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a proposal to establish A COMMUNITY ARTS SCHOOL may 15, 1972 prepared by concerned citizens of fort wayne ind. OBJECTIVES The purpose of this proposal is to utilize a long established Fort Wayne School of Fine Arts and by means of curriculum change and program innovations, establish a "Community Approach" to the Arts designed to integrate the arts into the mainstream of American life. By changing the philosophical, theoretical, and practical emphasis at one school of fine arts, it is intended that it can serve as a model for similar innovations in the arts in other cities all over the United States. The intention is to take an existing arts institution and by the use of a community arts council, ally it to other existing arts institutions and disciplines, general educational institutions, and most important, to institutions that constitute the board fabric of all American cities that hitherto have not related to, or been related to, by the fine arts and artists. The principal institutional targets will be the business community, organized labor, and municipal government with the understanding that the long range goal is to achieve union with all the institutions that make up the typical American city in general and Fort .Wayne in particular. The purpose of this proposal to establish a "Community Arts School" is to remove the fine arts from a peripheral position in the community and the fine artist out of the role of being an isolated, alienated individual in American life. The purpose of establishing a "Community Arts School" will be to establish an intellectual and pragmatical partnership between professionals and students in the fine arts with community leaders in Education, Business, Labor and Government designed to explore and experiment in the area of creating a maximum number of roles for the fine artist in his home community. An important purpose for the establishment of a "Community Arts School" will be to make the arts a resource and possession of all the people in the community, thus establishing an institutional arts world compatible with the democratic principles of America. This desire on our part to create "A Community Arts School" is part of the revolutionary spirit that is being generated throughout America as the nation approaches its 200th birthday. After a hundred years of frantic growth and expansion in which "moving on" to another place to reach personal and national goals was a major element of American life and psychology, a new dawning of America has arrived, a new mature awareness that we have come to where we are now by tremendous energy and in many ways with an undirected and wasteful expenditure of natural and human resources. As we approach our 200th anniversary, we have witnessed a shrill hysteria of national criticism designed to prove that we have failed as a nation and that the ideals and principles laid down by our founding fathers were the mockery that European dictators declared they would be. A minority of doomsayers over the last decade have declared the eminent collapse of America while the silent majority has been reflecting upon the past and planning for the future. Reflection and planning are not immediately dramatic and hence occupy no newspaper headlines, nor receive much attention from national television newsmen. But reflection and planning does result in a multitude of almost invisible actions that collectively add up to dramatic change. The dramatic change, unheralded by the media, is that the majority of Americans have come to the conclusion that the fulfillment of America as a nation will be obtained by the conscious development of their own communities. There is a recognition that we cannot deny international, or national responsibilities, but that the challenge of the third century will be concentrated on developing the full potential of the individual human being and the quality of his life. Now that the basic material needs of the majority have been me~ the concerns for quantity are being replaced by aesthetic concerns. Clean air, clean water, beautiful buildings instead of decaying slums, are aesthetic and artistic concerns as well as scientific and health concerns. Excellent schools and universities housed in beautiful buildings . reflect a rising aspiration for communities to give all their citizens the chance for self enrichment and mental development. Contained within all these concerns lie the principles and practices of the arts. Scientists in California discover that creativity, the fundamental trait identified with the arts, is not an attribute of the rare individual, but instead is a fundamental human potential atrophied in the past for most human beings because society was not designed to allow most human beings to develop such a potential. Other scientists discover that man functions in any task better in an aesthetically pleasing or artistic environment than in an ugly one. Beauty within this context moves from a peripheral concern of a wealthy elite, to becoming a basic tool in the evolution of the American Democratic community. THE PROBLEMS If our purpose in establishing a "Community Arts School" is to integrate the fine arts and the fine artist into the mainstream of American life we- must define the arts in terms of the realities of American Society. This is a very difficult task because it calls for the actuality of sociological analysis. It calls for an intellectual outlook that views the arts as objectively real, subject to the same scrutiny as all of our other societal institutions. It is here that we run into a major problem roughly divided into two parts. The one important aspect of the problem is that the social, economic, and behavorial scientists, whom we generally rely upon to study man and his institutions, in the main have virtually ignored the psychological, economic and sociological phenomena of the arts. If you study the literature of these scientists you will discover that they seem to ignore the gross involvement of human beings in our culture with the great variety of visual and audio material that are a fundamental part of our environment. Because 150 million individuals alone in our society are involved for extended periods of time with the works of writers and artists who create for mass consumption through television, it is unbelievable that these works are considered a peripheral influence to behavior. In modern architecture and in the design of automobiles, furniture, utensils, and clothing, we can see the utter pervasiveness of the artists role in society. The enormous amount and variety of aesthetic phenomena in our environment should certainly seem the obvious target of research in terms of their impact upon society and human behavior, but the truth is that it is not. A cursory review of behavorial research will yield several hundred studies on the effects of toilet-training on human behavior, but only one or two dealing with the entirely universal behavior characteristic of all children in every part of the world spontaneously drawing and painting, singing and dancing, and inventing and acting out imaginary roles. As a primary example of this extraordinary state of affairs in the exhaustingly researched Benjamin S. Bloom's "Taxonomy of Human Behavior" published by the University of Chicago, and based upon the accepted scientific definitions of man, the arts were given one paragraph with an asterisk following it. The authors explanation of the asterisk relates that they seriously considered leaving all of the arts out altogether because they simply did not fit into existing scientific models. This is all the more extraordinary when you consider that the authors along with their university colleagues probably constitute the most faithful audience for the Chicago Art Museum, the Chicago Symphony, and the live theatre that exists in that city. In spite of the universality of human behavior involved with the arts it must be admitted that it is difficult for professionals in any field to escape the conforming orthodoxies of their institutional organizations. It is generally accepted that institutions tend to maintain their cohesiveness by the adherence to their initial belief structures. It is therefore understandable that many scientists are reluctant to tackle a brand new area of study that will interfere with their existing models. However, to preserve their intellectual integrity it appears that science cannot ignore the arts much longer, especially if they are specifically challenged by community leaders to stop doing so. The second important aspect of the problem of communities attempting to realistically define the arts in America lies with the professionals in the Arts. The historical definitions of the arts, the traditional explanations of the arts, began in religion and philosophy before the birth of organized science. Investigation in your nearest library easily reveals shelf upon shelf lined with books that extol and explain the arts in terms of aesthetic philosophy. Theologians and philosophers were authorities in defining man and his arts long before the advent of scientists, and frankly attempted to thwart the development of "the intellectual upstart." Even after the most complete acceptance of science and its technological victories of progress most professionals in the arts tend to look upon the sciences as anathema and inimical to the arts. The initial combat- between science and philosophy may in no small part explain the tradition of the determination on the part of professionals in both science and the arts to patently ignore or actively excoriate each other. The majority of the professionals in the arts tend to think of the arts in exclusively philosophical terms, sometimes bordering on pure faith that the fine arts are magically divorced from the empirical sociological, psychological, economic, and societal laws that regulate and determine the development of such other community institutions as businesses, schools, and government. Many professionals in the arts believe that it is heretical to apply other than a theological yardstick to the arts, less the gods, or as they are sometimes called, the muses, will in anger take away the artist's creative potency and reveal that he is but a man after all. And, so we find that both science and the arts are not surprisingly arranged in institutional hierarchies with antagonistic authority figures in both fields castigating and denying each others existence. Because the sciences have ignored the task of defining the arts, their definition by default has been left to the authority figures in the arts and their definitions on the whole are not too helpful to community leaders and artists in cities like Fort Wayne, which is a principal reason for wishing to establish a "Community Arts School" to take on the challenge. COMMUNITY ARTS DEVELOPMENT Within the last decade we have witnessed a cultural explosion in the United States. One of the results of this explosion has been the sudden multiplication of traditional and new arts institutions. Traditional arts institutions like the Fort Wayne School of Fine Arts, Art Museum, Civic Theatre, Ballet Company, and Philharmonic have proliferated throughout the nation in communities that previously had no such institutions. Under the classification of new arts institutions, we have the Arts Council Movement which includes State Arts Councils, like the Indiana State Arts Commission, and community arts councils like the Fort Wayne Fine Arts Foundation. These organizations which have as their broad purpose, the development of all the arts within their respective geographical domains, are the most recent and important institutional development in the arts in modern times. In 1955, when the arts instititions in Fort Wayne, including the School of Fine Arts, banded together to create a Community Arts Council, there were three other such councils in existence in the United States. Today, according to the Associated Councils of the Arts, there are 950 such councils and more coming into being every day. When any organization such as a Community Arts Council has as its objective the support and development of all the arts in a given area there are questions that naturally arise in regards as to how to define those arts and their place in American society. If one is charged with "developing" the arts, the normal questions arise as to where the arts presently are in the community, what status they occupy, and in terms of development, what status they should have. The arts council as a new arts institution is a new community institution as well. Because its members are both leaders in the arts and general community leaders, community arts councils address themselves to the question of how the community is to benefit the arts_ but at the same time and very importantly also question how the arts are going to benefit the community in a reciprocal relationship. Because these questions are being raised in Tulsa, Des Moines, Denver, Grand Rapids, and many other cities in addition to Fort Wayne, Community Arts Development is a national movement in terms of both the arts and general community development. With these questions naturally arising from the dynamics of community action, artists and community leaders have been forced to consciously explore the traditional definitions of the arts for guidance and seek advice from traditional authorities in the arts. In doing so, they are discovering that the traditional definitions and advice are increasingly incompatible with their own goals and objectives. As a result the arts in America are being reassessed and redefined on the community level. Since most community councils like ours in Fort Wayne are made up of individuals from a variety of professions other than the arts, the questions are not being viewed exclusively as matters of aesthetic philosophy. Instead, the arts in Fort Wayne are being considered as empirically real in a social and economic sense as the labor unions or insurance companies the School of Fine Arts works with in the community. They are seen as interacting with and being affected by the other community institutions and generally conforming to the same kind of socio-economic principles and mechanics that guide all community institutions. For that matter this discovery has its corollary in the realization that many institutions not ordinarily viewed as artistic ones have many unheralded aesthetic dimensions to be considered and acted upon as well. What has also been discovered by community arts developers is that while the arts themselves have been touted as being virtually synonymous with creativity and change, the sociological structure of the existing institutions that are publicized as constituting "The American Art World" is held by many authorities to be inviolate and incapable of change. Community Arts leaders on the other hand believe that if creativity is welcome in the arts disciplines themselves, it should be equally welcome in terms of the makeup of arts institutions, the defining of the arts and what roles they should play in American life. If there is any area in America where freedom of thought should be found it is in the arts. Thus, in their search for answers regarding the arts in their communities, arts leaders in Fort Wayne and elsewhere have determined that they are in intellectual conflict with the existing art authorities who dominate what is called the "National Arts World." The community arts