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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.

	A crowd gathers in the Dome Room of the Rotunda to hear painter and art critic Suzi Gablik

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.

Each spring the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture sponsors a series of public lectures, held at the University of Virginia. The purpose of these colloquia is to provide an interdisciplinary forum for exploring and discussing issues of enduring significance and common concern. Often working together with other departments and programs at the University of Virginia, these colloquia address tough issues of abiding importance in ways that challenge prevailing assumptions and categories in the academy.

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