable and immune to quantifiable evaluation. Art doesn’t work that way, creatives sometimes complain. It should be free from economistic thinking in numbers and in graphs. But we should take practical stock of art’s effects. Without cases for culture, arguments for public and private support for the arts can fail when decision makers assume that money is better spent elsewhere. By documenting the low cost and high impact of participatory arts that address otherwise intractable challenges, budgets may change along with the concept of creativity. Human beings are dynamic; either our energy pursues creative activities, or it festers in frustration that can erupt in violence. The arts make good sense if we make a case for them.
Stellar participants who represent arts, politics, health, entrepreneurship, engineering, law and education combine to achieve a major objective of the conference even before it starts. We want to connect the range of experts through the arts, to foster interdisciplinary collaborations. We can recognize a link of shared practices. Like scientists, artists explore materials, including words and gestures; like engineers and entrepreneurs, artists model ways to break habits and try out new behaviors, expecting to fail along the way. In fact, working like an artist characterizes innovation in general; it means making something new, something that surprises the public and stimulates curiosity which leads to learning, conversation, and sociability. These are interpersonal activities worth cultivating if we hope to sustain democracy, a political experiment that depends on general participation and on judgment to reach agreements. It may sound surprising to argue for art and interpretation as foundations for non-violent democratic societies, but that was Kant’s proposal in his Third Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, written to rescue sociability from the single-minded arrogance of reason. The Enlightened defense of aesthetics continues through German philosopher Immanuel Kant’s disciple Friedrich Schiller, in response to the Terror in the French Revolution. Schiller understood judgment as a pause in the process of artmaking to determine how to proceed. The way to proceed during a reign of terror should avoid answering violence with more violence, he wrote. Instead, we should make art, to surprise and intrigue the enemy. Human beings have an innate human “play drive” to sidestep vicious and violent circles, to liberate new spaces and to recognize human creativity as a social resource. Schiller was sure that artmaking can bridge personal wellbeing with political freedom.
Do we have evidence to support his enlightened faith? Can making new things, performances, and interpretations, lead to human flourishing? If so, we need Cases for Culture to bring the effects to the fore. Maybe we will observe that the time-consuming and difficult activities related to artmaking are felt like a flow that defies the impatient habits and short-term thrills associated with abusive behaviors. The arts keep participants too busy to resort to the abuses of drugs or crime or teen pregnancies.
Thinking like artists, people address problems as challenges that stimulate cognitive and emotional energies. Problems are no longer obstacles, when artmaking demands judgment and decisions about how to use available time and materials. The link to health and psychological wellbeing should be obvious. People who judge and make decisions mitigate the depression and anxiety that present as helplessness, indifference and loss of pleasure. Artists are agents, not victims. Even miserable environments provide raw material for artists to recycle and imagine change, to develop the skills that can drive change. Whatever the aesthetic value of the results, artmaking is active and autonomous, available to everyone as processes that increase social capital and reduce depression.
Cases for culture will provide readings and ignite discussions for an efficient certificate program designed by Renaissance Now to make good on the resource of participatory art. The Certificate “Arts and Policy” is a brief series of four online seminars and four in person workshops to address the skepticism of many decision makers regarding the arts as practical interventions. They learn to think like artists and to acknowledge what artists contribute to society. Born of the imposed isolation and time to think during the Covid-19 lockdown, Renaissance Now revives the early modern spirit of exploration and engagement to respond to contemporary crises.
That is what happened in the Italian Renaissance, a model for development that we can refresh today. The Renaissance broke from conventional practices and reshaped Europe with effects felt worldwide, unequally as we know. The posterchild for Italy’s Renaissance is the Duomo in Florence. It was a collaboration between the Medici and a young architect who promised to build the tallest cathedral in Europe without external supports. Other investors dismissed the architect Filippo Brunelleschi as delusional and dangerous because bricks would fall on many heads. But the Medici risked their money and credibility on him. The risk paid off in prestige and power for the Medici. As Renaissance men they were not experts in everything —despite the current popular usage—but people who know how to collaborate and to trust the expertise of partners. How did this boldness erupt in the 1400s? What conditions prepared an astounding shift from God-centered living to putting humans at the center of human life? Why did intellectuals and artists opt for secular careers instead of going to the cloisters? The moment marked the end of a plague. Europe was emerging from a devastating disease that had lasted for almost a century. This was a wakeup call to the value of life on earth, like today’s wakeup call as we emerge from isolation and witness the devastation of our planet.
In post-pandemic times, the opportunity and obligation to be renaissance people includes everyone. We can learn from current social innovations through cases for culture and trigger new innovations with support from decision makers. Using the Renaissance name conjures a drive to engage lockdown pent-up energy to experiment and to collaborate in response to urgent challenges. Climate disaster, food insecurity, depression, inequalities of gender and race, among other challenges remain intractable if we treat them with one skill set or another. Each challenge depends on all the others, Harvard’s Fawwaz Habbal explained years ago when the United Nations first issued its 16 Sustainable Development Goals. Experts who remain in silos miss the connections while collaborators show more ambition and more humility. Contemporary societies require this combination of boldness and admiration for one another. We thrive on inclusion and broad participation in public life while exclusions produce and predict more inequality, scarcity, and violence.
Coming out of lockdown and having survived the terror of cluelessness about Covid we now face another fundamental terror, a fear for the future of our planet. Centuries of environmental abuse have rendered a deteriorated earth into a fragile and unreliable platform for human life. It is a shifting terrain of natural disasters and desperate migrations. Massive movement of people who cannot look back to lands that are off limits because of war and/or famine challenge the coherence of national cultures and identities. This challenge provokes either defensive exclusions or innovative ways to welcome foreigners. Humane models exist and can, perhaps, take the lead, if the advantages of hospitality become evident to decision makers. Cases for Culture can help to do this work. Implementation with measurable results can produce new cases for culture in a virtuous circle of collaboration and ever-increasing participation in programs that use arts to care for human life and for the planet.