What is a musician’s response to the condition of the world? Do musicians have an obligation and an opportunity to serve the needs of the world with their musicianship? At a time of crisis for the classical music profession, with a changing commercial landscape, a shrinking audience base, and a contraction in the number of professional orchestras, how does a young musician construct a career today? Are we looking at a dying art form or a moment of reinvigoration? In this course we will develop a response to these questions, and we will explore the notion that the classical musician, the artist, is an important public figure with a critical role to play in society. The course will include inquiry into a set of ideas in philosophy of aesthetics; a discussion about freedom, civil society, and ways that art can play a role in readying people for democracy; discussion on philosophy of education as it relates to the question of positive social change; and an exploration of musical and artistic initiatives that have been particularly focused on a positive social impact. Guiding questions for this course inquiry will include: - How can classical music effect social change? - How has music made positive change in communities around the globe? - What can the field of classical music learn from other movements for social change? - How have educators and philosophers thought about the arts and their connection to daily contemporary life? Each class will explore one critical question through lectures, discussions, interviews, or documentaries.
5.4 - Conversation with Jamie Bennett of ArtPlace America
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来自 Yale University 的课程
音乐与社会运动
64 个评分
从本节课中
Arts and Urban Renewal
How have the arts been a driving force for change in American cities? What are the potentials and pitfalls when positioning artists in this role? This class will pursue these questions through a series of case studies, including a video tour of arts organizations focused on urban renewal in Providence and New Haven, and the development of Lincoln Center in New York City.
与讲师见面
Sebastian RuthVisiting Lecturer in Community Engagement
Yale School of Music
So, I am Jamie Bennett and I'm currently the executive director of ArtPlace America.
And I arrived at this job
after a career that's been almost exclusively focused on nonprofit art and culture.
So, I started out actually as a grant writer at The New York Philharmonic.
Then I was lucky enough to go on and work in fundraising at The Museum of Modern Art.
I worked with a philanthropist called Agnes Gund.
I worked with the city of New York,
with the Department of Cultural Affairs as chief of staff to the commissioner.
And right before this job,
I was chief of staff at the National Endowment for the Arts,
working with then chairman Rocco Landesman,
as part of President Obama's administration.
And I've been here at ArtPlace for about a year and a half.
And ArtPlace is you know Sebastian is a partnership among 15 foundations,
eight federal agencies and six banks and financial institutions.
And we work to position art and culture
as a core sector of community planning and development.
So what we mean by that is just simply that any time
a mayor seeks a conversation about the future of her community,
we want it to be housing,
transportation, art and culture,
public safety, open space,
all around the table.
Each of those, as being understood as
a sector that is part of a healthy vibrant community.
Each of those, understood as needing planning and investments from its community.
And each of those, understanding that it itself has a responsibility to contribute
back to its overall community's future beyond its property worth.
It's not just enough to make sure that your theater,
your orchestra is exquisitely run,
which is hugely important,
but you're also a neighbor.
You also exist within a community and all of the issues and
concerns that are part of that community are issues
and concerns to you as an organization or as an artist.
I wonder if you would characterize the work of ArtPlace as being part
of a recent way of thinking about
the role of the arts and arts organizations within the context of communities or cities.
One of the things that we spend a lot of time talking about,
is the framework that we work within is this phrase, ''Creative Placement.''
And, ''Creative Placemaking'' as a phrase is relatively new.
It was the 2010 White Paper by Ann Markusen and Anne Gadwa,
that really introduced that phrase into wide usage here in the United States.
But one of the things they take a lot of time to talk
about is that the work itself is ancient.
Right? So I was trained in theater,
I studied theater as far as my degree.
And I think of ancient Greece where
the theater was not a literal center of its community.
It was also the center of government,
the center of religion,
the center of social life.
And friends of mine who come out of
the visual arts background point to the Caves of Lascaux,
and so they actually talk about the fact that the earliest recorded history we have,
is communities that literally inscribed
their boundaries with pictures of their collective images, their collective experiences.
So here you have community that was literally being defined by art.
These pictures on the walls of Lascaux.
So, the reason that you need a new name or a reason
that new name could be useful for work that is at least as old as recorded history,
is that it kind of serves like an invitation to a party.
If we want to pull together a group of people that are working in this way,
who think that art and community are inextricably
linked and that they need to support and reinforce each other,
you need to know who to show up at the party.
And so creative placemaking is essentially that way of saying, ''Hey,
here are the things we're talking but here are the folks that we would love to
have come join in the conversation with us.''
