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The Fate of the Arts
Spring Colloquium 2004
For
more than a century, the arts have undergone a strange
and difficult evolution. In the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, there were those who looked to the
arts with the highest expectations, regarding them as a
source of deep personal meaning and public cohesion. From
Romanticism to humanistic Marxism, the hope was held that
the arts would reflect the highest ideals of humanity in
such a way that they would be, in effect, an alternative
expression of transcendence in a secular society. By the
end of the twentieth century, it was clear that the arts
had failed to achieve this promise. Today, not only have
much of the arts turned in on themselves in a tangle of
subjectivity, leaving many unsure just what the arts are,
they have also been too easily co-opted by the dominant
powers of market forces, technology, and politics.
Whereas the Romantics found hope in the transcendental
power of poetry, and the Modernist avant-garde saw in the
arts the potential for political change, many people in
contemporary society see the arts as esoteric, distant,
and irrelevant. The drive among artists to differentiate
the arts from the prevailing institutional powers of modern
life has led them to employ increasingly refined and difficult
meanings that their audiences have grown weary of trying
to follow. Such tactics have failed to preserve a clear
purpose for the arts amidst the various forms of modern
institutional power.
The fate of the visual arts provides an excellent example.
Corporations now not only fund, but control, whole wings
of many of the country’s leading museums. New digital technologies
have made it easier for marketing firms to appropriate
the images of classical art. Government-funded arts programs
are repeatedly subjected to partisan politics and find
their budgets being cut or restored as new officials reverse
the decisions of their predecessors. These and other developments
reveal a society deeply divided over the importance of
the arts to education, citizenship, and a vital, energetic
democracy.
At this critical juncture, when the ability to envision
the arts as integral and meaningful to our society is all
but lost, we are bringing together, for a two-day symposium,
a group of leading thinkers and practitioners to consider
the contemporary place and potential of the arts. What
are the cultural conditions that have brought us to this
point? In what way have the arts lost their ability to
hold sway over the public imagination, and what does that
say about the society we live in? What kind of influence
can the arts exert within a society dominated by the forces
of the free market, information technologies, and political
power? What alternative structures, communities, and institutions
are needed so that the arts become an integral part of
our collective public life? In a time when the use and
usefulness of the arts are contested more than ever, it
is vitally important that we grapple with the challenges
facing these forms of imaginative expression that have
long been near the heart of human society and consider
their possible futures.
Papers from this colloquium were published in the Summer
2004 issue of The Hedgehog Review. |