leaders in Fort Wayne wish to create a "Community Arts School" to dramatize their challenging of the belief that holds that there is but one unified "National Arts World" in the United States, made up of common institutions and a single set of beliefs concerning the role of the arts in society. For if the belief in a unitary system is shattered an exciting national intellectual debate can begin concerning every aspect of the arts and the role they can play in our American community life. In seeking to establish a "Community Arts School" the School of Fine Arts, the Fine Arts Foundation, the University of Indiana at Fort Wayne, the Office of Community Schools, and the Office of the Mayor make the suggestions that there are at least two separate art worlds in the United States with different belief systems. There is the "National Creative Scarcity" system centered in New York City which believes that their arts institutions alone constitute our "National" arts and in addition define the arts in varying degrees of "cultural elitism. " This system is commonly held by the national media to be the single unitary "American Arts World" and so report it to the general public via radio, television, and magazines.' It is the contention of the community arts leaders in Fort Wayne that there is yet another "Art World" that has been coexisting with the other for many years and that now has grown so strong it can no longer be ignored. This "Art World" we label the "Community Arts- Creative Abundance" system. This "Community Arts" system is made up primarily of education institutions, Community arts institutions outside of New York City, and community arts councils. In thought and action these two systems have fundamentally different operational beliefs. From these beliefs arise their programming goals and objectives which have been and continue to be different. The "Creative Scarcity" or "Culture Capital" system presently located in New York City holds that there is both a "scarcity" of creative people capable of producing "true art, " and at the same time a "scarcity" of people capable of recognizing, appreciating, and supporting "true" art. Because in the past in both America and Europe, artists have been few in number, and of those few still lesser in number recognized as being "great" cultural elitists have adopted the viewpoint that regardless of any societal changes like American Democracy that may create different historical possibilities, an arts world must be made up of a small number of artists in a single "Culture Capital" producing what is labeled by a handful of authorities as "true art. " Similarly, because in the past both America and Europe there was a scarcity of people with the wealth, leisure time, and education, necessary to recognize appreciate, and patronize the arts, the "culture elitists" believe there should be as a desired ideal a small "scarce" audience for the "scarce" number of artists who produce the "true" art that a superior, small elite can recognize, appreciate, and patronize. As a dramatic illustration of this prevailing viewpoint one only has to read the major economic study of American performing arts commissioned by the Twentieth Century Fund and carried out by W. J. Baumol and W. G. Bowen, professors of Economics at Princeton University. In their book: Performing Arts: The Economic Dilemma the authors classified the "professional" national artists and institutions as those in New York City. The book dealt at length on the economic failures of existing New York arts institutions, catagorizing the increased costs of salaries, stage hands, light bulbs, etcetera. They noted the small audiences desiring to pay for the arts and most importantly, accepted intellectually that this was a natural and perhaps desirable variable, because their grand conclusion was that the dilemma of "American" New York arts institutions was that while every other segment of economic life represented by industry and business had solved the problems of increased costs by increasing productivity, producing more products per man hour, it still took four men, twenty minutes to play a Schuburt String Quartet. Therefore, to keep the arts alive more subsidy would be necessary practically forever. Nowhere in this economic analysis is there the strong suggestion that problems could be mitigated by superior marketing, by increasing the size of the arts audience, by increasing the product demand that plays such an important role in industrial productivity. No illustration was raised noting that "Hello Dolly" took three hours every night but because there was an audience sufficiently large the performers made and did not lose money. It is tacitly suggested; therefore, that a small audience for the arts is natural, expected and perhaps desired. To our knowledge only Community Arts developers have objected to the viewpoint of this objective research study and only now publically. This objection is made because in the "Community Arts - Creative Abundance" arts world, the viewpoint concerning artists and their audience is markedly different from the traditional one. The assumption is made that America socially, economically, and culturally, has evolved in an unprecedented way. As a result American Society and communities are in a position to challenge any previous historical assumptions about the roles the arts can play in American community life. The "Community Arts- Creative Abundance" system holds that within the great population of America there is an enormous reservoir of artistic talent. We believe that there is a direct relationship between the number of creative artists and the number of societal institutions that exist to produce, encourage, train, and support such creative artists. Since there has never been a society before America that has attempted to encourage extremely large numbers of people to be artists, community arts leaders suggest that it is unwise on the part of cultural elitists to automatically attempt to assume the amount of creative talent that is available in any given society. The only way this can be determined is to encourage as many people as possible to develop whatever latent artistic talent they may possess and then weigh the evidence. Such evidence already exists. At the heart of the "Creative Abundance- Community Arts" system is the great American Educational Revolution that was premised on the faith that every individual within our democracy, regardless of social and economic station, was through education to be given the opportunity to identify and develop whatever talent he or she might possess. In our desire for national perfection, we have of late been extremely critical of our public education system. Such criticism is healthy as long as we do not lose sight of the magnificance of its democratic goals, and the immensity of its success in achieving them. The evidence seems to be overwhelming that the American people possess an abundance of talent in all areas of human endeavor far beyond that imagined by any critics of our Democratic system. It is generally conceded by our European critics that as a result of our democratic educational systems, America has more doctors, more scientists, more technicians, more lawyers, more business men, and more engineers for the size of its population than any nation on earth, at any time or any place in the world. But then, they could always take comfort that as a nation we have no culture and therefore are uncivilized. It is the premise of the "Community Arts- Creative Abundance" viewpoint that the same educational system that has produced those doctors and lawyers has also produced the greatest number of trained artists in all the arts disciplines that has existed on the face of the earth and is continuing to do so at an accelerated pace geometric in its proportions. As a result we are now prepared to create communities where the arts are the birthright and possession of the majority of our people. We are now prepared to create an American civilization in keeping with the principles of our Democracy that will pale into insignificance the art produced in the past under despotism. This dream has been held by some American artists and community leaders in every period of our two hundred year history and now is on the verge of fulfillment, in no small way as a result of the development of our democratic educational system. THE EDUCATIONAL ARTS COMPLEX At the heart of the "Community Arts- Creative Abundance" system lies the great American Educational Complex which, of course, includes the institutions involved in this proposal. The development of our Democratic arts is a result of basic decisions made early in the beginning of our public education system. If one studies Educational History he will find that about the same time our public education system was getting started, the Europeans were developing their own systems beginning under Bismark and in Prussia. Both educational systems were intended to teach the mass of the population, but the Prussians determined that the system was to be designed for the limited purpose of producing loyal civil servants and superior soldiers. In America, the creation of a public education system began a continuing intellectual debate on what the schools should accomplish in and for a democracy. The questions were and still are concerning what should be taught if you are to teach everyone. As a result of these debates in our country the curriculum became focused not on creating a mass, but instead on creating an individual. For this reason the arts and humanities were included. For when pioneer educators searched the historical models of educational programs from Europe designed for the aristocratic and privileged, they found an emphasis· on a liberal arts education that included the arts and humanities. The philosophical ideal adopted in America was that every child, rich or poor, should receive the quality education hitherto only available to royalty and the very wealthy. Influenced by such American intellectual giants as John Dewey, who taught that the best way to learn is by doing, the emphasis on the arts in the schools very early shifted from studying the arts as products to having the students actually participating in the arts processes. The arts being included in the curriculum was merely imitating the school programs of the European elite. The major philosphical and scientific innovation of educators like Dewey was to conceive of the creative process illustrated in the arts not as a rare attribute of the "genius," the "abnormal" artist which was the contemporary focal point of the cultural elitists dominating the fine arts at that time in Paris and London. The "divine idiot" artist to be discovered and cared for by the wealthy, understanding patron was a prevalent viewpoint in the institutional art world while educators like Dewey were conceiving of creativity in the arts as a mental facility to be found in all human beings in varying degrees. Dewey and his intellectual colleagues also believed that this facility was capable of being developed and stimulated by institutions and societies constituted and devoted to doing so. This scientific viewpoint toward the arts was and is a keystone belief that separates "Community Arts - Creative Abundance" thinkers and practitioners from "Culture Capital- Cultural Elitist" adherents. Since Dewey, others have carried on these ideas. Educational researchers and philosophers like psychologist Viktor Lowenfeld from Pennsylvania State University have pioneered in studies that show that as a natural part of mental and emotional growth, all children regardless of race, creed, culture or nationality, spontaneously participate in the creative processes involving drawing, painting, singing, dancing, etcetera and do so until societal structures or circumstances discourage the individual from doing so, usually at adolescence. Let us view this concept in historical perspective. If, for example, you were a factory worker's son, or the son of a farmer in 1917, 1920, or 1930, you may naturally and with the urging of the school have participated in the arts processes with some enjoyment. But if you suddenly were taken out of school at age 14, a most common possibility for the majority of young Americans, to work in the factory or fields for 12 to 14 hours per day, and were in a societal milieu where the arts were generally frowned upon, you would be discouraged from developing your artistic sensibilities. Nevertheless, in places like Kansas, Wisconsin, and Indiana, in places extremely remote from the Culture Capitols of Europe, all kinds of individuals were experiencing the arts in the schools even while there were no arts in their soot filled factory homes, and as a result became artists instead of workers or farmers. This is not to say that the majority of all public schools throughout the nation featured a strong emphasis upon the arts. The public schools in wealthy urban areas led the way, and the pattern has been that these pioneering schools attempting to realize the goals of educational philosophers as Dewey have escalated their arts and humanities programs while less wealthy and less urban school districts gradually followed suit especially, with the advent of consolidating rural school systems. There has been steady and accelerating growth year upon year. Now, of course, American society and American schools have dramatically changed. John Dewey and Lowenfeld could only speculate on what would happen if all human beings were encouraged to develop their creative abilities in the arts in conjunction with their other learning. It is what they hoped could happen. In reading history they had determined that most of the philosophers of the western world have talked about what an ideal individual and his society should be. The consensus has always been that the ideal individual should not only be involved in the arts processes himself but in addition should be a patron of the professional artists and working for a society that cherishes the arts. Historically, leaders like Frederik The Great have been idealized because not only was he a political and military genius, but because he also studied philosophy, patronized the arts, and was an artist himself More recently we have the example of Winston Churchill. The Renaissance man concept is a fundamental one in both European and American educational philosophy. The difference is that in the class ridden countries of Europe such ideals are presumed the domain of a tiny ruling elite. In America these ideals are the professed destiny for all of the people. It is a breathtaking goal and pragmatically must be accepted as virtually impossible, given the natural psychological, economic, societal, technological and institutional limitations of any nation. But also pragmatically, if enough institutions are constituted and dedicated to such a task, and enough individuals are touched by such institutions, statistically some effects must result. Because education has become so absolutely ubiquitous in American life it has become difficult for many people to step back in perspective to realize that it has become next to industry and business our major American enterprise, and constitutes an absolute fundamental part of our business, professional and cultural life. The US. Office of Education estimates that close to 45 billion dollars is expended annually for education. Roughly 3 billion comes from the federal government, 18 billion from State