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Will Lightning Strike?
Art…It is the light by which human things can be mended. – Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince
As an artist and an audience member, I know that art has the power to transform me. Some encounters I’ve had with art have left my consciousness forever altered. These experiences have been profoundly personal, and they have never failed to surprise me nor to scare me just a little bit – like an earthquake or a close lightning strike. I know these things happen; I just never expect them to happen to me when they do.
I vividly remember the first time I heard a work by Arvo Pärt. Kronos Quartet performed Fratres in Eugene, Oregon. Their performance took my breath away and marked the beginning of a meditative devotion to Pärt’s music on my part. I return to Pärt's music because it nourishes a part of me that I find difficult to reach, not unlike a destination where I think I know the way when I set off, but find myself getting lost and going around in circles.
I’m certainly not alone in my experience. The ages overflow with testimony about the transformative possibilities that may be accessed through arts experiences.
As a result, when I encounter a message – either written or spoken – reiterating the transformative power of the arts, I accept the truth of it. My experience lends credibility to the claim.
But, my experience also tells me that art doesn’t always deliver on its transformative promise. In fact, most times it doesn’t. This probably says more about me than it says about art.
Art’s transformative power – like grace and forgiveness – are ever-present. My openness to receive and experience these things is not. I suspect that I am not unlike most people in this regard. We are flowers whose momentary bloom is subject to conditions that we may or may not know, depending on our self-awareness.
Increasingly, art’s transformative and enriching powers are taking center stage in arts organizations’ sales and marketing campaigns. For example, consider the Krannert Center’s clever & memorable tag line, “Come as you are. Leave differently.� There is a promise here, a promise that many organizations are making, perhaps using different words, but with the same meaning.
What happens when we don’t or can’t deliver?
The fulfillment of this promise is not just about the power of art. It is also very much about the readiness of the individual. We can help set up the conditions that facilitate our audience member’s realization of art’s potential. But, we can’t open a closed mind nor soften a hardened heart.
As I wrote in my blog entry, Innovating Meaningfully, value destruction can occur when an organization fails to deliver on its promises. I have pondered this morning whether our enriching promises and transformative examples set expectations over which we have not nearly enough control of the outcomes.
This promise of transformation and insight has become so diffused throughout our sector – in advocacy language, in sales and marketing materials, in speeches, in blogs, in conferences, and in publications – that I wonder whether we have moved transformation and insight from the place of “it’s-amazing-when-it-happens� to something that is part of the expected product bundle? If so, can we reasonably expect to deliver on an experience that is so unpredictable and personal?
I hope that most audience members are like me in that they don’t expect every experience with the arts to transform them, at least on a conscious level. I would also hope that we might develop more fluent and effective strategies to prepare individual audience members for the value that is already embedded in the experiences that they mine for meaning.
Posted on May 17, 2006 11:15 AM | Permalink
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Comments
Neill,
I can't help but relate this to my dating life. Sometimes you have a wow experience, but alas, too often you find yourself staring at the waiter instead. Then, of course, I've tried the whole "education" thing, trying to shape him into something useful, but that's hopeless! Leaving my inhibitions behind hasn't worked either.
What people need to understand is that education has several components. It's not just Art History 101 or Art Making Methods 102. It's a facilitation of experience-making. To educate an audience is to make them comfortable enough so they will release their inhibitions and engage with the work on any level - intellectually, physically, viscerally, emotionally, etc.
When I was managing public relations at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery, one of my most enjoyable and fulfilling tasks was chatting with a particular noon-hour TV interviewer who had no training in art whatsoever, but who was fascinated by the "unusual" things he would see at SAAG. For him the "wow" factor was the anticipation of seeing something that he wouldn't see anywhere else on his interviewing tours (perhaps he would be off to the animal shelter after interviewing me...).
It's hard to always fulfil that expectation. It also brings to mind the much larger and more contentious issue of the autonomy of curatorial vision within a larger organizational mandate. But I'm not going there!
Intrigued,
Shawn