The Culture of Possibility:
Art, Artists & The Future

We are in the midst of seismic cultural change. In the old paradigm, priorities are shaped by a mechanistic worldview that privileges whatever can be numbered, measured, and weighed; human beings are pressured to adapt to the terms set by their own creations. Macroeconomics, geopolitics, and capital are glorified. They form the foreground of the world depicted by powerful institutions: banks, militaries, energy corporations, major news media. People are expected to make sacrifices for profit-margin, to go to war for oil, to accept environmental damage that threatens future generations—and often, to do all this for no palpable reward beyond “improved economic indicators.” Within the old paradigm how we feel, how we connect, how we spend our time, how we make our way and come to know each other—these are all part of the scenery.

In the new paradigm, culture is given its true value. The movements of money and armies may receive close attention from politicians and media voices, but at ground-level, we care most about human stories, one life at a time. Our deepest debates, our obsessions, our consolations, and our most purely discretionary choices about where to deploy our resources and attention are conveyed through sound, image, and movement, in the vocabulary of art. People care passionately about how they and the things they value are depicted. They revive themselves after a long workday with music or dance, by making something beautiful for themselves or their loved ones, by expressing their deepest feelings in poetry or watching a film that never fails to comfort. In the new paradigm, it is understood that culture prefigures economics and politics; it molds markets; and it expresses and embodies the creativity and resilience that are the human species’ greatest strengths.

In the old paradigm, humanity is stuck. By the time an issue is prepared for public consumption—by the time that dueling positions have been extruded like so much media sausage stuffed with empty platitudes—there is very little room to move. In the new paradigm, our prodigious powers of imagination open portals to the future through alternate scenarios that respond to social conditions without being constrained by orthodoxies. There are multiple sides to every story, and many stories lead to something worth trying.

The bridge between paradigms is being built by artists and others who have learned to deploy artists’ cognitive, imaginative, empathic, and narrative skills. The bridge is made of the stories that the old paradigm can’t hear, the lives that it doesn’t count, the imagined future it can’t encompass.

I feel that it is vitally important that young professional artists and arts educators hear Arlene’s voice speaking the truth to them as they begin to make important decisions about their careers, always guided by context, core values, and accountability. That’s why I purchased Arlene’s new book for the 2013 class of Sistema Fellows, and also why I invited Arlene to lead off our recent symposium on collaboration and community building through music education.

—Heath Marlow, Program Director, Sistema Fellows Program, New England Conservatory

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To order The Culture of Possibility in bulk (5 or more copies), email bookorders@arlenegoldbard.com for a price list. 

If we’re going to end this fiscal madness and start rebuilding America, we’re going to have to get creative! We need a tsunami of music, film, poetry and art. The Culture of Possibility shows us how creativity can take our story back from Corporation Nation, tilting the culture towards justice, equity, and innovation. I urge you to read this book!
—Van Jones, Rebuild The Dream

The Culture of Possibility potentially will change the way we think about culture and the arts. Arlene Goldbard clearly challenges our understanding of culture as “the operating system” through which we label social issues, while suggesting that it is through the arts that meaning or beauty gives “shape to concepts and feelings.” Goldbard is brilliant in her argument of “Hidden in Plain Sight” in which she uses the parables of “Datastan” versus “Republic of Stories,” social systems built on a linear, machinelike approach versus storytelling which augments reality through nuance, imagination, and empathy. This comparison equips the reader with critical knowledge about the world and the potential for the future. I did not find this book to be prescriptive. On the contrary, it is filled with language that invokes an understanding and appreciation of the enormous opportunities for artists to illuminate the Enlightened of “the culture of possibilities.”
—Raymond Tymas-Jones, Ph.D., Associate Vice President for the Arts and Dean, The University of Utah College of Fine Arts; former President, the International Council of Fine Arts Deans

The Culture of Possibility: Art, Artists & The Future comprises two main sections with a prelude. Read an excerpt. Either main section can be read first, depending on the reader’s inclination:

“Hidden in Plain Sight: Twenty-Eight Reasons to Pursue The Public Interest in Art” features 28 short chapters (most no more than a page or two) exploring emergent knowledge from many realms including commerce, anthropology, social science, medicine, spirituality, cognitive science, art, public policy, and others. Each chapter highlights stories, research, and emerging developments that point to a specific public interest in cultivating empathy, imagination, and community through artistic and cultural creativity. A few chapter headings:

• Art-making Is A Survival Trait
• Art Develops The Latent Human Capacity for Empathy
• Six Skills Intrinsic to Art Can Actuate Social Change
• Art Enables Collaboration Across Boundaries, Engaging Connection and Common Purpose
• Putting Artists to Work in Cultural Recovery Can Catalyze A Larger Recovery
• Art Can Heal Brain Function

“The World Is Upside Down” examines the culture of Corporation Nation in which human pleasures are channeled into optimal modes of consumption, each purchase triggering the need for more. People’s own cultural heritages have been devalued in favor of a commoditized American culture constructed of an idealized past and a product-placement future. A steady doom-beat tries to keep us feeling less than, lubricating the system with the perpetual hope that our malaise can be cured by the right acquisition.

This is juxtaposed with art and other forms of cultural expression: in essence, art is the practice of freedom. How art and artists are treated testifies to social well-being. And culture’s latent power to actualize well-being is enormous, because its contains the raw material of self-determination and connection that will allow us to outgrow Corporation Nation.

Using first-person stories, drawing on both history and headlines, this section calls for two types of action: greatly enlarging our understanding of art’s public purpose and importance and greatly reducing corporate domination. Although the official story may see the two as unrelated, the relationship is actually close and dialectical: artists’ skills of social imagination, improvisation, empathy, and resourcefulness are needed to break Corporation Nation’s grip on our collective sense of the possible, overturning the inherited powerlessness that consigns the many to live as subjects of the few.

Run, do not walk, to read The Culture of Possibility by Arlene Goldbard. This clear-eyed, deeply informed, profoundly optimistic vision of the true power of the arts provides a fresh framework for all those in the arts, for those who love the arts, and for a much wider audience. This wider audience includes those who care about a healthy democracy, social justice, and the fabric of U.S. culture—because Goldbard reminds us of truths we know experientially but have lost in the status quo patterns of arts organizations and advocacy. Read the book. Give it to your friends (who will thank you). Discuss it. Because The Culture of Possibility presents us with vivid and visceral understandings with which to engage an arts-peripheral nation in the centrality of our human artistic birthright and brimming cultural potential.
—Eric Booth, educator, author, senior advisor to El Sistema

The Culture of Possibility: Art, Artists & The Future
Arlene Goldbard
Waterlight Press
194 pages
Library of Congress Control Number: 2013937647
ISBN-10 0989166910
ISBN-13 978-0989166911
www.cultureofpossibility.net

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To order The Culture of Possibility in bulk (5 or more copies), email bookorders@arlenegoldbard.com for a price list. 
To contact Arlene Goldbard about talks, workshops, and readings, send an email to arlene@arlenegoldbard.com