Government, and 21 billion from municipal taxes. Especially, on the state and local level the majority of the taxpayers dollar goes for the schools. Out of a national population of 203 million approximately 52 million are enrolled in elementary, secondary, and higher education institutions which means approximately 25 percent of the population is engaged actively in the education processes including the arts. These figures do not include the millions of adults participating in continuing education in which arts courses of all kinds play a major part. Teaching these multitudes are over 2 million professional educators and hundreds of thousands more people who work in service positions in the educational institutions. This educational complex of elementary, secondary, and higher education institutions is the very heart of the "Community Arts- Creative Abundance" system. In elementary schools all over the nation, training and practice in all the arts is going on. Children are being encouraged and rewarded for drawing, painting, singing, dancing, etcetera. As a result, a growing minority of students in every school district discover at an early age an interest in the arts. This growing minority group in turn swells the ever more sophisticated arts programs in the secondary schools. As a result of the increased encouragement and training received in the high schools, an ever growing number of graduates upon leaving for college elect to major in the arts, swelling the enrollment in college, university and private arts schools and causing the creation of arts departments in schools where they never existed before. Since the traditional arts world in New York is predicated upon a "scarcity" of artists, only a tiny few of the growing number of graduates in the arts can be employed, or in the case of visual artists "discovered" by the "authorities" who run the art galleries that constitute the "National" arts world. Returning home, these artists in the main are fed back into the "Creative Abundance" system of education as artist-educators. These artist-educators, devoted and well trained, produce more and better elementary arts programs which recognize and encourage still more individuals to take advantage of the larger, more sophisticated arts programs equally manned by recent art school graduates. These programs are so good that even greater numbers out of the increasing multitude of students being able to go to college, elect to become artists. When these increased numbers of students graduate they in turn find no increase of opportunity in the "Creative Scarcity" gallery system in New York. They, in turn, are fed back into the enlarging and expanding educational arts complex, often. having to return to school to get the required educational credentials they did not feel they needed or wanted since they hoped to succeed in the New York system. At the present time the system is increasing at a fantastic pace. According to the U.S. Office of Education in 1959, 7,633 individuals graduated with bachelors degrees in the visual arts, 1,062 with masters degrees, and 55 with doctorates, for a total of 8,750 trained professionals. By 1966, the numbers had increased to 13,577 graduating with bachelors degrees, 2,403 with masters degrees, and 88 with doctorates, giving you that year a total of 16,068 trained professionals in the arts. In 1970, 61,594 individuals graduated with bachelors degrees, 12,069 graduated with masters degrees, and 929 received doctorates, adding up to 74,592 people trained in the visual arts. This reveals that the system is reaching geometric rather than arithmatic proportions in growth. When the figures for graduates in the visual arts are added up for the last twelve years the totals are intellectually staggering. In this period, the real "Culture Explosion" is revealed to be the production of artists. In a little over a decade 223,836 individuals received bachelors degrees, 42,284 individuals received masters degrees, and 2,479 received doctorates. This adds up to a total of 268,927 degrees awarded for professional training in the arts!!! And of course, the enrollment figures are rising. A Louis Harris poll has documented that 18 percent of college seniors interviewed are interested in the arts - not as an avocation, not as a sometime part of an otherwise directed life-style, but as a full-time way of living. And the "Profile of This Year's Freshmen," compiled by the Chronical of Higher Education, shows that 9.2 percent of the freshmen chose the fine arts as a probable major jield of study, as compared to 16. 2 percent who wanted to concentrate on business and 11.6 percent who were interested in education. The fine arts ranked third in the listing of preferences, two notches ahead of the social sciences and engineering, which came in fourth and fifth. As a career preference, to be an artist was more interesting to the freshmen than to be a nurse, doctor, lawyer, or college teacher. Nowhere in any publications on the fine arts have these figures been published, because no one as a New York arts authority would have any curiosity. Their assumption is that the only professional artists in this nation are those individuals living in New York City recognized by the handful of institutions which include the Museum of Modern Art and a small series of other private art galleries which in turn are supported by the arts editors of such magazines as Time and Newsweek, the three major television networks, and the "National" Art magazines, including Art News and Art Forum. John Hightower, the Director of the Museum of Modern Art who recently resigned from that position, was before that the director of the New York State Arts Council. When Mr. Hightower assumed the directorship of the Museum of Modern Art he was interviewed on the Today Show. In that interview, which was never quoted by anyone, he pointed out that the Museum of Modern Art had been in collusion with a number of the leading New York galleries. If M.O.M.A. decided to recognize an artist by a showing of his work, then the monetary value would increase when it was moved to the private galleries for sale. This would also work in the reverse direction, with a private gallery "recognizing" a new artist, and then having their wisdom confirmed by a showing at the Museum of Fine Arts and confirming articles being written in the New York Times, Time and Life magazines. Mr. Hightower was recently forced to resign but his admission of the intellectual shallowness of the system has hopefully speeded up its dissolution. For example, Claus Oldenburg, a now recognized modern master in the arts, was manufacturing giant hamburgers out of paper mache for several years, and while admired by his friends, these hamburgers were worth about $1.50 each. Then, one of the leading gallery owners, recognized for his taste by the New York Times flavored Mr. Oldenburg's work and featured his hamburgers in a major show in his gallery. The gallery owner declared that these burgers are among the only "true arts." They are now intellectually, but importantly, monetarily valuable. The burgers now are worth $10,000, the cheeseburgers $15,000 with the "discoverer" of the "true art" getting perhaps over half the price on each culinary and artistic masterpiece. Now, according to art authorities, giant hamburgers are not only the "true art" in America, but since New York is now the Culture Capitol of the world, replacing Paris of the prewar years, hamburgers must be the "true art" in London, Paris, Berlin and the whole world … because the "cultural elitist" system says that for true creativity and sophistication it is reasonable to accept there must be only one style, one kind of "true art" that expresses a nation, a world, a time and an age, or increasingly ... a moment. With such sincerely held convictions it is easy for art authorities to ignore the fact that the "Creative Abundance" system has turned out 268,927 people professionally trained in the visual arts, because they are not needed or desired for the "Culture Capital" system to function. To illustrate this fact, by example, students of the Fort Wayne School of Fine Arts reviewed and analyzed the issues of Art News which report on the "National Arts World" of New York for the same time period as covered by the statistics from the U.S. Office of Education on arts graduates. In this analysis they were able to determine that while 268,927 individuals throughout America graduated from professional training institutions, the gallery and museum system in New York exhibited and sold the works of 9033 artists. Approximately 181 artists were newly discovered while the rest constituted the already established stars. Even if this system wanted to recognize, which it does not all new artists, it could barely dent the hundreds of thousands of artists being trained. Therefore, the safest way is to totally ignore the phenomena as not fitting into their intellectual systems, not conforming to their institutional models. If the hundreds of thousands of professional artists are anathema to the "Culture Capital - Cultural Elitist" authorities, the rise of the Advocational Community Artist produced by the "Creative Abundance" system is still more beyond the pale of their interest. Within the "Creative Abundance" system of educational institutions the number of individuals who elect to become professional artists and artist-educators, still represent a small minority in terms of the general population, even though this minority represents the greatest number of professionally trained artists the world has ever known. A much larger group graduating from our educational institutions do not seek the arts as a profession, either because they are not interested enough, or because they are realistic enough to see the poor chances of making a living at art. These individuals instead swell the ranks of advocational arts groups throughout the United States that are also historically unprecedented in their numbers. A significant part of the Culture Explosion has been the rise of the amateur or semi-professional artist. These are persons who were introduced to the arts by the professional artists in the schools and while enjoying them as a means of self-fulfillment do not attempt to make them their principal occupation. In one of the only sociological studies of the Arts In America that has been done, Alvin Toffler, now famous for his bestseller, Future Shock, spent a year traveling throughout the United States studying the arts outside of the "Culture Capital." In the resulting book The Culture Consumers: Art and Affluence in America published in 1964, Toffler points out among his statistical findings that there are approximately 25, 000 community theatre groups in America with an annual audience of over 100 million people. Of the 1250 orchestras in America, over a thousand are amateur or community orchestras. According to Toffler the number of amateur musical instrumentalists jumped from 19 million in 1950 to 35 million in 1960 and the dollar value in instrument sales soared more than 175 per cent. In the visual arts, Toffler used an estimate by the National Art Materials Trade Association that the number of adult amateur painters and craftsmen had risen in number from 30 million in 1950 to 40 million in 1960, with over a million of them taking formal instruction. By now, says Toffler, these figures must be understatements. Even in small rural towns, the hardware stores now sell fine art supplies, and failing this, rural people can be well supplied by the national mail order companies that all stock a complete inventory of sophisticated art materials. Art supply companies are now multi-billion dollar industries as a result of the arts education complex and amateur artists. When Mr. Toffler published his book, he was castigated by "national" arts authorities for being unsophisticated and provencial because he concentrated his studies outside of New York, and because he measured the arts in "economic" terms rather than in literary or esthetic terms. And so, the "Culture Capital - Cultural Elitist" authorities choose to ignore the "Community Arts- Creative Abundance" system of arts as it continues to develop and grow, turning out individuals trained to think of the arts as a process useful to the individual and the community that he lives in. Not only has it turned out and continues to do so, hundreds of thousands of people trained as professionals in the arts, but it has turned out and is turning out millions of people from every walk of life who enjoy participating in the arts personally, and desire to have the arts play a more important part in the life of their community, no matter where in America that community is located. It has turned out the individuals who are community arts leaders in cities all over the country forming community arts councils. It h.as produced the community arts leaders in Fort Wayne who wish to create "A Community Arts School" dedicated to defining the artist and arts in terms of the role they can play in their own American community. WHY A "COMMUNITY ARTS SCHOOL" NOW Two hundred years after America achieved its political independence from Europe, through the development of a "Community Arts School" it will begin its true cultural revolution, by declaring its independence from the European "Cultural Capital - Cultural Elitist" arts system. As in our political revolution, this revolt is a result of years of gradual growth and barely perceptible change. Politically, Americans in the colonies had co-existed with the European home countries and believed strongly and loyally in the aristocratic, despotic monarchy system, even as in day to day institutional existence they more and more practiced an alien democratic system. It was only when dramatic events occurred that clearly revealed how different a political and spiritual system had evolved on this continent did the Americans reluctantly, consciously explore those differences and declare their political independence. When they did, they did not throw out the intellectual heritage but modified it to the new goals and objectives of Democracy. In this political revolution for the most part the new Americans rejected the fine arts, for in Europe the fine arts were identified almost exclusively with the aristocratic and religious institutions they were finally and enthusiastically rejecting. While the church and Monarchy continued to patronize the artists that make up the Art History we know, the Americans pioneered in conquering a continent, excelling in the development of a unique social, political, and economic system that one day, as it has, could provide the foundation for the fine arts (o flourish in a freedom unheard of anywhere else on Earth and devoted to all of the people and not just the few. When America was building a nation, the few fine artists produced by this country continually were forced' to go to Europe to be trained and discovered. The wealthy few in America who wished to consume art had to import it at great expense from Europe ·or go to Europe at great expense to buy it The conventional wisdom was that there was and could be no fine art produced in a Democrary because of its emphasis and concern for the "unwashed" masses. In the meantime in "cultured" Europe, so few people nationally had the wealth, education, and leisure time to patronize the arts, the few arts institutions necessary to supply this small group of individuals in an economically feasible way, clustered