Let's Switch to "Expressive Life!"

WE ARE THE ONES WE'VE BEEN WAITING FOR!
I weigh in on the conversation late because of fatigue from returning last night from eleven intense, engaged days in Cuba with colleagues from the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture and the National Museum of the American Indian meeting with Cuban museum and humanities colleagues involved in a range of arts and culture work from under water patrimony, ballet, flamenco, poetry, reinterpretations of race, culture, and national identity, and historical preservation among other arts and culture topics. Whether one agrees or not with the Cuban ideological and political focus, what a contrast in formal, affirmative cultural policy to our national cultural policy discourse or lack of one, until this stimulating consideration of “Expressive Life”.

In several countries around the world of very different ideological and political persuasions, artists and cultural workers, national and local politicians, various civil society sectors, and multilateral bodies are vigorously engaged in ongoing discourses about culture and the arts combined as a transversal cultural policy category which intersects other quality of life polices in such areas as spiritual well being, imagination and creativity, economics, health, security, conflict resolution and so on. In general these discourses illustrate the poverty of our societal focus on arts and culture and I think the urgency of arts and culture practitioners and related fields to break with our rather amorphous, reactive, often anti-intellectual discussions, and pandering, raw market posture, e.g. “Arts=Jobs”, in the search to foreground and get support for arts and culture from politicians and corporate patrons.

Provocative, yes! But I think a relatively accurate, real-culture-politic description of the national context in which Expressive Life is posited as a substantive qualitative focus and means with potential to “eliminate the dismissive, eye-rolling assumptions that now attach to "The Arts".

Although I do not think that Bill’s Expressive Life construct will supplant traditional usage of the words arts and culture, I welcome it because I think it provides a needed discursive framework with potential to stimulate-- as in this Blog and the UK’s engagement of the terminology and meaning--- a deep and ongoing examination of why we find the arts and culture, (artists and intellectuals) in such a marginal place in national life exemplified in the meager $50 million allotment of the $787 billion dollar stimulus package. Beyond reflection, I think Expressive Life as “voice” and “heritage” provides substance and direction for an expansive, productive public and governance policy focus. And Expressive Life has potential to prime a deeper discussion of meaning and range of arts and culture and help put behind us the often shallow practice of subsuming culture in arts’ articulations and diminishing or dismissing the arts in intellectual discussion.

So, I urge that we take heed of the song lyrics “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for” of Sweet Honey in the Rock and use Bill’s Expressive Culture initiative to situate artists and cultural workers and to elaborate arts and culture In the center of our national debate and policy formulation to re-steady our country and to reintegrate into the protocols forged by the community of nations.