Can Art Change The World?
From Adbusters, August Issue of 2005
Robert Storr (Critic/Curator/Artist/NYU Professor):
I don’t think art can change the world. There are moments in history—in the 1930s and the 1920s and since—where very direct address of general social problems by artists has had something of an effect. It’s hard to say what it was or how to quantify it, but it’s undeniable they spoke for the times and people knew it. There are other times when merely the presence of a voice of dissent or a kind of questioning in public for which art is also a vehicle can do a lot.
I’m also of the view that sometimes people who should be socially active take refuge in art and make art as an alternative to being involved in the sort of nuts and bolts and oftentimes boring business of organizing and voting and demonstrating. I think we’ve been through a period where a lot of people have very sophisticated political ideas based on a whole series of postmodern thinkers but actually they do almost nothing, and they have avoided the full implications of having a political understanding of the world by having such a good rap. I don’t know how many students I’ve spoken to, taught, and dealt with who can tell you all about the crisis of late capitalism but in fact have never done anything political in their lives, or very little, and who can tell you all about what’s wrong with other people’s political practice but haven’t made any mistakes yet… There’s a dimension in which a lot of political postmodernism is a kind of shadowboxing, and I think that that is something really to be questioned.
Jennifer González (UCSC Assistant Professor):
I think we desperately need the term art, because it’s incredibly useful. Art is a conceptual category that allows for something that’s not already defined. So, unlike the notion of the commodity, art allows people to do a lot of different kinds of things that in other parts of culture they wouldn’t be allowed to do: experiments, investigations, formal innovations, mixings of materials, etc. I would say the category art has an incredibly important social function to play…
…Art is about as dangerous as literature. But you could also say: it’s about as dangerous as philosophy, which means it’s about as dangerous as Marxism… It’s dangerous in the way literature is dangerous: it raises ideas, it changes minds. …You can never predict in what ways it will change minds or change culture, which is one of its strengths. Neither can you predict whether a political philosophy will change cultures. What did Adam Smith know when he was writing? Did Marx know what would happen with his writings?
Rirkrit Tiravanija (Artist):
I say, yes, art can change the world, but I don’t know how. (Laughs) It used to be much more clear, what impact the statements and visions and images that artists have made have some impact on the world around it. But I also think it’s always working at a different speed than other things. It’s a different speed than politics. Even Beuys’ Frei University and things like that, they have an impact, and still do, but in a very different speed. The idea that the Green Party is a coalition in the German government has a lot to do with that. I think it does, but I think you have to see it in the long term. We’re actually in the space of possibility, so in that sense we have to try to work hard at using it and making it so that it’s possible, whether it happens now or not, so it’s possible to always have a way to use it.
…I’ve always thought art was kind of a space for possibilities. With that condition, I see it more as a place for making models, or modeling the possibilities… Art for me is the kind of space where differences can exist. It’s a place where we can discuss and show and deal with our ideas. This is a place where it can happen where we can put it up, look at it, discuss it, and have our views on it.”