in national capitals like Paris, London and Vienna. Anyone seeking to participate in the arts or to enjoy them as a consumer was forced to leave the provences and travel to these European capitals. The wealth, the educational institutions, the arts, and political power were and still are centered in such capitals today. By the turn of our second century as a nation the few arts institutions that existed in America were primarily located in the eastern section of the country and were considered by the "international" arts authorities of the European Culture Capitals as inferior because as they knew a Democracy cannot produce "true" art. At about this time the "Creative Abundance" system of public education began to quietly function in Kansas and Illinois: places geographically and philosophically remote from any "Culture Capitals." Such places if they were known at all in Paris were considered raw and forbidding inhabited primarily by savages. Leaping ahead to the end at the Second World War, America had become the undisputed political and economic power of the world. As a result the "Culture Capital - Cultural Elitist" center was moved from Paris to New York, along with many of the elitist European art authorities who came to settle there. Although the city was self designated as the "first" city of the land of America, one could still hear familiar phrases like "provencial" Americans are incapable of producing "true" art, or Middle Class Americans from the middle west make good scientists and businessmen, but not artists and intellectuals. In the meantime, these middle class, middle Americans, as well as their counterparts in every part of the nation were pouring a majority of their community and state wealth into the "Creative Abundance" educational system, with literally fantastic expenditures for arts facilities and faculties. And now, as New York arts institutions collapse and die from the lack of community support in their own city, arts councils in Tulsa and Anaheim are told that if they want "true" art in their communities they must export at great expense "true" artists from their Culture Capital and if, and this is a remote possibility, they have developed any indigenous arts talent they must send them to New York even if the chance is fantastically remote that they would have a chance of practicing their talents in a "Creative Scarcity" system that requires only a tiny few. Remember, that in spite of your own community wealth and resources, mere money cannot produce the magic of "true" art produced in a Culture Capital. At this point it must be mentioned that like the American colonies before our original revolution, the majority of arts leaders in the Nation still believe and are loyal to New York and the "Culture Capital - Cultural Elitist" viewpoint, for after all in their educations they were taught a common arts history, and if they were interested in the arts, all they could read were the articles in Time, Life, Look, Newsweek, Saturday Review, and other publications sincerely concerned about the arts, but with a vested interest in maintaining the "Cultural Capital - Cultural Elitist" system. Movies and later television supplied them with the same reinforced message: "True art and art in America must originate and remain in the Culture Capital. " Totally analogous to our forefathers in the colonies, individuals who enjoy the New Yorker and admire many of the artists that have come out of the Cultural Capital system have feelings akin to matricidal guilt at the idea of freeing themselves from the motherland and declaring their cultural and intellectual independence. Like our ancestors, it means a loss of security that goes with being a conformist to a system that brands its heretics as "provencial" and "unsophisticated" in a field that prides itself on being synonomous with "sophistication." There is a certain terror involved in saying: "I am not sure of what role the fine artist in America is playing and what role he could or should play," as opposed to smugly saying: "I know what the role of the American artist is in America, because the accepted authorities in American art have told me, and I am as sophisticated as they are because I certainly agree with them." But, of course, we also have the comforting historical precedent of the Oracle at Delphi declaring Socrates the most sophisticated man in the world because he admitted that he knew very little and had many more questions in his mind than he had answers. Something akin to The Stamp Act or the Quartering of Troops in Private Homes in Boston is often necessary to motivate original thought. Something dramatically incompatible with your own convictions and values must occur that is absolutely intellectually and emotionally unacceptable to you and to the majority of your contemporaries. This "something" has been the continuing escalation of the definition of the American Artist as an alien outsider in his own land. If the art history of the western world is explored it reveals that the artists that constitute our intellectual heritage, up until fairly modern times were in the main accepted in their contemporary social order and fulfilled a societal function designed to promote that order. Social criticism by artists was one legitimate role for artists and acted out by such artists as Goya and Hogarth. But on the whole, artists fulfilled social roles that supported the societal system that nurtured them. There were not many artists or people utilizing them, but those artists were accepted as having a legitimate although sometimes low status in society. The romantic notion of the artist as an alienated rebel came about when his traditional aristocratic and religious patronage came to an end and the artist became dependent upon the free enterprise gallery system. No longer being able to deal directly with his patrons, the artist became alienated from the general public and community life. He gathered in intellectual and economically poor ghettos in European Culture Capitals, talked only to other artists, and became totally dependent upon the "intellectual-middlemen" of gallery owners and media critics for both economic sustenance and intellectual guidance. With only "Culture Capital" gallery owners and critics to decide the social roles for the artist, the most satisfactory one for them to promote was to have the artist defined as a mad, isolated, abnormal character whose only value was the occasional rare product that they could recognize and merchandise as "true" art. The Gallery owner and the critic were of course the only ones who would or could deal with such strange creatures. The image of the artists as an intelligent man of the world, thoroughly involved in the economic, philosophical and political happenings of his time, the artist as a Cellini or Michelangelo, was replaced by the mad genius, swimming through a fog of alcohol or fits of psychosis, but in his illness and isolation still producing masterpieces that are rejected by the galleries and critics until in a bitter poverty the artist dies. At this point the true worth of the masterpieces is discovered by the gallery owners and supporting critics, and assured of limited "scarce" supply the value of the works comfortably escalates as the years go by providing wealthy industrialists and nervous South American dictators with a safe and easily transported form of financial investment. This is not to say that some alienated and mentally ill artists have not produced "true masterpieces,;, but the "Cultural Capital - Cultural Elitist" authorities have turned this around and have promoted the idea that the artist can only create "true art" by being alienated and isolated from his society, which in America, is a middle-class, democratic, free enterprise, business oriented, society. In the last twenty years the "Creative Abundance - Community Arts" system has produced an estimated 350, 000 professionally trained individuals in the arts. According to the arts authorities in New York the "true" artists in America consists of several thousand alienated males living in intellectual, economically impoverished ghettos in the City of New York. Religiously, the artist is an atheist or follower of obscure oriental rites. Socially, he dispises both marriage and heterosexuality. Politically, he is a radical dedicated to the overthrowing by violence, the capitalistic free enterprise system. His chief leisure time activity is remaining stoned on a multiple variety of hallucinatory drugs. In short he is the perfect counter-culture hero, the complete negative and reverse stereotype of the middle class, middle American citizen that inhabits America. He hates Coca-Cola, General Motors, and cannot wait to see all the Burger Chef stands destroyed in the coming violent revolution in which the enslaved American workers will rise up from their factories and bring down their capitalistic masters. Then, a utopian socialistic state will be set up and the workers will humbly hand over the leadership positions held too long by businessmen and lawyers to the pot smoking, humanistic painters and sculptors. The utter and complete absurdity of this definition of the American artist is so blatant that no matter how sympathetic to the traditional belief system of the Culture Capital, it simply cannot be intellectually or emotionally accepted by community arts leaders throughout the nation. It certainly is not accepted by us here in Fort Wayne, It is so gross a definition, many people throughout America not intimately involved in the world of the arts will most likely suspect the definition to be a satirical exaggeration more likely a product of a humorist like Art Buchwald or Al Capp than the work of serious intellectual leaders in the arts. As evidence that the "Culture Capital- Cultural Elitist" system indeed has reached this unacceptably absurd position one only has to read about the forced resignation of John Hightower from the Museum of Modern Art. As the previous director of the New York State Arts Council, Mr. Hightower brought to the Museum job the intellectually liberating experiences of having dealt with politicians, businessmen, institutions, and communities outside of New York City. It is with this perspective that he took the job and began by confessing the cooperative role the museum played in the economic life of certain New York Galleries. In the end, Mr. Hightower fell victim to the same system that dictated the alien role for the artist. Great pressure was put on him to act out the ultimate escalation of the artist as an alien to that of total political revolutionary. Thus, as Director he was forced to allow programs such as "Dial a Radical" in which, at Museum expense, and on the justification that it was "true" art, the Museum allowed such groups as the Black Panthers to record "hate" messages calling for the violent overthrow of the American Government. These messages could be heard by calling the Museum. This was done as a result of an artist's strike, generally supported by the New York intellectual community. The leader of that strike was Claus Oldenburg's brother, who upon Mr. Hightower's resignation has been hired to replace him as the director of the Museum. As further evidence, we have the problems of the California Institute of Arts located in Burbank, California. The California Institute of Arts was the result of a dream of Walt Disney to create an Arts School that would truly represent the American Democracy that he had expoused and extoled throughout his artistic life. It was his desire to take the money he had earned as an American artist to create the best arts school in the nation. Unfortunately, Disney died before the school facilities were completed and therefore, was not available to help set the school up or help decide its policies. The Board of Trustees being primarily businessmen and not on familiar terms with the arts were in a quandary as to what to do with a 42 million dollar facility naturally turned to "national" arts authorities in New York City and hired William Corrigan, Dean of the School of Fine Arts at New York City University. Seeking the 'finest" artists in America to be the faculty, he naturally hired "national" artists from New York. When his faculty and his first students were gathered together the Dean of the new school reflecting Walt Disney's concern for democracy allowed the faculty and the students to democratically decide together the purposes, practices, and policies of the school. After due deliberation, the faculty and students, decided that the role of the fine artist in America was as a revolutionary dedicated to the overthrow of the democratic, capitalistic, free enterprise system and the bourgeoisie American middle class. Since this was the purpose of the Art School they demanded that Herbert Marcuse, the advocate of violent revolution teaching at Berkley be hired onto the staff of the California Institute of Art. This demand was refused by the businessmen on the Board of Trustees and as a result the school has been in a turmoil ever since, with the faculty and students dramatizing their contempt to the surrounding middle class community by public nude bathing and public drug consumption. In contrast to this prevalent "Culture Capital - Cultural Elitist" definition of the American Fine Artist we have a research study of the American Fine Artist carried out by the University of Wisconsin Arts Extension Department in 1968. In this study, University researchers identified the Wisconsin professional artist by surveying the records of the Wisconsin Painters and Sculptures Show. This open competition professional arts show, sponsored by the State Professional Artist Association at the time the survey had been held in Milwaukee every year for a period of 42 years and annually received entries from thousands of Wisconsin artists from every area of the state. The criteria for the sample was that the individuals surveyed had to have been selected for the exhibit at least three times in the last 10 years or an individual who had won one of the major awards during the same period of time. The resulting sample consisted of several hundred artists. A questionnaire was designed to give a social and economic profile of the professional Wisconsin artist. The questionnaires were distributed by mail and while it may be surprising to some, the majority of those solicited responded and sent in their "no-name" questionnaires. The information received from this survey was in marked contrast to the "New York" description of the professional artist as an alien outsider. Roughly half were male and female with the majority, married and having children. The majority owned homes, had cars, television sets, etcetera. Roughly two thirds were Democrats and Independents with the rest Republican. The majority were Protestants with a large percentage of the minority religions represented being Jewish, a percentage larger than for the population as a whole. Approximately half the women were housewives and the other half being educators. Among the men, the overwhelming majority were professional educators. Only two or three of the total samples said that they received more than 5 percent of their annual income from the sale of their work. The majority responded that they enjoyed living in their own communities and desired to be an artist there rather than moving to New York City. However, to the question regarding whether they were satisfied with the community recognition or