Cultural Agents & Civic Responsibility

Prologue: Welcome Back

• The Cultural Agents Initiative aims to bring civic responsibility back to humanistic education.
• Disputes over science versus arts and humanities were prevalent, with empirical fields gaining traction while creative areas diminished.
• The goal was to spark interest in humanistic education by emphasizing a practical defense, linking art with accountability.

Mayor Mockus and Augusto Boal

• Antanas Mockus, Bogotá's mayor, addressed challenges creatively with the motto: "What would an artist do?"
• Mockus replaced corrupt traffic police with pantomime artists and used fleeting stars to mark traffic deaths.
• Mockus's initiatives led to halving fatal car accidents, a 70% drop in homicides, and a threefold increase in tax revenues.
• Augusto Boal, a theater artist and theorist, staged public coproductions of urban life, including "legislative theater."
• Boal trained facilitators for non-actors to improvise solutions for conflicts, mental illness, and unfair laws.
• Both Mockus and Boal linked creativity to humanistic interpretation, becoming model cultural agents.

The Work of Art in the World

• The book takes inspiration from arts projects that deserve reflection, and these works of art are creative on both large and small scales, allowing for institutional innovation.
• The humanities teach the interpretation of art, attending to technique, context, competing messages, and aesthetic effects.
• Training free, disinterested judgment is crucial, especially in aesthetics, as it requires responding to experience without prejudice.
• Interpreting art and appreciating its power to shape the world can drive change and contribute to civic education.

Art's Ripple Effects

• Acknowledging art's work makes individuals cultural agents who make, comment, buy, sell, reflect, allocate, decorate, and vote.
• Humanists can focus on aesthetics, enabling fresh perceptions and new agreements.
• Pleasure is a necessary dimension of sustainable social change and not a temptation that derails reason.
• "Agent” recognizes the shifts Gramsci described as a war of position.
• Art is provocative and ungovernable and stimulates collaborations, it has no obligation to be constructive or ethically inclined.
• The book aims to discover patterns in art to inspire creative apprenticeship akin to Lucy Lippard's art criticism.

Linking Art to Accountability

• Many artists, like Alfredo Jaar, Krzysztof Wodiczko, and Tim Rollins, link art to accountability.
• It must be asked how humanists see creative expression: "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
• Art and interpretation shape lives by generating assumptions, desires, and ambitions and effect practical interests.
• Cultural agents are formed individually, as was Friedrich Schiller's approach in coaching artists in the construction of political freedom.

Humanities and Civic Life

• Pessimism is intellectually gratifying, but an optimism of the will drives life toward social commitments.
• One experiment involved an arts-based literacy program using literary classics as pre-texts.
• Harvard's Cultural Agents course hosts speakers combining art with professions like medicine, law, business, engineering, and government.
• The course has a fair where local artist-activists and students pitch problems and codesign interventions.
• Civic life depends on aesthetic training to develop imagination and judgment.

Out of Bounds

• Projects, like mimes directing traffic and legislative theater, begin as art but ripple into extra-artistic institutions.
• Rigoberta Menchú's testimonio about civil war in Guatemala was politically effective due to her literary strategy.
• Collaboration of various skill sets is needed to hitch unproductive social patterns to unconventional interventions.
• The "adjacent possible" relies on a combination of art and science to stimulate social effectiveness.
• The arts need adaptive methods to throw systems that thrust systems into crisis and create new forms.

Engaged Humanities

• Humanistic interpretation serves as an interdisciplinary courtyard for various fields (politics, economics, medicine).
• Success in art and other fields depends on coproduction.
• Engaged Humanities and Public Scholarship programs collaborate with artists.
• One divergence from convention is to highlight art projects with social effects that do not fit into existing academic fields.

Open Parentheses

• Attention to art's work in the world was once basic for education and civics.
• Fifty years ago, the instrumental effects of art became anathema to many humanists who retreated from social concerns.
• Art's purposelessness became the watermark of authenticity.
• Friedrich Schiller believed the aesthetic detour was an obligation to make new forms when old ones caused conflict.
• Schiller argued that aesthetic education would allow the public to imagine, play, and pause for disinterested judgment.
• Creativity and aesthetic judgment are foundations for democracy.

Art as Experience

• If it is useful to study the book and its artistic interventions in social challenges, it is because the text creates a discussion about artistic creativity, and is catalytic for creative criticism. “We lay hold of the full import of a work of art only as we go through in our own vital processes the processes the artist went through in producing the work."
• Art reframes experience, offsets prejudice, and refreshes perception, with interpretation sharing the civic effect.
• Artists critically interpret existing material into new forms.
• Critical thinking is both a condition and complement to art-making.
• Maria Montessori's achievements with disadvantaged Italian children and recent gains for Finland and South Korea show cognitive development from creativity.
• Business schools see management as an art form along with science itself.
• Aesthetic education has civic work, as learning to think like an artist and an interpreter is vital.

Political Art

• Political leaders like Antanas Mockus and Franklin Delano Roosevelt have art that can collaborate with government.
• "Press Here" marks contact points between aesthetic and political innovation.
• The book circles back to Schiller to call out a creative-critical faculty as an important human instinct and makes for optimism with humanist interpretations of constraints being critical in the field.
• The Work of Art in the World is a work in beta to generate commentary and criticism, as Augusto Boal has stated in his work on Legislative Theatre.