Createquity.: Quick! What’s the most important issue in the arts? Is it declining audiences? The fact that it’s so hard to make a living as an artist? Changing demographics and cultural equity? Unsustainable business models? New technologies? Government funding? Arts education? Gentrification? Creative placemaking? Where I can go to figure out what the heck I’m doing this Friday night?
2 comments:
Usually when we think about our society's connection to the arts, we think about how the economy and the arts interact with one another. The idea of studying our society's wellbeing in connection to the arts is something refreshing that I haven't heard of before. In fact, I didn't even know this was a concept that existed, let alone has been studied extensively in other industries. As artists, we need to consider not just the quality of the art we are creating, but also how we can improve upon our society's access and interaction with the arts in our daily lives. The arts are proven to have benefits to people's lives. Yet, this blog points out that the arts are generally not in the list of things that contribute to our society's wellbeing. This idea of trying to find the specific ways in which the arts contribute to wellbeing may be the key to improving our industry's place in our society's daily lives.
I found the inner debate of GDP (Gross Domestic Product) and GNH (Gross National Happiness) to be quite intriguing. The aim of both of these indicators is to quantify how well a society is doing, GDP in terms of economic success and GNH in terms of the overall well-being of a country. We are slowly approaching the dawn of a new era, a time when computers and machinery are doing the vast majority of the jobs once held by the middle class. With these jobs being taken by inanimate objects, what jobs are left for these people? The human race continues to grow in terms of population; every day there are more humans on this planet than there ever were before. So what do these people do to survive and sustain themselves, especially when there are fewer jobs to be had? If you’re good at reading between the lines you can sense the undertone of this question in the article, yet the article just kind of mumbles over the handful of GNH indicators that have been formulated instead of actually addressing the issue. Then at the end, the article wraps up with it’s “arts are good for happiness” argument. Personally, I believe there is an untapped answer lying between the success of the arts and the downfall of jobs which produce goods/services on an economically minded scale.
Post a Comment