status they received as artists, the negative responses were virtually unanimous. The results of the Wisconsin study strongly tally with the survey of former graduates presently being conducted by the Fort Wayne School of Fine Arts. What emerges from both is a portrait of the American professional artist in marked contrast to the one presented to the public by the New York media. What is revealed in Wisconsin and Indiana, and we suspect all over the nation, is a professional artist of middle class origins, living as a middle class American, either as a housewife, or as an artist-educator, accepted in his community for his role as an educator and not as an artist, because everyone knows that an artist is that alien stranger residing in New York portrayed in the movies and on television. This brings us to the second dramatic impetus for the creation of a "Community Arts School." As arts educators and developers, many of us could honestly accept the increased numbers of young people desiring higher professional education in the arts because while we knew the "Culture Capital" system would not support the employment of them, we were sure that they could be fed into the educational system. Even when the majority of higher education institutions for prestige purposes de-emphasized arts education degrees and urged their students to take "fine arts" degrees to prepare them for nonexistant occupations, community arts developers had enough evidence to show that after a year or so of frustration most of the "fine arts" graduates would go back to school, take additional education courses and get their teaching licenses. What is occuring was inevitable but nevertheless still comes as a shock. Because of the concentration on zero population, the stock market, or any number of societal reasons, the "Creative Abundance" system seems to have reached certain demographic limits. While the numbers of art majors have increased geometrically, the numbers of available pupils and schools and the number of necessary teachers are now approaching a balance. In other words, we have now reached the over production of artists that can be accommodated by the system producing them. In short, we have arrived at the point where the graduates of an art school cannot be taken care of by having them teaching in a college, university, high school or elementary arts program. As long as you could bury artists in the educational system they could remain virtually invisible. If artists outside of New York are invisible, you can ignore them. But if you suddenly have a tremendous surplus of unemployed graduates from Art Schools, you must deal with them, you must explore the purposes to which they must be put. And, in the process you must discuss the roles of all the artists no matter where they presently reside and how they are earning their living. We are extremely aware of this problem in Fort Wayne, because we have been forced to tell our entering freshman that they are entering a profession that institutionally does not exist. We explain to them that in the past they could always be gainfully employed as a artist-educator, with recognition and salaries coming from the community as a teacher and not as an artist. In every case the response of the student is the question: "Why??" This "Why?" must be faced as a question of enormous complexity, as much filled with problems as it is with enormous opportunity. This question of "Why?" is not a small and isolated one in American life. It is a pressing concern of state legislatures. For example, a few weeks ago the Chicago Tribune in a Sunday special explored the problems of higher education in Illinois. It dealt at length on the problems of what higher educational institutions in the state should be doing for preparing students for the realities of American life. The article revealed that the State legislature had cut the engineering departments because there was a surplus of aerospace engineers in the country. It was also cutting the budgets of education departments because there was a shortage of teaching jobs available. In other words, there was an obvious concern about the numbers of individuals being trained and the jobs available to such individuals. In the same article, the problems of private colleges were outlined, showing that like the public institutions they, too, were plagued by problems of financing and spending priorities. As an example, they detailed the problem of one well known private college which had to double their annual request for funds from alumni because in keeping with their educational priorities they needed the additional funds to complete the construction of their 2 million dollar Fine Arts Center!! Priority indeed, when you realize that this Center will be used to professionally educate an increased number of arts majors for societal roles that utterly do not presently exist in American Community life!! It is not our intention to call for the abolishment of the "Creative-Abundance" system because it no longer can invisibly accommodate the artists it has and is training. Nor is it our object to diminish the place of the arts in education because the traditional arts world does not need more artists. We are convinced that the arts in every great abundance are an important means of improving the quality of American Community life for everyone. But it is our intention to revise the definitions of the arts and artists that has become necessary of the American Educational Revolution. It is our intention, in fact, to continue this ArtisticEducation-Cultural Revolution by expanding the educational programs to include the creation of new societal institutions and programs designed to utilize on the community level, the artistic talent educational institutions like ourselves are producing in our arts training programs. It is our purpose to have arts education programs geared to the social, economic, political, and philosophical realities of American community life. BASIC PRINCIPLES OF "THE COMMUNITY ARTS SCHOOL" The first principle is that we intend to concentrate on developing an "American Community Artist" instead of a "National Artist." By this we mean, an artist trained to find a meaningful role in a typical American community like Fort Wayne, Indiana or Toledo, Ohio, rather than one trained to live in and conform to the momentary intellectual dictates of an "International Culture Capital." What we don't mean is an artist isolated from the world at large. The "Community Artist" will be happy to know that other artists are doing anywhere in the world. But the artist we visualize will be sophisticated enough not to believe that he must conform in his artistic work or life style to any standards proclaimed by the arts authorities of any solitary community. In order to develop the American "Community Artist" we reject all of the basic concepts of the "Culture Capital - Cultural Elitist" arts world. One of the most important rejections is the intellectual notion, based on the economic necessities of the New York gallery system that there is just one kind of "true" art for any historical moment and that the art work that proceeded that moment is automatically, intellectually and economically worthless. It is a notion that breeds the intellectual absurdity of adolescent artists being proclaimed as supposedly reaching their artistic maturity, triumphant heights and obsolescent decay within a period of a year or so. This is an exact institutional correlation to young rock and roll musicians being discovered, exploited and discarded in dizzying swift fashion for the purpose of quick profit. Another basic principle of the "Community Arts School" is that there is no necessity for only one kind of art on a national or international basis since the limitless possibilities of variety are inherent in the very nature of the arts processes. A simultaneous abundance of artistic styles and an abundance of different kinds of artists is an ideal of the "Community Arts School." Such an intellectual free enterprise system holds no terror except to individuals who have a vested interest in an existing "Culture Capital." The role of the American "Community Artist" and "Community Arts" student will be to have his art grow out of his own intellectual convictions and talents, and the value of his art being its acceptance by, and contribution to, his own community, wherever that community is located in this great vast nation. Through the ubiquitous American education system the "Community Arts" student has in cities like Fort Wayne throughout the country the intellectual traditions of the entire Eastern and Western world at his fingertips. He has the means of gaining the basic skills and crafts that constitute all of the arts disciplines. In the communities themselves he has the wealth of industry and commerce, a population with more affluence and leisure time, and a sophisticated, ever more educated potential audience for his art becoming for a variety of reasons concerned about the esthetic quality of life in their community. In addition, on a feedback principle the very educational institutions training him to be an artist can be producing more potential patrons for the artist he wishes to be when he or she graduates. In short, the intellectual possibilities in the development of a "Community Arts School" pales into absurdity the idea that a handful of authorities anywhere can contain the full creativity of a nation and proclaim that its national artists are a small group of isolated drug orientated marxist revolutionaries. One of the absolute basic principles of the "Community Arts School" is the enthusiastic acceptance of the fact that American communities are based upon the democratic middle class, business oriented, capitalistic, free enterprise system. It is extremely important to remember that our original revolution was not carried out by a group of hopelessly poor peasants, but by an educated middle class. It has been this same middle class growing in wealth and numbers that has created and sustained America's social, economic, and political institutions, including those submitting this proposal, and those this proposal is being submitted to. It is this same, grown still larger, middle class and hardly impressed with Karl Marx that presently and in the future still will be defining the American community including its artistic and cultural life. For many years, it has been fashionable among American intellectuals inspired by European Marxist intellectuals, to make the American middle class or "Bourgeoisie" the principal scapegoat for all the evils of this nation, and as supporters of our governments international policies, for all the evils of the world. Middle class taste, middle class standards, middle class morals, middle class work ethics, middle class religion, have all become epitaphs for that which is of the least quality, the most crass, the most mindless, the most unethical, and the most foolish. Of course, when middle American can be prefixed to such titles the contempt and horror can be increased geometrically. Because these epitaphs are so broadly used and ill defined it is difficult to understand what they mean and why they are so terrible, especially since they are so often used as intellectual weapons by individuals who in so many characteristics, such as educational background, regional origin and annual income, comfortably fit into the parameters of the middle-class themselves. One explanation for these blanket indictments may be that since the majority of Americans can be classified as middle-class anything, including those things which can be seen as bad in the country, must of necessity involve the middle class. By then, taking the intellectually shallow point of view that everything in America is wrong, the blame can put on those most involved, who happen to be middle-class Americans. Thus, since everything is wrong in America it is the fault of the middle-class because of their thoughts and deeds which divide up into such sub-elements as middle-class taste, morals, ethics, politics, and aspirations. It is, of course, most pertinent that one does not hear the phrase, "Middle-class intellectualism" thus by omission denying the possibility of serious thought among those from the middleclass, i.e., the majority of Americans. Since American communities like Fort Wayne are middle-class, middle-American in nature, nothing intellectual can be expected from them. As a basic principle of the "Community Arts School" we are not going to take the equally absurd point of view that every aspect of middle class American life is a paragon of virtue and quality. But we do take the point of view that we are middle-class Americans, working with middle-class students, in middle-class institutions, for the benefit of other middle-class institutions and individuals. As such, we believe, we are as capable of serious, sophisticated, intellectual, and cultural thought and action as any individuals and institutions in any other community existing upon the face of this earth. Unlike a "Culture Capital" we do not ascribe our intellectual powers as a unique exclusive possession of this particular community, but instead, believe that the same thing can be said for any other middle-class American community of similar size anywhere in this great country. This is not said in jargonistic hyperbole but with the firm knowledge that America has vastly changed since the youth of Sinclair Lewis and to not recognize this fact is far more provencial than the ignorance he so potently described in "Main Street." We cannot say that the arts have even begun to reach their potential in middle-class cities like Fort Wayne, or that the artist has begun to have a recognized and honored place in such communities. What we are saying, is that we believe that the American middle-class community is ready and capable of defining new roles for the American artist as part of its total community development, and will do so faster when we in the arts accept as we are doing in forming the "Community Arts School" that all the American middle-class community institutions are our allies and not some kind of "ideological" or "class" enemies to be cursed and overthrown. The original Americal "Political" Revolution was created and supported by American middle class intellectuals. The coming American "Cultural Revolution" in which the American artist is integrated into the mainstream of American life as the "American Community Artist" will be accomplished in the same way, by the same kinds of people. "COMMUNITY ARTS SCHOOL" STRATEGIES A basic strategy of the "Community Arts School" will be to consider the "placement" of its graduates in the middle-class American community as an institutional objective equal in importance to teaching its students the formal principles and techniques of the various arts mediums. Using the city of Fort Wayne as a laboratory, the faculty and students together will be involved in experimental programs designed to foster the recognition of the artist in Fort Wayne and utilizing that recognition attempt to create new institutional roles for the professional artist while not denying and even fostering the continuing growth of the advocational artist. New courses in the curriculum of the school under the heading of "Community Arts Development" will be organized in cooperation with Indiana University, the Fort Wayne Community Schools, and the Community Arts Council. These courses will be designed to orient the art