2006 Conference Blog
6 Posts in 60 Seconds
Six Posts in Sixty Seconds gives you the latest on Brewing Culture, as well as some "creative space" for contemplation and conversation about life's deepest, most defining questions. WWW.BREWINGCULTURE.ORG
1. GIRLS OUTPACE BOYS IN USE OF TECHNOLOGY: They mature more quickly, are said to be more responsible and do better at school. Now media-savvy girls are putting another one over the boys by leading the digital communications revolution. After one of the most comprehensive studies of the effect on children of the explosion in media choices of the past 15 years, the regulator Ofcom said girls aged 12 to 15 are more likely than boys to have a mobile phone, use the internet, listen to the radio and read newspapers or magazines. Only when it comes to playing computer and console games do boys overtake girls. The study, focusing on children aged between eight and 15, also showed the extent to which mobile phones and the internet are taken for granted by primary school children. Their 11th birthday appears to be the tipping point, with eight of out of 10 children having their own handset by that age. The phenomenon of children setting the timer on the video recorder while their parents struggle with the instruction manual also appears to have translated to the internet age: two-thirds of those parents also admitted that their children knew more about the medium than they did. (The Guardian, UK)
Launcher: Should this make a cheer or cringe? 80% of 11 year olds have their own cell-phones? Will this generation define the medium or will the medium define them? And how will we work to redeem technology in a way that retains relationships?
2. ADVERTISERS TARGET CREATIVE CLASS: BMW breaks its first TV work from GSD on Monday with commercials that compare the luxury carmaker to risk-takers who dare to defy convention. The new BMW theme "Ideas are everything" derived in part from GSD's alliance with writer Richard Florida, who penned The Rise of the Creative Class. (Florida, who has worked with GSD as a consultant, identified the agency's hometown of Austin, Texas, as the top market for what he calls the "creative class.) In a spot that shows architect Frank Lloyd Wright's famous "Waterfall House" being hit by a wrecking ball, the message is that corporate thinking has no respect for unconventional points of view. (AdAge)
Launcher: The Creative Class is the most unorganized, yet most powerful cultural force in American life. For what purpose do we create, however? How can the Creative Class put its resources, skill, and imagination toward some great purpose?
3. "BUZZ" CONFERENCE SEEKS CREATIVITY IN THE CHURCH: Hosted by Washington’s National Community Church, the two-day event was formed from the convictions that: the church ought to be the most creative place on the planet; the greatest message deserves the greatest marketing; and the Church is called to compete in the middle of the marketplace. Pastor Mark Batterson led the first session of the Buzz conference with the title of “The Buzz Commandments,” explaining the term “buzz” and how to create buzz. “Born on the wrong side of the track in the Judea outback, working in a carpenter shop until he was 30, he never wrote a book, he never held a public office, and his ministry only lasted three years,” said the Batterson. “Yet 2000 years later two billion people claim to be his followers. How do you explain that? I think the answer is ‘supernatural buzz.’ It was a word of mouth revolution. Let me tell you what Buzz is not. Buzz is not a marketing gimmick. Buzz is not a publicity stunt. Buzz is an ancient mandate. It is our job to redeem technology ...”
Launcher: If a stranger approached you on the street and asked, "Can you tell me where to find the most creative place on the planet?" What would you say? Disneyland? Pixar? Julliard? Hallmark?
4. NEW URBANISM AND THE AMERICAN DREAM: Almost without exception, the message we have heard, a message of deep concern, has been the same: the American Dream just doesn't seem to be coming true anymore. Life at the dawn of the millennium isn't what it should be. It seems that our economic and technological progress has not succeeded in bringing about the good society. A higher standard of living has somehow failed to result in a better quality of life. And from mayors to average citizens, we have heard expressed a shared belief in a direct causal relationship between the character of the physical environment and the social health of families and the community at large. For all of the household conveniences, cars and shopping malls, life seems less satisfying to most Americans, particularly in the ubiquitous middle-class suburbs, where a sprawling, repetitive, and forgettable landscape has supplanted the original promise of suburban life with a hollow imitation... (Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream)
Launcher: How does your environment contribute to your connectedness to others?
5. STORYTELLER AS LIFE'S POET: "A storyteller is a life poet, an artist who transforms day-to-day living, inner life and outer life, dream and actuality into a poem whose rhyme scheme is events rather than words -- a two-hour metaphor that says: Life is like this! Therefore, a story must abstract from life to discover its essences, but not become an abstraction that loses all sense of life-as-lived. A story must be like life, but not so verbatim that it has no depth or meaning beyond what's obvious to everyone on the street."
Launcher:How does a story abstract from life in a way that maintains depth, texture, and meaning?
6. HOW TO MAKE IT IN NYC (AND OTHER CITIES) AS AN ARTIST: It is still possible to thrive as an artist in New York City, according to several recent reports, conferences and hearings, as long as artists follow some simple guidelines.
