"Over the two arts conventions I've just marshaled through, one particular comment has been bouncing around in my head more than others. It was said during one of the many AmericaSpeaks caucus sessions in Denver, that gathered groups of 8 to 10 cross-disciplinary participants to talk about larger, common issues of performing arts policy.
The group was bemoaning the disconnect between the professional arts and civic life, evidenced by their tenuous support in city councils, state budgets, and federal policy. And then one participant said this:
''We need to stop making the arts so special.''
The participant didn't mean it in a snarky way. He had just realized the strange and often self-produced gulf between creative expression and everyday life. Art shouldn't be an experience we reserve for sacred and exceptional moments, he said. It should be an expected and completely normal part of everything we do.
There has been a perceived strategic advantage, at least in the past decades, in promoting the arts as separately important to community and society -- a unique and specialized form of expression that demanded special protection and focused support. But the group was coming to realize the downside to that strategy, which is to disengage creative expression (particularly professional creative expression) from the everyday, the expected, the assumed, the obvious.
Art and artistic expression shouldn't be the jewelry of society, it should be part of the blood, part of the muscle, and part of the bone. When our strategies set us apart from the world so that we can be separately admired, supported, and valued, we shouldn't be surprised when we are perceived as separate.
As John Dewey wrote more than 70 years ago:
As long as art is the beauty parlor of civilization, neither art nor civilization is secure."
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