One of (many) side projects I am working on involves promoting the inclusion of artists in community development, and I don’t just mean aesthetically (as in go make some pretty art to make our cities look nice) but stragetically, philosophically, even ethically. My motivation comes from my fatigue with the perpetual cycle of artist displacement (artists move into affordable {undesirable} neighborhoods. Artists’ creative energies breathe vitality to the neighborhood. Businesses and upper class people locate to the “artsy” neighborhood. Rents and property taxes rise. Artists {and low-to-middle income folks} are forced out. You know the drill). That’s why I am one of many artists who think it’s time for artists to get involved in community planning, community building, and most of all in banding together to create our own affordable housing spaces.
My work is inspired by ideas, so I am looking for books pertaining to (social) Futurism, gender identity, urban sustainability, and aesthetics (sometimes called the philosophy of art). I’ve come across a book that I am really excited about: Reading Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art by Christopher Janaway. Just in the introduction alone, Janaway makes provocative inquiry about the historic Platonic-Nietzschean argument
about the nature and value of art. Plato (a tragedy writer-turned-philosopher) railed against the art form of his time: poetry and tragic dramas. He believed that philosophy’s rational argument into the truths of universal values (ethics) were crucial to improving the lives of individuals and communities. Plato felt that art was concerned with image making at the expense of truth and knowledge, and therefore was an irrational pursuit that was detrimental to universal knowledge and happiness. In contrast, Nietzsche believed that the value of the tragedy (and the arts in general) lay in its ability to touch and uplift the emotional aspects of the psyche.
It will be interesting and helpful to get a better grounding in this ancient argument, and I think that I’ll read this book along with Marzella Tarozzi Goldsmith’s The Future of Art: An Aesthetic of the New and the Sublime. (Goldsmith makes an interesting analysis of the three loci of aesthetics–subjective, objective, and absolute–and makes the case that sublime nature of art can overcome the nihilation of modernism).
