Artists, poets wanted now!

We need artists to invent a new culture, and to do so lickity split

by Kevin Potvin <kpotvin@republic-news.org>

Are we creatures of our culture? Is it true what Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, and Michel Foucault have said, that our religion, our national identity, and our sexuality dictate how we raise our children, what we do for work, and what wars we fight and which challenges we decline?

If so, then it should be merely a case of re-shuffling our cultural deck of cards to produce a whole different matrix of economic necessities so that we work, invest in, consume, and support those businesses that more closely fall in line with new emerging values about war and peace, work and rest, and consumption and sustainability.

There is strong evidence bubbling up all around us of a whole new set of values in our thinking about conflict, activity, and happiness. Of course there will remain in the landscape those who drive Humvees, those who wash driveways with garden hoses, and those who complain always about all taxes and suspect the worst of all governing schemes. But I have noticed an emerging critical mass of concern for the environment and its declining resources, for our behavior and the needless waste and damage it brings, and for our governance and the more equitable, not always just less, taxing schemes to govern with.

These emerging new concerns in our society I believe have sprouted up around the growing realization that increased productivity and consumption cannot, after a certain point, increase any further our general happiness. Also, it has become more widely appreciated that at current rates of per capita consumption, resources will run out: we are expending the capital, not just the income, and no trust fund—such as we might imagine the Earth to be—can long generate income if its capital is used up too.

If our behaviours are products of our values, and if our values are products of our culture, then if we want to change our society’s behaviour as a whole and gear our economic activity more toward a negative growth model in terms of consumption and toward a declining ecological footprint in terms of our environment, we should be able to do so by simply inventing a new culture.

Nothing simple about that, but when we think about who most creates culture, directs it, and infuses it with meaning, no one else comes to mind as clearly as our artists. We need to become a people who celebrate those who simplify their lives in inventive ways and who reduce their ecological footprint with brilliant new technologies. Most of all, we need to become a people who rally behind those who take positions of leadership by winning support for recasting public assets heroically toward these kinds of ends. It is, as it always has been, the job of the artists to lead the way in bestowing the prestige of their favour on the pioneers of these new values.

Bono, though the Irish musician produces only sham rock, and though he too closely attaches himself to leaders we know cannot ever be pioneers, does at least show that artists are not barred from thinking about and assuming a role in the direction of their host societies. The popularity of his music is not all about the beat and the glamour; the lyrics contained therein account for most of it. And those lyrics affirm a renewed social activist role for members of society, an activism explicitly tied to newly defined ideals of reduced consumption, smaller ecological footprints, and more equality.

Nothing could prove more that the artists are in control of dictating what is prestigious and what is dirty than the fact that ultra-capitalist Jim Pattison is proud owner of anti-capitalist John Lennon’s Rolls Royce. A generation ago, the most lauded artists among us, the rock stars, celebrated lifestyles of profligate waste and unlimited acquisition. Soon, their model was emulated throughout society, and everyone sought cocaine, fast cars, and trophy wives. A decade earlier, the Woodstock generation celebrated free love, less work, and city-level activism. Sure enough, everyone tried to emulate what thus was deemed to be cool, to the point where a young Michael Harcourt opened up a free store-front legal clinic to help young kids busted for smoking marijuana.

I call on artists today to get back to the serious business of inventing and re-inventing culture, and begin again to direct the rest of us towards new ideals and values that are more sustainable in a world where we must celebrate the slackening of consumption and the shrinking of our ecological footprints, or face serious civilization-threatening consequences if we don’t. Filmmakers, musicians, painters, poets, and writers are here urged to take crash courses on the issues surrounding the imminent collapse of our basic civilization-supporting systems, and to deliberately and in concert with one another hurry up and invent a new culture for us where different values will give rise to different behaviours that will steer us away from the cliff we are currently speeding directly towards.

Time is short and money is tight. You’ll have to do it with neither. For helpful hints, check in on the biographies of any of the greats who have come before you. There you’ll find that the most towering triumphs of the artist class in saving their host societies from certain ruin have always come amidst conditions of short time and tight money. Heat and pressure have always been required to turn a lump of coal into a glistening diamond.

Get to work now. For once in your lives, the rest of us actually need you. And those courses you took at the college of art? Turns out they’re actually useful for something.

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