1) Never Get Sick. A recent survey of independent artists in the city (those without a steady employer) found that more than a third "experienced a significant gap in health insurance coverage in the last year," and that 75 percent of those without insurance put off seeking needed medical care.
2) Don't Be Born Abroad. This month, the cellist Yo-Yo Ma testified before Congress about the "extraordinarily high" barriers to foreign artists.
3) Lower Expectations. Dancer and choreographer Bill T. Jones contrasted what it was like in 1982 when he started his company in New York with what it is like now for dancers: “Five of my former dancers…are really depressed…they are despairing.”
4) Make Sacrifices. Glenn Lowry, the director of the Museum of Modern Art, says that artists are “willing to give up a great deal of comfort – financial, emotional, maybe psychological” to be in New York City.
5) Learn To Love Inadequate, Overpriced Spaces. Those who care about the arts in New York City are increasingly alarmed at the trouble artists have in finding places to live and spaces to work – whether for rehearsing, exhibiting or performing.
6) Focus On Business and Politics. There are opportunities for funding and other support from corporations, non-profit organizations and government agencies for those talented enough, and savvy enough, to make the cut. "Artists need to be able to have the time to think about their art and to create," Ella Weiss of the Brooklyn Arts Council testified at the City Council hearing. "They also need to know that our society values the time they spend [creating.] The National Science Foundation funds pure research. Do we really ever fund pure art, just for the arts sake?"
7) Be Perfect. A composer who teaches on the faculty of the Juilliard School observed in a television documentary marking its centennial celebration that an average graduate of law school or medical school can still have a decent career. But it is not possible, he said, for a successful artist to be only average.
8) Have Hope.Yes, there are challenges, but some smart people are trying to address them. (Gotham Gazette)
Launcher: Still want to be an artist?
Brewing Culture (BC) is a faith-based 501c3 non-profit dedicated to creating, commissioning, and celebrating transcendent art and media. BC has two main goals: to build creative communities in ten American cities, and to recruit 10,000 patrons to give the price of a movie ticket a month to support redemptive art and media. This email, Six Posts in Sixty Seconds, gives you the latest on BC, as well as some "creative space" for contemplation and conversation about life's deepest, most defining questions. Please email: sixposts@brewingculture.org us articles, news or announcements.
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ABC: Artists as Reconcilers
Abraham Lincoln spoke here.
Betty Spackman too. The Bituminous Coal Queens of Pennsylvania numinously so.
Canaries in the culture mines, we crane our necks past the columns in Cooper Union, to listen. It is cold.
The columns win.
Dana Gioia asks us if we are a country worth visiting
Erik Lokkesmoe emcees a series of epiphanic moments in the eye of the storm.
Franz Mohr--Piano Tuner for Jesus--puts his apron on and tunes us up in this
Great Hall, and in the Great Hall Gallery you can
have your portfolio critiqued and network network network . . .
IAMNY is all about Intelligent Humility, Intuit Throat Singers and Ian Cron,
Julliard musicians,
Kitsch, key notes, Kirk can der Swaagh and other
liturgical mutts,
Makoto leading the pack,
Nancy Pearcey blistering our brains and
optional activities including an exhortation to Open Up to the Big Hammer.
Poets, peacemakers, and Piquant Publishers,
Quixotic perhaps, selling Spackman, Seerveld,
Rookmaaker. They teach us to Ride into the Storm,
Stand at the Margins, be
Storm Chasers at Starbucks on subways or
Third Avenue, send back measurements, thrive on the margins, till we have faces.
Understanding visual language, we are Upper Storey Artists we are
Vissi Dancers we do vignettes and in our
workshops experience wonderment . . .
Xample:
yesterday I listened to
Zimbabwe and Zipf.
A.R.T. Introduction
For the upcoming International Arts Conference’s 15th year anniversary conference, “Artist as Reconcilers,” I am preparing the following series of essays about art called “A.R.T.: Awareness, Reconciliation and Transformation”. Here is my introduction section. The whole content of “A.R.T.” will be initially be available to IAM members only, so if you are interested please join IAM membership ($40 annual, $25 for students) via the conference section of this site.
- Makoto Fujimura
What is A.R.T.?
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
Little Gidding, The Four Quartets
About A.R.T. (Awareness, Reconciliation and Transformation)
Introduction:
I write this in order to encourage artists and to help facilitators of the arts understand their role in cultural stewardship. While About A.R.T. is an effort to broadly describe what Art is, it is not by any means a complete definition. I am drawing upon my own experience as an artist and what I find myself teaching to others. I do believe that these principles are helpful to understand the role of creativity in our lives, and to contextualize our creative activities in society. I am ultimately interested in a dialogue that move toward a stewardship of creative gifts, and how we may as a society see artistic roles, and creativity in general.
