Anitra Budd
When I was asked to write an entry for this blog salon, I was excited. When I noted the topic, aesthetics and social change, I was alarmed. In trying to analyze this instinctual sense of danger, I realized that the root of my feeling was my conflation of aesthetics with judgment.
The term aesthetics, like Walt Whitman, contains multitudes (take a look at this chapter by art history and education scholar Terry Barrett for a great discussion of the concept’s many dimensions). To consider aesthetics largely in terms of assessment and discernment is limiting, but not unusual. Consider the language in some of the overarching questions Animating Democracy will consider during this blog salon (emphases mine).
- As more art becomes socially engaged, are aesthetic frames useful?
- What aesthetic values and outcomes are meaningfulfor artist and community stakeholders in arts and social change work?
- What criteria can be framed that reflect appropriate standards and measures of aesthetic excellence in arts and social change work?
- What is the role of broader cultural criticism that considers popular culture and social and political analysis in assessment?
Frames, criteria, outcomes, standards, assessment—this is the language of judgment, which makes perfect sense. Aestheticscan be thought of as a system of criteria by which we judge art, and as an editor, I wouldn’t make it far in the profession if I didn’t feel comfortable making judgments about art. My fear is that too often, we extrapolate intrinsic merit from aesthetic value—I find it beautiful, therefore it is good, necessary, worthy. And in a capitalist society such as ours, worthiness, worth, is tightly bound up with money.
What do money, value, and judgment mean in a social change context? Obviously money (and too often the lack thereof) is an engine that drives many social justice efforts. Donations, sales, grants—in whatever form, in whatever context, the use of money contains within itself judgment: to grant another year of funding to that organization, but not this one; to spend money addressing this issue, not that one. These decisions, whether they affect a large organization or a small one, can have enormous effects on programs, staff structures, constituencies, and even missions, and they’re usually not made lightly. Organizations on the receiving and giving end of money often have a host of evaluation rubrics on which they base their decisions, and more work to refine and disseminate best practices in evaluation is being done every day.
Aesthetics can serve as a useful shortcut for making decisions. I can attest to this—in publishing, talking about a particular writer’s aesthetics, or a press’s, or an editor’s can aid not only in deciding where to direct resources (and, yes, money), but also in determining how to position a work or author, or how to group like with like (for example when the shared aesthetical aims of several writers form a school or movement).
But even though I can see the benefit in it, I sometimes find the consideration of aesthetic positions, my own and others’, maddening. The terrain is too slippery, too often caught up in social, political, and cultural modes that don’t have much to do with modern, multiplicitous life. Not only that, but aesthetics can take the form of personal preferences and idiosyncrasies that have simply solidified over time, and this, for me, is the most pernicious aspect of the concept. It forces me to keep looping back in on myself, a snake eating its tail: How did my personal aesthetics form? To what extent are they built on quirks of personal history, a happy childhood memory here, a frustrating encounter with art there? How much of my aesthetics is based on racist, misogynistic, and classist ideas that I’ve subconsciously absorbed over the course of my life? And as a culture worker, as someone who makes decisions about writing, how responsible am I for continuously interrogating my aesthetics?
I know I will spend a lifetime struggling with these questions, and I look forward to that prospect. But to imagine aesthetic frames being applied to social change work doesn’t appeal to me, it disturbs me. Social justice work addresses longstanding, systemic inequities around education, job opportunities, housing, criminal prosecution, and a host of other issues that are hugely important to the health of communities. Until we can reasonably separate aesthetic discussions from discussions of worth and value, and by extension monetary value, I fear aesthetic frames will serve as just another way to determine which socially minded artists and arts organizations receive money to continue their work and which don’t. And to my mind, the work these individuals and groups are undertaking is simply too vital to necessitate yet another set of funding criteria, however well intentioned.
I don’t think the possibility of an aesthetics divorced from a capitalist system is completely out of the question for our country. Over the course of this year, arts organization Alternate ROOTS undertook a significant exploration of aesthetics as the term relates to social justice work. During a Roots Week 2014 learning exchange, Alternate Roots founding member Bob Leonard, an arts organizer, director, and professor at Virginia Tech, offered this working definition of aesthetics.
“Aesthetics is an inquiry into how artists, in their products and processes, utilize sensory and emotional stimulation and experience to find and express meaning and orientation in the world and to deepen relationships amongst artists and their partners across differences.”
I applaud this definition not only for its expansiveness and flexibility, but for its noticeable lack of value judgment. I hope that with more research, dialogue, and productive partnerships, we can all work toward aesthetics that truly consider art and beauty as values in their own right, and not simply proxies for money.
