Anarchy or Responsibility

By Christian Have

"This book is meant to spark a discussion about the need for cultural responsibility.

Art and culture has to make its way back into the center of society and success is the responsibility of everyone. A main ambition of writing this pamphlet has been to place the societal value of art and culture back on the agenda, and to change the rather close-minded understanding of the usefulness and market value of art that has dominated within later years. I believe that art and culture possess a value that largely extends beyond mercantile gains. But to achieve this value it is absolutely necessary that art, culture and the artists redefine themselves, their possibilities and - not least - take on a responsibility to ensure that their art also gains societal value."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Forlaget Underskoven
• Release date: Nov 10, 2015
• ISBN: 9788793299207

Book preview

Chapter 1

A new responsibility

There are several reasons that this is the right time to write a book dealing with the need for – and the necessity of – a new cultural responsibility.

Partly because of the several years of global increase in wealth has let to an increasing degree of materialism and focus on the market, utility and market economy at both a political level, in business and among the wide public.

Partly because the worldwide climate changes have made us aware of our own vulnerability in the face of global tendencies and challenges.

With the arrival of the Internet and smartphones we have experienced a radical technological media revolution, which has not been seen greater since Gutenberg, and which fundamentally has changed our society, our way of thinking and our behavior in an ever-changing world. In the year 2000 approximately 360 million people had access to the Internet worldwide. In 2014, this number had grown to around 7 billion – an increase of 741 % during just 14 years!¹

In other words, in the world of today everything is happening incredibly fast in relation to just a few years back. In no time, news is being spread all over the world. Meanwhile, social media such as Youtube and Facebook has forever altered the way we interact with each other: Today, Facebook has more than 1.44 billion (and counting!) active users around the world². Moreover, every month more than 30 billion links, pictures, stories etc. are shared between the users. That the arrival of the Internet and social media has fundamentally changed our world is beyond discussion. Who can even really remember the world before the Internet?

Finally, the current Western financial crisis has decreased public investments in culture and art so massively that we soon risk losing great parts of our cultural heritage because our states and societies no longer have the means to support them³.

In other words, our global society is facing an array of massive changes. Across the globe national states are affected by the economic challenges, combined with a new type of global risky terrain where problems cannot be solved by governments and states alone. These so-called ‘mega crises’ require new, common solutions and this in a way that incorporates responsibility and commitment. This calls for new analyses, new ideas – and new actors who take on a new type of responsibility.

But these massive global challenges have not just caused a political, economic and social crisis in particularly the western democracies. The crisis is just as much – or maybe even to a larger degree – cultural⁴.

When analyzing the changes of culture and art during this period, it quickly becomes clear that art and culture have gone from being something that we instinctively knew was important to slowly losing its natural reason for existing. Especially within the last 20 years, art and culture has been viewed as obsolete, and it has become a common perception that art and culture is no longer need to have, but rather nice to have.

To claim that the significance of art and culture has been forgotten within the last 20 years may not resonate well with a lot of people, not least when you consider that it is exactly within the last two decades that terms such as intellectual capital, the experience economy, innovation and creative professions have turned dominant mantras among the decision makers and politicians, and where researchers such as Pine & Gilmore (The Experience Economy, 1998) and Richard Florida (The Rise of the Creative Class, 2002) have gained status as business and social gurus with their focus on experiences, creativity and art as generators for economic growth.

But this is exactly my point: common to the dominant concepts of the last decades, such as experience economy, artistic professions, and creative classes, are their narrow focus on culture as something that has to be of use. Put differently, culture and art is not viewed as carrying any value in itself but rather as tools – to the economic growth of businesses, to place branding of cities and nations, to position and differentiate products, etc.⁵ The only real use of culture that cannot be discussed is the spiritual use.

As we in the Western World have become increasingly richer, the perception of culture and art as something important and valuable to our spiritual and intellectual wellbeing has been lost.

Historically, this development is rather remarkable: Throughout history the improved welfare of a society or culture has always resulted in artistic and cultural revival. The Old Egypt, the Roman Empire, the Islamic Revival and the European Renaissance are all examples of this.

Nevertheless, during the last decades, the massive welfare increase of the Western World has not resulted in similar cultural revival. Even though this period has provided significant progress within design, fashion, gastronomy and architecture, the progress has happened on what you may call the cultural surface: We are mostly speaking in terms of aesthetic achievements. We construct amazing museums, design fabulous expositions and construct great multi-arenas. But we do no longer know what to put in the museums, expositions and arenas. We do not know neither their use nor why we have them.

Borrowing expressions from anthropologists and ethnologist you could refer to this forgetfulness as the dawning loss of culture. And even though researchers are discussing the definition and impact of culture and cultural loss it seems clear that the Western cultural loss, as seen in the contours of the current cultural landscape, will have great consequences for our identity, our self-perception, our communities and our solidarity: From our societies having carried a somewhat common self-perception of our identity as a group, we no longer have a cultural foundation to cling to. Things that we once assumed important, essential and natural parts of our culture will now be forgotten – or rather: the justification for why these things are important, essential and natural will be forgotten.

Why is this important? Why are a common artistic and cultural identity, understanding and frame of reference important to us? Primarily because of two reasons:

Firstly, a society without any common cultural conscience is simply not coherent. If we lose the awareness of our common culture, we also lose the sense of why and how we are connected.