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Peter Senge
This was fairly contrarian of Senge, given that the title of the convention is "Renewable Resources: Arts in Sustainable Communities."
But Senge is all about reframing. If someone asked you how your marriage was going, you wouldn't proudly say it was sustainable, he pointed out. We hear sustainable and we hear "surviving." We visualize unsustainable primarily through its antonym "unsustainable."
As a big-picture guy, he tried to get the audience of hundreds of arts administrators to shift out of economic crisis mode, and reconsider the arts (the act of creating, not the category The Arts) as a basic human activity. "Why do the arts matter?" he asked, eliciting an almost palpable sigh of frustrated impatience from the people who know the arts matter and just need other people to understand that so they'll give more money.
When we live our art, Senge suggested, we find out who and where we are--and digressed geographically to Chaco Canyon, where astronomy and architecture unite to tell a story about a people's place in the universe. (This is a classic visionary gesture, to enlist a far-off "before-times" to reframe the scary future in part as a return to a golden age.)
"The big evolution," claimed Senge, "is when the arts became The Arts, an abstraction. Abstraction leads to objectification and then marginalization. Art is a thing. A museum is a symbol of that." And the arts become marginalized because you can or can't afford the things we know as Art.
In this little parable you could hear tough love--as always, for those who have ears to listen.
When Senge shifted from the arts to the future, talking about the anger and resentment global youth feel at being born into an era of reduced expectations or IPCC head Rajendra Pachauri saying we have until 2012 to act on global warming, you heard a bell tolling. When he mentioned that the world has lost over 50 percent of its topsoil during the Industrial Age, pointed out that the 500 wealthiest people in the world earned more money than the poorest 416 million, and underlined the fact that the most acute global problem today is a shortage of drinking water, there would have been no room on his PowerPoint slide (there wasn't a slide, he was just rattling this off the top of his head) for the fate of an orchestra's capital campaign.
Yes, the arts can show us a new way of living, but we felt that Senge was subtly emphasizing that many of The Arts will not. Senge kept circling art used as a verb--creating versus the thingness summed up by "creativity."
He qualified the problem-solving mindset that came up with sustainability with the creative orientation that asks, "What are we trying to create?" (Dinosaurs, in their way, were probably very interested in sustainability.) Any arts organization wants to matter, to be relevant, but our impression is that Senge isn't betting on any whose relevance is primarily theoretical or abstract. For him, the arts matter if they arise from how we actually live, not from how we like to think we live.
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