Artistic Citizenship: A Public Voice for the Arts

by Campbell; Mary Schmidt

• ISBN13: 9780415978668
• ISBN10: 0415978661
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2006-06-21
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

How do people in the creative arts prepare for, and participate in, civic life? This question is central to anyone involved in arts education and in the creation of public policy for the arts. Celebrity endorsements of political candidates and controversies over NEA funding aside, the role of the artists - student and professional - must increasingly be couched in terms of the social: artists make art, but they also exercise their cultural citizenship as explainers, teachers, and advocates. This volume will be developed at NYU, where the Tisch School of the Arts (not coincidentally founded in 1965, the year the NEA came into being) is one of the country's premier institutions for arts education. Mary Schmidt Campbell and Randy Martin are putting together a volume that will explore the central questions of "artistic citizenship," a term they create here to explore a unique and powerful form of civic identity. The list of contributors, all of whom have or have had some connection to the TischSchool, include the novelist E.L. Doctorow, performance artist Karen Finley, film and television scholar Toby Miller, Arvind Rajagopal, theatre guru Richard Schechner, cultural theorist Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Deborah Willis, George Yudice, and the African writer Ngugi Wa Thiongo.

Table of Contents

Artistic Citizenship: Introduction	1	(22)
Randy Martin
The Role of the Arts in a Time of Crisis	23	(10)
Mary Schmidt Campbell
A Polity of Its Own Called Art?	33	(10)
Richard Schechner
Encounters with Censorship	43	(8)
Ngugi Wa Thiong'o
Address to the Students of the Tisch School for the Arts, New York University, September 14, 2001	51	(8)
E. L. Doctorow
Responsible Looking	59	(18)
Deborah Willis
A Praise of Doubt	77	(20)
Gail Segal
Screening Citizens	97	(18)
Toby Miller
Patriotism, Fear, and Artistic Citizenship	115	(22)
Robert Stam
Ella Shohat
Art for Whose Sake? Artistic Citizenship as an Uncertain Thing	137	(14)
Arvind Rajagopal
Public and Violence	151	(12)
George Yudice
``Twixt Cup and Lip'': Intentions and Execution of Community-Based Art as Civic Expression	163	(18)
Jan Cohen-Cruz
Participating in Artistic Citizenship: Constructing a National Narrative---Considering the Passion of Terri Schiavo	181	(16)
Karen Finley
Contributors	197	(4)
Index	201