I guess one of the questions that drives me and my work in
Community MusicWorks and one thing we've discussed in this course
quite a lot is in fact the artistic production and
the sense of contribution intricately connected.
Not just this happens to be that we're doing art in this context,
but in fact the art we make is informed by the place we are,
the community we're in and vice versa,
that there's an impact on or an imprint on public life because
of the activity and the process of being artist in a community.
I wonder thinking about the
opposite or the contribution of art to place.
There is certainly a problematic dimension,
and I know you've spent a lot of time sort of
critically defining and clarifying at ArtPlace,
there is the problematic dimension of
the pattern of artists coming into
a place and this sort of gentrifying effect that happens,
so that there is an attractiveness of an artistization to a place.
And gradually the people that might have
been in that place or that might have in fact been the very people,
the artists or artistization were intending to serve become displaced because
the value of properties goes up and the kinds of
clientele come from other parts of a city.
And I wonder how you're talking about that
these days and what the positive answer to some of these problems is.
And what's interesting is our work is sort of
talking about the way artists can help shape their communities.
And yet the first sentence that I think has ever been uttered in
every Q and A that I've ever done in every public setting for the last year and a half,
someone says, ''Oh, I get it,
we'll get artists to move to a community.''
So artists are somehow defined as people who don't live in a community.
Right? This is weird dichotomy that we Americans hold in our heads.
That there are these things called artists,
and there are these people called,
community And periodically these artists move to a community and do things to and in it.
So I think one of the things that really important to
unpack is that artists live in communities.
Artists are people. And that we talk often about the fact that
artists are the only asset that I can think of that actually exists in every community.
So, when you're thinking about the assets that a community has to develop,
not every community is on a waterfront.
Not every community is from public transportation.
Not every community is anchored by a hospital or a university.
But every single community has people who sing and dance and tell stories.
And one of the things that I think is interesting is there's a lot of
disconnect with people recognizing their neighbors as artists.
There's this weird thing where artists are those people who do that thing over there.
It can only be done in a tutu.
It can only be done behind Travertine marble,
and we don't recognize that there is a continuum of practice that is all connected.
So I think one of the first things that I think is
worth unpacking a little is that notion that
artists are not just people who move to communities.
But then there's also cultural displacement
which I think we need to spend sometime talking about.
And we don't as a society necessarily
welcome all community members equally in all of our spaces.
So in Echo Park, Los Angeles,
they were building a new public space and
Echo Park is a neighborhood that's maybe 93 percent Spanish- speaking.
And this new public space was build with zero signage in Spanish.
So I think a very clear message was being sent culturally
who was and wasn't welcome in that space.
There's a thread in this course,
in this discussion where we've been resurrecting
John Dewey and thinking about his complaint in the 1930s,
that art had become disassociated with
the sort of goings on of daily life but not so much like you know,
that you don't see art when you are at your supermarket,
but more of that fundamental human impulse to find
order and find meaning in the world is really where art comes from.
But that when we display it only in
certain settings or we think of it taking place in only certain settings,
we forget that actually this is something fundamentally human.
And as a birthright and as a natural course of affairs and not something
just that sort of
refines our everyday experience to the point that people don't access it.
When folks are sort of thinking about
control policy or they're thinking about in sort of the John Dewey sense,
we tend to create a taxonomy.
We tend to create some divisions among the arts,
that I don't know that citizens necessarily do in the same way.
And there's a lot of times when we talk and we
sort of conflate nonprofit arts organizations with art.
So for instance, when I was at the NEA,
the NEA runs in conjunction with a U.S. Census,
the survey of public participation in the arts.
And for a long time,
the NEA measured attendance at benchmark arts activity.
So jazz concerts, classical concerts etc.
and they found that 34% of Americans were participating in the arts.
And that's contrary to I think how many of us experience the world.
I take the subway to work.
Every other person is listening to music that entire time.
Half of the people on the subway are reading books.
People have art as a part of their everyday lives,
and one of the things that I think you're getting at
is creating art is fundamentally a part of who we are as human beings.
So there is no community,
there are no set of human beings that do not produce art.
Even under the direst of circumstances.
If you talk about Auschwitz,
or you talk about the Japanese American internment camps.
People were producing art.
So it is something that we all do.
It is a way that we connect with each other.
It is a way that we understand the world.
So I think, we connecting that continuum to make sure that sort of the person
listening to their headphones on the subway and the person
experiencing Wynton Marsalis in the Jazz at Lincoln Center beautiful atrium,
understand that those things are somehow connected.
They're not the same thing,
but they are somehow connected and they're part somehow of the same human impulse.