I also write here to begin a dialogue among church leaders and Christians who desire to understand the arts. While this dialogue is not directed only to a Christian audience, I do speak and write as one, with all of the worldview assumptions attached to that pre-supposition. I make this premise because in all of the recent effort to define the importance of the arts, and critique of art and arts education, I have noticed writers such as John Carey (“What Good Are the Arts?") and James Elkins (“A Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art”) specifically describing their worldview as strictly secular. I find their discussions helpful, although I find that presupposition often breaks down in their own turfs as their ideas evolve, and they may not be as consistent in their worldviews as I am trying to be for mine. Nevertheless, I do think it is important to start out with a premise. I am not a secularist, so I have certain presuppositions that frame my discussions. I do believe that creativity is a gift of the Creator. And because of my theological framework, I believe that such a view of the arts will produce more diversity, more content and more color to all of the arts, Christian or not. We are created to be creative: and we have stewardship responsibilities that come with that gift. The more we find fittingness in the God given responsibility, the more freedom we will find in our expression.
It has been noted that we have entered the Creative Age. The Information Age, for us Americans and other non third-world countries, is over. India and China, and other countries have taken over the role of dispersing technology and executing productions: the only resource that we have that cannot be outsourced is our creativity. Thus, we are at a crucial moment in history in which we are witnessing a paradigm shift in culture, a shift that may be as significant as Gutenburg’s invention of printing. Just as the invention of prints caused many shifts in cultural values, the Creative Age, with her accompanying technologies, will usher in principles that formerly were considered unimportant for the everyday needs of the society. Some have called this time “post-Human” as our boundaries of creativity begins to have serious ethical and moral boundaries. Before Modernism, artists depicted flowers as flowers, asking “How do you depict a flower?” Modernism asked “What is a flower?” and Post Modernism followed with “Is there a flower at all?” And in post-Human time we ask, “Can humans combine their DNA with a flower?” In other words, we are at a point in which what we create and what we imagine will not merely be virtual, but are actualized into reality, and quite possibly, into our DNA.
If Gutenburg brought books to us, this age brings CG technology, virtual realities, and DNA manipulation. So do we study the sciences to find answers and guide our path? The sciences cannot reach into the supernatural, nor into the mysteries of our realities, because they are bound by natural, measurable data. Art on the other hand should and can reach into the very heart of existential mysteries sciences cannot tackle. But we need to have a clear understanding of how art functions, in order to begin to understand this role. Art of the past, it seems to me, is a great place to calibrate our place in history, and press our existential marker into the shifting tide of culture.
Some have moved away from the study of the classical and traditional in favor of erasing boundaries of the past. But we have found ourselves anchorless, without any agreed upon boundaries at all, ever so fearful of the future as a result. I believe that what we can learn from Rembrandts and Shakespeares of the world is even more significant today because they give us hope in turmoil, and therefore give us a picture of mediation to this age, in the power of technology today. The sciences and technology need this trans-historical dialogue on the arts, because arts determine our cultural values, and determine what the culture sees as beautiful and true.
Recently I spent some time visiting friends who work as insiders in Hollywood. There is a significant effort, I found, among the industry experts to create a more principled way to develop creative content, movies and the new media. After the success of Lord of the Rings, and now Narnia, we desire for more Lewises and Tolkiens to come out. These creative resources are not birthed out of a vacuum, but over generations of commitment to nurture and value creativity. The church has been mostly reluctant to take the lead in cultural production, fearful that those who enter Babylon will come out tainted by her, unable to speak for her values. And since there is still a vacuum in culture that the church abdicated to general culture, even if we desire more Tolkiens and Lewis, the church, in her present status, will be the first to reject them as misfits.
In order to have meaningful dialogue in this condition, we Christians must reevaluate our definition of creativity and art. On one hand, Biblical literalists and separatists (such as the “Left Behind” authors) may insist on that all of what is discussed in art must be literal interpretation of Christian stories, an approach which forbids certain art to exist at all. On the other we have secular purists who desire art to be left alone to the “good” desires of our hearts, self reliant and (in most cases) necessarily alienated from society. My approach in A.R.T. is neither of these routes. In order to lead, and teach our children to lead, Twenty First Century with creativity, we must speak in to our culture to value art and steward her with proper boundaries, and lead with a sense of responsibility. At the same time, we must realize that art is neither a mere tool to be used for ours or other ideologies. A.R.T. must ask deeper questions: what I have began to call “a five hundred year questions.” What we create matters: all art products cast their vision of what the artist consciously or unconsciously desire for the world to become. We are, and will become, what we imagine: and if we do not understand both the power and the danger of our imaginative powers, we will not begin to birth meaningful, and hopeful works of inspiration.
- Makoto Fujimura
2006 Conference Blog
Reporting from the 2006 Conference: Artists as Reconcilers