We are the Movers and Shakers of the World Forever, It Seems

My position in this debate was stated most eloquently by a man who studied frogs for a living, as quoted by a Welsh fighter pilot and re-purposed by an Oatmeal company hoping to launch a new candy bar. His name was William O’Shaughnessy. And he said,

We are the music-makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams.
World-losers and world-forsakers,
Upon whom the pale moon gleams;
Yet we are the movers and shakers,
Of the world forever, it seems.

With wonderful deathless ditties
We build up the world’s great cities,
And out of a fabulous story
We fashion an empire’s glory:
One man with a dream, at pleasure,
Shall go forth and conquer a crown;
And three with a new song’s measure
Can trample an empire down.

We, in the ages lying
In the buried past of the earth,
Built Nineveh with our sighing,
And Babel itself with our mirth;
And o’erthrew them with prophesying
To the old of the new world’s worth;
For each age is a dream that is dying,
Or one that is coming to birth.

-Arthur William Edgar O’Shaughnessy

And yes, my first exposure to this extraordinary piece of writing was when Gene Wilder hummed it, nearly under his breath, in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

And therein lies my strange journey to the “lead” side of this debate.

First, a confession. I am a die hard “follow”-er. I couldn’t agree more that there is something deeply, deadly classist, patronizing and insulting about the arguments presented  that imply that listening to one’s audience can only lead to creating bad (or at least shallow) art. Or that an organization’s job is to simply take whatever springs, fully formed, from an artist’s head and slap the right “marketing” on it and it will automatically find an audience. It reduces the artist’s impulse to the role of the gatekeeper, filtering out the “bad” in search of some pure ideal of “good” that the “audience” must then be educated to appropriately appreciate. And it reduces the “audience” to a passive, dull, “mob” and of whom we artmakers must be vaguely embarrassed. We must serve them, but only while making sure they understand we are above them. It conceives of the audience as a kind of monolith, needing  to be tamed or improved, rather than a collection of individuals whose life experiences and curiousity combine to bring them to the moment of intersection with a work of art.

This subtle, pervasive contempt for the audience is killing our institutions. This belief that only the “right sort” has earned the right to critique our artistic product ignores the (apparently uncomfortable) fact that each and every audience member is already critiquing, moment to moment, every work of art they experience. And they always have.

I do not believe there is an initiation ritual or an educational pedigree required for a person to be transformed by their encounter with art. I do not believe that a work of art has to be old, or prestigious, or anointed by the right sort of critic to create the subtle alchemy of experience that, to paraphrase O’Shaughnessy, “moves and shakes the world” one performance at a time. And I believe context matters. The Nutcracker was a flop in Europe before it became the most profoundly popular ballet in America. Josephine Baker was told she was “too skinny and too dark” for American audiences before she became an extraordinary success in France. And each of these examples are easy to discount as being “populist” or low-brow, although each have been a gateway for millions of people to encounter an art form that later became an essential element of their aesthetic lives.

Just as a cult classic movie adaptation of a slightly creepy children’s book ultimately led me to the poem written by a 19th century herpetologist that has become my life’s mission statement.

Incidentally, do you know what inspired the making of the film Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? The director’s 10 year old daughter had read the book and asked her dad to make a film of it with the help of her producer “uncle” Dave. Of course the film would not have happened if Quaker Oats hadn’t been trying to break into the candy bar business…

There is always a delicate dance of inspiration, discovery, feedback, resources and promotion required to take a creative impulse like Roald Dahl’s or William O’Shaughnessy’s and transform it into the packaged, presented event that we call an artistic success. And to discount the role of that 10 year old girl (or Quaker Oats, for that matter) in the process of creation that resulted in my discovery of my own aesthetic mission statement is to woefully misunderstand the artmaking process.

So why am I not on the “follow” side of this debate?

Because, as Chief Justice Potter pointed out in the 1964 Supreme Court ruling about obscenity: “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced . . . [b]ut I know it when I see it …”

Our audience cannot tell us in advance what experiences will transform them. But they will know it when they see it. We as artmakers cannot set out to create an experience that will “transform.” But we must be capable of recognizing it when it takes place.

Our audience requires us to go places they cannot, with a depth and a perception that their daily lives don’t allow time for. We are specifically tasked to sift and juxtapose the artifacts of culture in search of new meanings, new architectures for the “fabulous stor[ies]” out of which we will fashion an “empire’s glory.”

And to do that we must wander “desolate streams” and take odd tangents against the stream of mass culture upon occasion. We must seek the wilds so that we may discover untrodden paths. That is the only way of creating something that can truly  “prophesy… to the old of the new world’s worth.”

We must imagine (like O’Shaughnessy)  the worlds the audience cannot (yet). By doing so we call them powerfully in to being and create the future, not just of our art forms, but of culture itself. Acts of creation must be wild, or else they will never discover the untrodden territory that will transform society.

But that does not mean we should to ignore the experiences and images of the present moment, or of the community we serve.

As artmakers we have the duty to seek the wild. But we have the responsibility to present the relevant.

Our institutions are curatorial by nature. Curation is all to often reduced to the discovery and promotion of that which is “excellent.” Excellence is insufficient. As artmakers and art presenters we have a responsibility to select, not only the art that is excellent, but also the art that will most essentially address the present moment in the lives of the unique community that we serve.

That is how we fulfill our role as creators of the future of culture. There are times when the present moment can best be served by a 19th century poet. And other moments that may best be served by a ’70s children’s story. Our history can inspire our present to create our future. But it is the curatorial task of the  moment to select which histories, in service of what future.

To identify the artistic needs of this moment we must both seek the wild and rub up against the experience and perspectives shaping our community right now. To lead, we must listen hard to our community to help us define the questions of the moment. And then present the answer that only the dreammaker can provide.