student to a social-economic-scientific approach to his profession that can complement the traditional aesthetic philosophical approach to the arts. These courses will help the student to intellectually and emotionally prepare him or her for the experimental and entrepreneurial attitude he or she will need carving a place for themselves in the middle-class American community. In these courses the art students will be enlisted in doing some of the vital sociological research into the role of the arts in America that so overwhelmingly has not been accomplished up to this point in time. In addition, as a part of "Community Arts" education, the students in cooperation with Indiana University, the Community Schools, and the Community Arts Council, will participate in "Action-Research" projects designed to utilize their arts skills in a variety of continuing highly visable community arts projects. In both the academic and action research the students will be brought into personal contact with leaders, individuals, and institutions outside of their art classrooms and art subject matter. The community will become his classroom in importance to his formal classrooms on the campus. In the majority of Art Schools and Art Departments in the nation, the art student is still being isolated intellectually and emotionally from such people as workers, businessmen, housewives, doctors, lawyers, politicians, and educators, because he is being trained to fulfill a mythical role in a mythically satisfying culture capital where in his fantasies the student will achieve easy fame and fortune. In the majority of Art Schools and Art Departments, the art student is still being taught to fulfill the role of the 19th century European artist. It is the hope of the "Community Arts School" to create the more difficult but exciting in its reality challenge of producing a 20th century American artist. Another major strategy of the "Community Arts School" will be to engender in the students the realization that "Community Arts" means an active relationship and partnership with the other arts disciplines in his community. For what is true in regards to the dichotomy in the visual arts between the "Community Arts - Creative Abundance" system and the "Culture Capital - Creative Scarcity" system, is equally true in the case of all the other arts disciplines. Hundreds of thousands of individuals are being trained in theatre, music, and dance, for non-existent positions in the "Culture Capital." These individuals must also find their defined places as American "Community Artists." "In unity there is strength" is an old adage, but one that is relatively new to the arts. For even as arts schools have produced students alienated to society as a whole, so have they produced multitudes of graduates so myopic that they can see no relationships between themselves and artists in other disciplines. A principal motivation/or the development of Community Arts Councils everywhere has been the realization on the part of "Community Artists" and other community leaders supporting the arts, that the American Community, musicians, actors, dancers, painters, and poets all face the same problems of community definition and community support. They have in increasing numbers come to realize that they can achieve greater progress by intercooperation rather than by internecine intellectial and economic warefare and the doubtful claims of artistic superiority for this arts discipline or that. Therefore, using the Community Arts Council as a coordinating agency, the "Community Arts School" will provide its visual arts major practical educational experiences in the other arts disciplines. This will be done by having them work on projects with the Fort Wayne Civic Theatre, Fort Wayne Ballet Company and the Fort Wayne Philharmonic that are fellow members with the School of Fine Arts in the Fine Arts Foundation. The students will participate in other programs and projects designed to promote the acceptance of all the arts and artists in the community. He will be taught to recognize that to develop the arts in the community, he must realize that all the arts institutions are inseparably interrelated, and in turn; they collectively must be related to all the other basic institutions of the community, if they are to grow fast enough to provide him with dignified employment as an artist by the time he graduates. In effect, the students in cooperation with his teachers and other community leaders will be analyzing the community as a complete "human system" made up of a variety of vital socialeconomic and political "systems." He will be analyzing the local arts institutions as a "cultural system" and formulating strategies of how to integrate this "cultural system" into the total community where presently there is limited interaction and acceptance for the arts. It is understood, of course, that in taking this "Community Arts - Creative Abundance" approach, we do not know what kind of arts or artists will result. We do not know what roles we will be able to create for the artist in communities like Fort Wayne. What we do know is that we cannot accept the traditional "Culture Capital - Cultural Scarcity" system that denies the possibility and probably opposes the development of the American "Community Artist." We feel that American communities like Fort Wayne are ready to have the arts play an important role in the raising of the quality of community life. We know that such communities have the artistic and economic resources to accomplish such purposes. We know that as a nation we have already moved fantastic lengths toward the development of an American Civilization based upon creative abundance, pluralism, and intellectual diversity. Therefore, we feel that in following the precedents already established in developing the arts in a democratic framework, and by sharing in the faith of such known pioneers as John Dewey, and in the faith of thousands of still unknown Americans who believed in creating an American civilization, when conditions were so much more unconducive, we are carrying on a unique American enterprise that pragmatically and spiritually promises nationally significant results that appear to us to be worthy of national support in the process of achieving them. Fort Wayne Fine Arts Foundation 324 Penn Avenue Fort Wayne, Indiana 46805
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Title | A Proposal to Establish a Community Arts School |
Subject | Brochures |
Description | This proposal, to change the purpose and function of the Fort Wayne School of Fine Arts and create an organization that would connect with institutions and businesses throughout the city, was prepared by unnamed but "concerned citizens" of Fort Wayne. |
Date | May 15 1972 |
Type | Text |
Original Format | Nine sheets, one fold, printed on both sides, brown on buff (pages), brown on orange (cover), 11 x 8 3/8 inches; Fort Wayne Fine Arts Foundation |
Physical Item Repository | Purdue University Fort Wayne Archives. For more information about the Archives see its home page at http://www.ipfw.edu/microsites/university-archives/ |
Digital Format | application/pdf |
Digital Publisher | Walter E. Helmke Library, Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne |
Rights | Copyright Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne, 2015 - . All rights reserved. May not be reproduced without permission. For information regarding reproduction and use see:http://cdm16776.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/about/collection/p16776coll1 |
Technical Data | Scanned with Fujitsu fi-6770 scanner with ScandAll PRO and Adobe Acrobat XI using Color, 400 dpi, 24-bit |
Accession No. / Digital ID | 30000126500127 |
Collection | Fort Wayne Art School --- A Retrospective |
Transcript | a proposal to establish A COMMUNITY ARTS SCHOOL may 15, 1972 prepared by concerned citizens of fort wayne ind. OBJECTIVES The purpose of this proposal is to utilize a long established Fort Wayne School of Fine Arts and by means of curriculum change and program innovations, establish a "Community Approach" to the Arts designed to integrate the arts into the mainstream of American life. By changing the philosophical, theoretical, and practical emphasis at one school of fine arts, it is intended that it can serve as a model for similar innovations in the arts in other cities all over the United States. The intention is to take an existing arts institution and by the use of a community arts council, ally it to other existing arts institutions and disciplines, general educational institutions, and most important, to institutions that constitute the board fabric of all American cities that hitherto have not related to, or been related to, by the fine arts and artists. The principal institutional targets will be the business community, organized labor, and municipal government with the understanding that the long range goal is to achieve union with all the institutions that make up the typical American city in general and Fort .Wayne in particular. The purpose of this proposal to establish a "Community Arts School" is to remove the fine arts from a peripheral position in the community and the fine artist out of the role of being an isolated, alienated individual in American life. The purpose of establishing a "Community Arts School" will be to establish an intellectual and pragmatical partnership between professionals and students in the fine arts with community leaders in Education, Business, Labor and Government designed to explore and experiment in the area of creating a maximum number of roles for the fine artist in his home community. An important purpose for the establishment of a "Community Arts School" will be to make the arts a resource and possession of all the people in the community, thus establishing an institutional arts world compatible with the democratic principles of America. This desire on our part to create "A Community Arts School" is part of the revolutionary spirit that is being generated throughout America as the nation approaches its 200th birthday. After a hundred years of frantic growth and expansion in which "moving on" to another place to reach personal and national goals was a major element of American life and psychology, a new dawning of America has arrived, a new mature awareness that we have come to where we are now by tremendous energy and in many ways with an undirected and wasteful expenditure of natural and human resources. As we approach our 200th anniversary, we have witnessed a shrill hysteria of national criticism designed to prove that we have failed as a nation and that the ideals and principles laid down by our founding fathers were the mockery that European dictators declared they would be. A minority of doomsayers over the last decade have declared the eminent collapse of America while the silent majority has been reflecting upon the past and planning for the future. Reflection and planning are not immediately dramatic and hence occupy no newspaper headlines, nor receive much attention from national television newsmen. But reflection and planning does result in a multitude of almost invisible actions that collectively add up to dramatic change. The dramatic change, unheralded by the media, is that the majority of Americans have come to the conclusion that the fulfillment of America as a nation will be obtained by the conscious development of their own communities. There is a recognition that we cannot deny international, or national responsibilities, but that the challenge of the third century will be concentrated on developing the full potential of the individual human being and the quality of his life. Now that the basic material needs of the majority have been me~ the concerns for quantity are being replaced by aesthetic concerns. Clean air, clean water, beautiful buildings instead of decaying slums, are aesthetic and artistic concerns as well as scientific and health concerns. Excellent schools and universities housed in beautiful buildings . reflect a rising aspiration for communities to give all their citizens the chance for self enrichment and mental development. Contained within all these concerns lie the principles and practices of the arts. Scientists in California discover that creativity, the fundamental trait identified with the arts, is not an attribute of the rare individual, but instead is a fundamental human potential atrophied in the past for most human beings because society was not designed to allow most human beings to develop such a potential. Other scientists discover that man functions in any task better in an aesthetically pleasing or artistic environment than in an ugly one. Beauty within this context moves from a peripheral concern of a wealthy elite, to becoming a basic tool in the evolution of the American Democratic community. THE PROBLEMS If our purpose in establishing a "Community Arts School" is to integrate the fine arts and the fine artist into the mainstream of American life we- must define the arts in terms of the realities of American Society. This is a very difficult task because it calls for the actuality of sociological analysis. It calls for an intellectual outlook that views the arts as objectively real, subject to the same scrutiny as all of our other societal institutions. It is here that we run into a major problem roughly divided into two parts. The one important aspect of the problem is that the social, economic, and behavorial scientists, whom we generally rely upon to study man and his institutions, in the main have virtually ignored the psychological, economic and sociological phenomena of the arts. If you study the literature of these scientists you will discover that they seem to ignore the gross involvement of human beings in our culture with the great variety of visual and audio material that are a fundamental part of our environment. Because 150 million individuals alone in our society are involved for extended periods of time with the works of writers and artists who create for mass consumption through television, it is unbelievable that these works are considered a peripheral influence to behavior. In modern architecture and in the design of automobiles, furniture, utensils, and clothing, we can see the utter pervasiveness of the artists role in society. The enormous amount and variety of aesthetic phenomena in our environment should certainly seem the obvious target of research in terms of their impact upon society and human behavior, but the truth is that it is not. A cursory review of behavorial research will yield several hundred studies on the effects of toilet-training on human behavior, but only one or two dealing with the entirely universal behavior characteristic of all children in every part of the world spontaneously drawing and painting, singing and dancing, and inventing and acting out imaginary roles. As a primary example of this extraordinary state of affairs in the exhaustingly researched Benjamin S. Bloom's "Taxonomy of Human Behavior" published by the University of Chicago, and based upon the accepted scientific definitions of man, the arts were given one paragraph with an asterisk following it. The authors explanation of the asterisk relates that they seriously considered leaving all of the arts out altogether because they simply did not fit into existing scientific models. This is all the more extraordinary when you consider that the authors along with their university colleagues probably