Do the arts have public purposes?

[Ken Egan]

Tonight Humanities Montana and the Missoula Cultural Council partner to host Arts Forum: The Arts and Civic Engagement at 7 pm at the MCT Center for the Performing Arts ("just off Broadway" in Missoula).

We'll discuss the public role of the arts. Is there such a role? How would you define it? Or should the arts be primarily about individual creativity?

[Debby Florence]

Culture is part of a person's identity, and the arts play a role within culture. I don't think it's possible to extract art from culture, even if it is never shared publicly. That said, it's really difficult to constrain "art," and make it exist for one sole purpose or another. For example, to relegate art to the position of "hobby," like it so often is, leads to lack of arts education in the schools, low-paid artists and designers, and a general devaluing of creativity and innovation. And we're all aware of how art and music enhance brain development in children, and reinforce language and math skills, and so on. To say art is for educational purposes only, deprives us of all kinds of non-linear, non-verbal communication that who knows, might be important to our social fabric? Maybe I am taking it too far?

Here's a link to a few ways that the arts are used for the public good, so-to-speak.

http://www.artsusa.org/information_services/research/institute_comm...

Here's a link to a Cultural Policy being developed by some arts leaders:

http://www.newculturalpolicy.org/index.php?option=com_content&v...

[Dottie Susag]

Here's a link to a one-hour interview by Marty Moss-Coane with Sherman Alexie where he reads poetry and talks about many things including the role of the arts in all our lives. I don't have the direct quote, but he suggests that the arts can't save us but they come as close as anything to making that possible.
http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast.php?id=510027 "Radio Times" on National Public Radio October 28, 2009

[Kim Anderson]

I thought the discussion last night was very good, and I hope we can partner with others to encourage similar conversations around the state. And I'd like to see the conversation move down the road, beyond the explicitly political/civic uses of art. What is the role of art in a society? Can personal and intimate art create social change? Could it be that Virginia Woolf had at least as great an impact on cultural norms as George Orwell? Is all art, by definition, moral? And who is defining the terms "art" and "moral."
just asking.....

[Matt Pavelich]

Art frequently prefigures advances in philosophy and political discourse. Art requires and promotes empathy. Nothing but art remains of the people who lived on this planet 30,000 years ago, and only through their art are we now aware of the quality and purpose of that existence and our distant ancestors' proximity. The first and most effective ambassadors between hostile groups of humanity are virtually always artists. Whenever and wherever art has been constrained or devalued there has been a consequent shrinking of the public soul, and disaster of every kind has always followed close behind. Our species, when it does not aspire to beauty, tends to collapse into ugliness.

[Ken Egan]

Thanks so much for this eloquent, moving "apology" for the arts. Lisa Simon and Ted Hughes' talk on war and the arts confirms your claims for the power and value of art and poetry. I can't help wondering how our musicians, writers, painters, filmmakers and more are representing our experiences of war in Afghanistan and Iraq. ARE we as a culture facing up honestly to what is happening to soldiers and civilians who suffer war today?