Americans for the Arts

Animating Democracy’s new Aesthetic Perspectives framework spawned multiple parallel scenarios in my head. In one, I was continuing my conversation from a few weeks ago with a foundation grant officer, who told me that their organization was “not so interested in social justice”; you simply had to “have artistic excellence.” I had presented my most cogent argument that artistic excellence is often conceptualized in dangerously narrow ways, to the detriment of appreciating arts and social justice work—only to be brushed aside. What would have happened if the framework, offering many different ways of reading “excellence” in socially engaged art, had been at my fingertips then? 

Why is beauty, a word often included in definitions of aesthetics, missing from the list of 11 attributes of excellence in the Aesthetic Perspectives framework? It is a question that prompted many conversations during the making of the framework as we wrestled with exclusive connotations of “taste” and what is “beautiful.” I posit that the sum total of the 11 aesthetic attributes complexifies beauty and provides a framework for reconsidering what is beauty in Arts for Change. 

On June 21, 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its opinion in the case South Dakota v. Wayfair. In essence, the Court ruled that state and local governments can require retailers with no physical presence in the state to collect sales tax on those sales. The Court ruled that the standard for determining the constitutionality of a state tax law is whether the tax applies to an activity that has “substantial nexus” with the taxing state; i.e., the Court threw out a previous requirement for “physical presence.” Previously, if the vendor didn’t have physical presence in the state where the buyer was, there was no requirement on the business to collect the tax.. Now, practically, how does a seller know in which state to collect tax? Is it where the seller is shipping it? Is it the billing address? And what does this mean for artists and art sellers?

The worlds of community development and art for social change are intersecting frequently these days, and this leads, at least, to a need for simultaneous translation and patience if not treatment for outright culture shock. How do we talk about and track these new types of interactions? How are the respective practitioners getting along? And what happens when a planner, researcher, and evaluator steeped in 35 years of relatively conventional assessment of community development issues and organizations—that would be me—needs to understand, appreciate, and gain insights about the radically different styles, motivations, and ways of seeing and interacting that are employed by artists engaged in social change?

Visiting a retrospective exhibition of the art and film of Robin Lloyd and Doreen Kraft reminded me of how many arts administrators are also artists in our community. In the workplace, artists have certain advantages, particularly with the never-ending aspiration to improve. While building upon technique and experience, curiosity leads artists to explore new horizons. And, resiliency and adaptability are central to an artist’s process, and crucial for an organization’s sustainability.

Animating Democracy’s new beautiful Aesthetic Perspectives framework gives voice and importance to the myriad aspects that work together to create strong art for social change. With this lens, it adds important ways of seeing “quality” in general, offering an eclectic voice in the family of other frameworks that describe what quality and excellence is—in product, in process, and in programs. Able also to hold the paradoxes, it states, “Ambiguity, contradiction, and co-existence are essentials for a tolerant democratic society. Art can help us live with the ambiguities and contradictions of our world; it can show us how each thing contains its opposite.”