I’m on the road with time for just a quick note to tell you that on May 12th, more than sixty activist artists, community artists, creative organizers and uncategorizable fellow travelers took part in a White House briefing I helped to organize. Actually, it was two meetings in one: I’d proposed a meeting of community …
I’ve been waiting a week for the obituary on Augusto Boal that appeared in Saturday’s New York Times. He passed away last Saturday at the age of 78. Boal was a giant figure and a defining influence on the practice of art that is simultaneously the practice of politics (and though some Boal disciples might …
The most-forwarded article award for this week goes to “The Creativity Stimulus” by my friend Jeff Chang, which appears in the May 4, 2009 edition of The Nation. It’s a concise and compelling argument for the vital role that artists and artists-activists can play in democratic renewal and national recovery: Every moment of major social …
Two more video clips have been produced to advocate putting artists to work as part of national recovery. One features movie star Peter Coyote, and the other features…well, as you can see—me. You can access both videos, plus one starring actor Bill Irwin, at my YouTube channel. I’ll be writing more soon about how others …
In ordinary discourse, beauty can be an answer: what nourishes the spirit, kindles desire, soothes the heart? But in the more self-referential realms of ArtWorld, it is a question. Is “mere beauty” a mask for deeper truth? Does it snag the eye, diverting attention from whatever essence it adorns? Is it a fancy name for …
By now, I know my tribe: like Lewis Mumford, “I’m a pessimist about probabilities; I’m an optimist about possibilities.” (Or like Gramsci: “Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.”) If you’re a member too, perhaps you also watched Battlestar Galactica, a sci-fi series that just ended (but will certainly be available in one form …
It’s exciting and scary to be present at a birth. I’m not thinking of the literal kind except as an unimpeachable source of metaphor for the birth of an idea: as with a living being, we look for wholeness and soundness, the fulfillment of hopes in a generous measure of new possibility. For some time, …
We humans are good at condemning other people’s sins of omission. There’s a whole publishing industry around how much the average German knew about Nazi atrocities, for instance, calibrating ordinary people’s exact degree of culpability for what was done in their names. But it’s much harder to admit the same faults in our own and …
Intimations of spring (my first in the Midwest) are everywhere. It’s been amazingly warm, with passers-by in shirtsleeves. Yesterday on my walk I saw thick green clumps of narcissus and daffodil thrusting through the earth. The tips of branches that had very recently looked dead have now swollen into buds, smooth or fuzzy according to …
My heart goes out to President Obama on his thus far unrequited desire to form a more perfect union with the other party. I understand what he is trying to do, but I’m worried that he doesn’t understand why it won’t succeed just now. Consensus is a beautiful idea. In Aristotle’s philosophy, everything has a …