[MUSIC] There's nothing quite like a global economic downturn to make you think about the really big, dare we say, existential questions. The global economic landscape has dramatically and irrevocably changed in the past few years, and this raises questions for any cultural leader as we seek to build or rebuild institutions that are meaningful, relevant, and sustainable for the next generation. I think this Gauguin painting is great image for all these questions. In the beginning of this course, we talked a lot about value, and our legitimacy and meaning as a field lies, in large part, in how we continually create that value. This session is gonna tackle the underlying reason for our entire field of endeavor which is gonna be challenging to do in a short session. But without considering and having a sense of intellectual ownership over why we matter, we could end up being really good at the how and not very clear on the why. We could even run the risk of, as has been attributed to the writer George Eliot, knowing everything about violets except the way they smell. Let's start with the obvious one and move quickly on. Cultural leaders are well versed in all the instrumental arguments around the arts, economic development, and educational enhancement. While we use this language to talk about what we do, and that language is compelling to donors, governments, and supporters, I'm not going to dwell on it beyond sharing this thought from the inestimable economist John Kay. I always think it's best to use an economist to critique the views of other economists when possible. Now I'm gonna take us on tour of the intrinsic value of what we do, the real and essential why of all of this, and you won't be surprised to know that one of my spiritual guides on this quick tour is John Dewey. As a species on this planet, we face broad societal challenges that are endemic and daunting. So where do the arts have any meaning in all of this? Well, as we're learning once again, and as we seem to need to learn about every 100 years, the search for meaning does not end in banks or gated communities. The arts create meaning outside of markets, and that's a radical act in the current world. Legitimacy for what we do is bestowed, conferred, or rewarded by society. You can't simply appropriate it. And with legitimacy come responsibilities to use resources wisely and to create good for the many, not just the few. We create relationships, not transactions, and our most enduring legacy will be those relationships and how we help people makes sense of the world. And engagement with creative expression gives us a greater sense of agency in the world, a greater sense of what we can achieve. And the legacy of the legitimacy of our field goes back to our earliest time on Earth. It would be extraordinary if it suddenly stopped with us. It won't. Arts and culture is humanity's scrapbook and family album. Let's take a look through that album and let it speak for itself. We'll start with the Makapansgat pebble, 3 million years ago. This is not a made object. This is an objet trouve, a found object. This extraordinary item is a worn, reddish brown, jasperite pebble that bears an uncanny resemblance to a human face. The nearest known source of this variety of stone is 20 miles away from the cave where it was found. One of the early humans who took refuge in this cave must have noticed the pebble in a stream bed, and seeing the likeness of the stone to the face of a human, brought it back for safekeeping. It's not food. It's not a weapon. And he or she was the first known art collector. Cave drawings from the Nerja caves in Spain show us how elemental the need is to record the world around us in pictures. And theater was as much a part of the Greek's political process as voting was. The warriors so beautifully made for the Forbidden City show the power of art as a portrait of power. And politics can be represented, and even influenced, by artists. The English painter Turner, a 100 years before the movement of visual abstraction, captured the terrible beauty of this landmark moment in English history. Shepard Fairey gave us an image for an entire generation of new voters. And Nick Ute captured an image in Vietnam that defied us all to turn our eyes away from the horror of war. Picasso also reminded us for all time of the chaos of what we can do to one another in our worst moments in his painting Guernica, and also produce something that makes everyone who walks past it smile. It's a celebration of a public space given by the artist to the people of Chicago. The music we create can make us smile with so many notes from Mozart. Or it can make us shiver with just two notes. The arts can adorn us, and they can mourn us. They can give us things of beauty for our home. They can disguise us, and they can reveal us. They can remind us of the beauty of the natural world of which we are only one small part, and they can admonish us to look after it responsibly. The arts can make us think about how we move through space and about the wonder of the human body. And they can make us think again about how constrained we actually are by gravity. The arts can be spectacle. They can be intimate like this netsuke, and they can be truly personal. Art is legitimate because it is who we are. After all, as Katherine Anne Porter said, the arts are what we find again when the ruins are cleared away. [MUSIC]
