I was in New York last week, mainly talking with groups of NYU arts students about roles for artists in social change. Every once in a while in such milieux, I run into the complacent view that artists are doing good just by being artists. It annoys me when people trot out essentialist ideas of …
Living in the San Francisco Bay Area, very near the liberal epicenter at Berkeley, I’ve yet to meet anyone who is now or has ever been a Bush voter. I?ve been thinking hard about this, because it’s in my nature to want to understand those with whom I disagree, and my encounters with their views …
Two headlines this gray morning by the San Francisco Bay. The California Supreme Court invalidates the marriage licenses issued to gay couples in San Francisco, and the governor of New Jersey, flanked at the podium by his wife and his mother, steps down, confessing that he has been living a lie: he comes out as …
The other day I took a walk with a friend who came to this country as a child, a refugee from Nazi Germany. We talked–are there any other topics these days–of the state of American politics and society. “It’s just like Germany,” she said. “If we were younger, if our children didn?t live here, we’d …
My friend Michael Dorsey has a good story on his blog for June 29th about the U.S. Attorney’s insane charges against artist Steve Kurtz of the Critical Art Ensemble. They started with bioterrorism and whittled the indictment down to something they thought might actually stand, petty larceny. But the crime the artist actually committed was …
A few days ago I alerted you to expect information about another great project by and for artists awakening to the crisis in democracy. SPARC, the Social and Public Art Resource Center in Venice, California, has inaugurated the National Call to Artists, a Web repository for images, songs, scripts, and ideas that can help increase …
In my blog entry for June 6th, I reported on a meeting of community artists. I described how the participants noticed that, out of political demoralization, we had silenced ourselves in the public arena, not even bothering to state our case. Unlike earlier times, we artists weren’t promoting a cultural policy agenda for the presidential …
At the end of May I attended a conference sponsored by the Community Arts Network, a uniquely rich resource for anyone interested in culture and community. It was conceived as a state of the field meeting, a check-in. While some of the participants were relative newcomers to community cultural development practice, there were enough 20-30-year …
The Nation of 17 May carried a piece about the shortcomings of the new South Africa. The article seems well-informed and mostly reasonable, and some (but not all) of the shortcomings seem short indeed. But my heart sank when I saw it. It’s not that I thought post-apartheid South Africa was heaven on earth, it’s …
In 1971, psychology professor Philip Zimbardo conducted an experiment in which Stanford students played the roles of prisoners and guards in a simulated prison in redecorated labs and a boarded-up corridor of the Psychology Department. They were all healthy male students who’d passed psychological tests and given informed consent about the deprivations they might experience. …