constitute the most faithful audience for the Chicago Art Museum, the Chicago Symphony, and the live theatre that exists in that city. In spite of the universality of human behavior involved with the arts it must be admitted that it is difficult for professionals in any field to escape the conforming orthodoxies of their institutional organizations. It is generally accepted that institutions tend to maintain their cohesiveness by the adherence to their initial belief structures. It is therefore understandable that many scientists are reluctant to tackle a brand new area of study that will interfere with their existing models. However, to preserve their intellectual integrity it appears that science cannot ignore the arts much longer, especially if they are specifically challenged by community leaders to stop doing so. The second important aspect of the problem of communities attempting to realistically define the arts in America lies with the professionals in the Arts. The historical definitions of the arts, the traditional explanations of the arts, began in religion and philosophy before the birth of organized science. Investigation in your nearest library easily reveals shelf upon shelf lined with books that extol and explain the arts in terms of aesthetic philosophy. Theologians and philosophers were authorities in defining man and his arts long before the advent of scientists, and frankly attempted to thwart the development of "the intellectual upstart." Even after the most complete acceptance of science and its technological victories of progress most professionals in the arts tend to look upon the sciences as anathema and inimical to the arts. The initial combat- between science and philosophy may in no small part explain the tradition of the determination on the part of professionals in both science and the arts to patently ignore or actively excoriate each other. The majority of the professionals in the arts tend to think of the arts in exclusively philosophical terms, sometimes bordering on pure faith that the fine arts are magically divorced from the empirical sociological, psychological, economic, and societal laws that regulate and determine the development of such other community institutions as businesses, schools, and government. Many professionals in the arts believe that it is heretical to apply other than a theological yardstick to the arts, less the gods, or as they are sometimes called, the muses, will in anger take away the artist's creative potency and reveal that he is but a man after all. And, so we find that both science and the arts are not surprisingly arranged in institutional hierarchies with antagonistic authority figures in both fields castigating and denying each others existence. Because the sciences have ignored the task of defining the arts, their definition by default has been left to the authority figures in the arts and their definitions on the whole are not too helpful to community leaders and artists in cities like Fort Wayne, which is a principal reason for wishing to establish a "Community Arts School" to take on the challenge. COMMUNITY ARTS DEVELOPMENT Within the last decade we have witnessed a cultural explosion in the United States. One of the results of this explosion has been the sudden multiplication of traditional and new arts institutions. Traditional arts institutions like the Fort Wayne School of Fine Arts, Art Museum, Civic Theatre, Ballet Company, and Philharmonic have proliferated throughout the nation in communities that previously had no such institutions. Under the classification of new arts institutions, we have the Arts Council Movement which includes State Arts Councils, like the Indiana State Arts Commission, and community arts councils like the Fort Wayne Fine Arts Foundation. These organizations which have as their broad purpose, the development of all the arts within their respective geographical domains, are the most recent and important institutional development in the arts in modern times. In 1955, when the arts instititions in Fort Wayne, including the School of Fine Arts, banded together to create a Community Arts Council, there were three other such councils in existence in the United States. Today, according to the Associated Councils of the Arts, there are 950 such councils and more coming into being every day. When any organization such as a Community Arts Council has as its objective the support and development of all the arts in a given area there are questions that naturally arise in regards as to how to define those arts and their place in American society. If one is charged with "developing" the arts, the normal questions arise as to where the arts presently are in the community, what status they occupy, and in terms of development, what status they should have. The arts council as a new arts institution is a new community institution as well. Because its members are both leaders in the arts and general community leaders, community arts councils address themselves to the question of how the community is to benefit the arts_ but at the same time and very importantly also question how the arts are going to benefit the community in a reciprocal relationship. Because these questions are being raised in Tulsa, Des Moines, Denver, Grand Rapids, and many other cities in addition to Fort Wayne, Community Arts Development is a national movement in terms of both the arts and general community development. With these questions naturally arising from the dynamics of community action, artists and community leaders have been forced to consciously explore the traditional definitions of the arts for guidance and seek advice from traditional authorities in the arts. In doing so, they are discovering that the traditional definitions and advice are increasingly incompatible with their own goals and objectives. As a result the arts in America are being reassessed and redefined on the community level. Since most community councils like ours in Fort Wayne are made up of individuals from a variety of professions other than the arts, the questions are not being viewed exclusively as matters of aesthetic philosophy. Instead, the arts in Fort Wayne are being considered as empirically real in a social and economic sense as the labor unions or insurance companies the School of Fine Arts works with in the community. They are seen as interacting with and being affected by the other community institutions and generally conforming to the same kind of socio-economic principles and mechanics that guide all community institutions. For that matter this discovery has its corollary in the realization that many institutions not ordinarily viewed as artistic ones have many unheralded aesthetic dimensions to be considered and acted upon as well. What has also been discovered by community arts developers is that while the arts themselves have been touted as being virtually synonymous with creativity and change, the sociological structure of the existing institutions that are publicized as constituting "The American Art World" is held by many authorities to be inviolate and incapable of change. Community Arts leaders on the other hand believe that if creativity is welcome in the arts disciplines themselves, it should be equally welcome in terms of the makeup of arts institutions, the defining of the arts and what roles they should play in American life. If there is any area in America where freedom of thought should be found it is in the arts. Thus, in their search for answers regarding the arts in their communities, arts leaders in Fort Wayne and elsewhere have determined that they are in intellectual conflict with the existing art authorities who dominate what is called the "National Arts World." The community arts leaders in Fort Wayne wish to create a "Community Arts School" to dramatize their challenging of the belief that holds that there is but one unified "National Arts World" in the United States, made up of common institutions and a single set of beliefs concerning the role of the arts in society. For if the belief in a unitary system is shattered an exciting national intellectual debate can begin concerning every aspect of the arts and the role they can play in our American community life. In seeking to establish a "Community Arts School" the School of Fine Arts, the Fine Arts Foundation, the University of Indiana at Fort Wayne, the Office of Community Schools, and the Office of the Mayor make the suggestions that there are at least two separate art worlds in the United States with different belief systems. There is the "National Creative Scarcity" system centered in New York City which believes that their arts institutions alone constitute our "National" arts and in addition define the arts in varying degrees of "cultural elitism. " This system is commonly held by the national media to be the single unitary "American Arts World" and so report it to the general public via radio, television, and magazines.' It is the contention of the community arts leaders in Fort Wayne that there is yet another "Art World" that has been coexisting with the other for many years and that now has grown so strong it can no longer be ignored. This "Art World" we label the "Community Arts- Creative Abundance" system. This "Community Arts" system is made up primarily of education institutions, Community arts institutions outside of New York City, and community arts councils. In thought and action these two systems have fundamentally different operational beliefs. From these beliefs arise their programming goals and objectives which have been and continue to be different. The "Creative Scarcity" or "Culture Capital" system presently located in New York City holds that there is both a "scarcity" of creative people capable of producing "true art, " and at the same time a "scarcity" of people capable of recognizing, appreciating, and supporting "true" art. Because in the past in both America and Europe, artists have been few in number, and of those few still lesser in number recognized as being "great" cultural elitists have adopted the viewpoint that regardless of any societal changes like American Democracy that may create different historical possibilities, an arts world must be made up of a small number of artists in a single "Culture Capital" producing what is labeled by a handful of authorities as "true art. " Similarly, because in the past both America and Europe there was a scarcity of people with the wealth, leisure time, and education, necessary to recognize appreciate, and patronize the arts, the "culture elitists" believe there should be as a desired ideal a small "scarce" audience for the "scarce" number of artists who produce the "true" art that a superior, small elite can recognize, appreciate, and patronize. As a dramatic illustration of this prevailing viewpoint one only has to read the major economic study of American performing arts commissioned by the Twentieth Century Fund and carried out by W. J. Baumol and W. G. Bowen, professors of Economics at Princeton University. In their book: Performing Arts: The Economic Dilemma the authors classified the "professional" national artists and institutions as those in New York City. The book dealt at length on the economic failures of existing New York arts institutions, catagorizing the increased costs of salaries, stage hands, light bulbs, etcetera. They noted the small audiences desiring to pay for the arts and most importantly, accepted intellectually that this was a natural and perhaps desirable variable, because their grand conclusion was that the dilemma of "American" New York arts institutions was that while every other segment of economic life represented by industry and business had solved the problems of increased costs by increasing productivity, producing more products per man hour, it still took four men, twenty minutes to play a Schuburt String Quartet. Therefore, to keep the arts alive more subsidy would be necessary practically forever. Nowhere in this economic analysis is there the strong suggestion that problems could be mitigated by superior marketing, by increasing the size of the arts audience, by increasing the product demand that plays such an important role in industrial productivity. No illustration was raised noting that "Hello Dolly" took three hours every night but because there was an audience sufficiently large the performers made and did not lose money. It is tacitly suggested; therefore, that a small audience for the arts is natural, expected and perhaps desired. To our knowledge only Community Arts developers have objected to the viewpoint of this objective research study and only now publically. This objection is made because in the "Community Arts - Creative Abundance" arts world, the viewpoint concerning artists and their audience is markedly different from the traditional one. The assumption is made that America socially, economically, and culturally, has evolved in an unprecedented way. As a result American Society and communities are in a position to challenge any previous historical assumptions about the roles the arts can play in American community life. The "Community Arts- Creative Abundance" system holds that within the great population of America there is an enormous reservoir of artistic talent. We believe that there is a direct relationship between the number of creative artists and the number of societal institutions that exist to produce, encourage, train, and support such creative artists. Since there has never been a society before America that has attempted to encourage extremely large numbers of people to be artists, community arts leaders suggest that it is unwise on the part of cultural elitists to automatically attempt to assume the amount of creative talent that is available in any given society. The only way this can be determined is to encourage as many people as possible to develop whatever latent artistic talent they may possess and then weigh the evidence. Such evidence already exists. At the heart of the "Creative Abundance- Community Arts" system is the great American Educational Revolution that was premised on the faith that every individual within our democracy, regardless of social and economic station, was through education to be given the opportunity to identify and develop whatever talent he or she might possess. In our desire for national perfection, we have of late been extremely critical of our public education system. Such criticism is healthy as long as we do not lose sight of the magnificance of its democratic goals, and the immensity of its success in achieving them. The evidence seems to be overwhelming that the American people possess an abundance of talent in all areas of human endeavor far beyond that imagined by any critics of our Democratic system. It is generally conceded by our European critics that as a result of our democratic educational systems, America has more doctors, more scientists, more technicians, more lawyers, more business men, and more engineers for the size of its population than any nation on earth, at any time or any place in the world. But then, they could always take comfort that as a nation we have no culture and therefore are uncivilized. It is the premise of the "Community Arts- Creative Abundance" viewpoint that the same educational system that has produced those doctors and lawyers has also produced the greatest number of trained artists in all the arts disciplines that has existed on the face of the earth and is continuing to do so at an accelerated pace geometric in its proportions. As a result we are now prepared to create communities where the arts are the birthright and possession of the majority of our people. We are now prepared to create an American civilization in keeping with the principles of our Democracy that will pale into insignificance the art produced in the past under despotism. This dream has been held by some American artists and community leaders in every period of our two hundred year history and now is on the verge of fulfillment, in no small way as a result of the development of our democratic educational system. THE EDUCATIONAL ARTS COMPLEX At the heart of the "Community Arts- Creative Abundance" system lies the great American Educational Complex which, of course, includes the institutions involved in this proposal. The development of our Democratic arts is a result of basic decisions made early in the beginning of our public education system. If one studies Educational History he will find that about the same time our public education system was getting started, the Europeans were developing their own systems beginning under Bismark and in Prussia. Both educational systems were intended to teach the mass of the population, but the Prussians determined that the system was to be designed for the limited purpose of producing loyal civil servants and superior soldiers. In America, the creation of a public education system began a continuing intellectual debate on what the schools should accomplish in and for a democracy. The questions were and still are concerning what should be taught if you are to teach everyone. As a result of these debates in our country the curriculum became focused not on creating a mass, but instead on creating an individual. For this reason the arts and humanities were included. For when pioneer educators searched the historical models of educational programs from Europe designed for the aristocratic and privileged, they found an emphasis· on a liberal arts education that included the arts and humanities. The philosophical ideal adopted in America was that every child, rich or poor, should receive the quality education hitherto only available to royalty and the very wealthy. Influenced by such American intellectual giants as John Dewey, who taught that the best way to learn is by doing, the emphasis on the arts in the schools very early shifted from studying the arts as products to having the students actually participating in the arts processes. The arts being included in the curriculum was merely imitating the school programs of the European elite. The major philosphical and scientific innovation of educators like Dewey was to conceive of the creative process illustrated in the arts not as a rare attribute of the "genius," the "abnormal" artist which was the contemporary focal point of the cultural elitists dominating the fine arts at that time in Paris and London. The "divine idiot" artist to be discovered and cared for by the wealthy, understanding patron was a prevalent viewpoint in the institutional art world while educators like Dewey were conceiving of creativity in the arts as a mental facility to be found in all human beings in varying degrees. Dewey and his intellectual colleagues also believed that this facility was capable of being developed and stimulated by institutions and societies constituted and devoted to doing so. This scientific viewpoint toward the arts was and is a keystone belief that separates "Community Arts - Creative Abundance" thinkers and practitioners from "Culture Capital- Cultural Elitist" adherents. Since Dewey, others have carried on these ideas. Educational researchers and philosophers like psychologist Viktor Lowenfeld from Pennsylvania State University have pioneered in studies that show that as a natural part of mental and emotional growth, all children regardless of race, creed, culture or nationality, spontaneously participate in the creative processes involving drawing, painting, singing, dancing, etcetera and do so until societal structures or circumstances discourage the individual from doing so, usually at adolescence. Let us view this concept in historical perspective. If, for example, you were a factory worker's son, or the son of a farmer in 1917, 1920, or 1930, you may naturally and with the urging of the school have participated in the arts processes with some enjoyment. But if you suddenly were taken out of school at age 14, a most common possibility for the majority of young Americans, to work in the factory or fields for 12 to 14 hours per day, and were in a societal milieu where the arts were generally frowned upon, you would be discouraged from developing your artistic sensibilities. Nevertheless, in places like Kansas, Wisconsin, and Indiana, in places extremely remote from the Culture Capitols of Europe, all kinds of individuals were experiencing the arts in the schools even while there were no arts in their soot filled factory homes, and as a result became artists instead of workers or farmers. This is not to say that the majority of all public schools throughout the nation featured a strong emphasis upon the arts. The public schools in wealthy urban areas led the way, and the pattern has been that these pioneering schools attempting to realize the goals of educational philosophers as Dewey have escalated their arts and humanities programs while less wealthy and less urban school districts gradually followed suit especially, with the advent of consolidating rural school systems. There has been steady and accelerating growth year upon year. Now, of course, American society and American schools have dramatically changed. John Dewey and Lowenfeld could only speculate on what would happen if all human beings were encouraged to develop their creative abilities in the arts in conjunction with their other learning. It is what they hoped could happen. In reading history they had determined that most of the philosophers of the western world have talked about what an ideal individual and his society should be. The consensus has always been that the ideal individual should not only be involved in the arts processes himself but in addition should be a patron of the professional artists and working for a society that cherishes the arts. Historically, leaders like Frederik The Great have been idealized because not only was he a political and military genius, but because he also studied philosophy, patronized the arts, and was an artist himself More recently we have the example of Winston Churchill. The Renaissance man concept is a fundamental one in both European and American educational philosophy. The difference is that in the class ridden countries of Europe such ideals are presumed the domain of a tiny ruling elite. In America these ideals are the professed destiny for all of the people. It is a breathtaking goal and pragmatically must be accepted as virtually impossible, given the natural psychological, economic, societal, technological and institutional limitations of any nation. But also pragmatically, if enough institutions are constituted and dedicated to such a task, and enough individuals are touched by such institutions, statistically some effects must result. Because education has become so absolutely ubiquitous in American life it has become difficult for many people to step back in perspective to realize that it has become next to industry and business our major American enterprise, and constitutes an absolute fundamental part of our business, professional and cultural life. The US. Office of Education estimates that close to 45 billion dollars is expended annually for education. Roughly 3 billion comes from the federal government, 18 billion from State Government, and 21 billion from municipal taxes. Especially, on the state and local level the majority of the taxpayers dollar goes for the schools. Out of a national population of 203 million approximately 52 million are enrolled in elementary, secondary, and higher education institutions which means approximately 25 percent of the population is engaged actively in the education processes including the arts. These figures do not include the millions of adults participating in continuing education in which arts courses of all kinds play a major part. Teaching these multitudes are over 2 million professional educators and hundreds of thousands more people who work in service positions in the educational institutions. This educational complex of elementary, secondary, and higher education institutions is the very heart of the "Community Arts- Creative Abundance" system. In elementary schools all over the nation, training and practice in all the arts is going on. Children are being encouraged and rewarded for drawing, painting, singing, dancing, etcetera. As a result, a growing minority of students in every school district discover at an early age an interest in the arts. This growing minority group in turn swells the ever more sophisticated arts programs in the secondary schools. As a result of the increased encouragement and training received in the high schools, an ever growing number of graduates upon leaving for college elect to major in the arts, swelling the enrollment in college, university and private arts schools and causing the creation of arts departments in schools where they never existed before. Since the traditional arts world in New York is predicated upon a "scarcity" of artists, only a tiny few of the growing number of graduates in the arts can be employed, or in the case of visual artists "discovered" by the "authorities" who run the art galleries that constitute the "National" arts world. Returning home, these artists in the main are fed back into the "Creative Abundance" system of education as artist-educators. These artist-educators, devoted and well trained, produce more and better elementary arts programs which recognize and encourage still more individuals to take advantage of the larger, more sophisticated arts programs equally manned by recent art school graduates. These programs are so good that even greater numbers out of the increasing multitude of students being able to go to college, elect to become artists. When these increased numbers of students graduate they in turn find no increase of opportunity in the "Creative Scarcity" gallery system in New York. They, in turn, are fed back into the enlarging and expanding educational arts complex, often. having to return to school to get the required educational credentials they did not feel they needed or wanted since they hoped to succeed in the New York system. At the present time the system is increasing at a fantastic pace. According to the U.S. Office of Education in 1959, 7,633 individuals graduated with bachelors degrees in the visual arts, 1,062 with masters degrees, and 55 with doctorates, for a total of 8,750 trained professionals. By 1966, the numbers had increased to 13,577 graduating with bachelors degrees, 2,403 with masters degrees, and 88 with doctorates, giving you that year a total of 16,068 trained professionals in the arts. In 1970, 61,594 individuals graduated with bachelors degrees, 12,069 graduated with masters degrees, and 929 received doctorates, adding up to 74,592 people trained in the visual arts. This reveals that the system is reaching geometric rather than arithmatic proportions in growth. When the figures for graduates in the visual arts are added up for the last twelve years the totals are intellectually staggering. In this period, the real "Culture Explosion" is revealed to be the production of artists. In a little over a decade 223,836 individuals received bachelors degrees, 42,284 individuals received masters degrees, and 2,479 received doctorates. This adds up to a total of 268,927 degrees awarded for professional training in the arts!!! And of course, the enrollment figures are rising. A Louis Harris poll has documented that 18 percent of college seniors interviewed are interested in the arts - not as an avocation, not as a sometime part of an otherwise directed life-style, but as a full-time way of living. And the "Profile of This Year's Freshmen," compiled by the Chronical of Higher Education, shows that 9.2 percent of the freshmen chose the fine arts as a probable major jield of study, as compared to 16. 2 percent who wanted to concentrate on business and 11.6 percent who were interested in education. The fine arts ranked third in the listing of preferences, two notches ahead of the social sciences and engineering, which came in fourth and fifth. As a career preference, to be an artist was more interesting to the freshmen than to be a nurse, doctor, lawyer, or college teacher. Nowhere in any publications on the fine arts have these figures been published, because no one as a New York arts authority would have any curiosity. Their assumption is that the only professional artists in this nation are those individuals living in New York City recognized by the handful of institutions which include the Museum of Modern Art and a small series of other private art galleries which in turn are supported by the arts editors of such magazines as Time and Newsweek, the three major television networks, and the "National" Art magazines, including Art News and Art Forum. John Hightower, the Director of the Museum of Modern Art who recently resigned from that position, was before that the director of the New York State Arts Council. When Mr. Hightower assumed the directorship of the Museum of Modern Art he was interviewed on the Today Show. In that interview, which was never quoted by anyone, he pointed out that the Museum of Modern Art had been in collusion with a number of the leading New York galleries. If M.O.M.A. decided to recognize an artist by a showing of his work, then the monetary value would increase when it was moved to the private galleries for sale. This would also work in the reverse direction, with a private gallery "recognizing" a new artist, and then having their wisdom confirmed by a showing at the Museum of Fine Arts and confirming articles being written in the New York Times, Time and Life magazines. Mr. Hightower was recently forced to resign but his admission of the intellectual shallowness of the system has hopefully speeded up its dissolution. For example, Claus Oldenburg, a now recognized modern master in the arts, was manufacturing giant hamburgers out of paper mache for several years, and while admired by his friends, these hamburgers were worth about $1.50 each. Then, one of the leading gallery owners, recognized for his taste by the New York Times flavored Mr. Oldenburg's work and featured his hamburgers in a major show in his gallery. The gallery owner declared that these burgers are among the only "true arts." They are now intellectually, but importantly, monetarily valuable. The burgers now are worth $10,000, the cheeseburgers $15,000 with the "discoverer" of the "true art" getting perhaps over half the price on each culinary and artistic masterpiece. Now, according to art authorities, giant hamburgers are not only the "true art" in America, but since New York is now the Culture Capitol of the world, replacing Paris of the prewar years, hamburgers must be the "true art" in London, Paris, Berlin and the whole world … because the "cultural elitist" system says that for true creativity and sophistication it is reasonable to accept there must be only one style, one kind of "true art" that expresses a nation, a world, a time and an age, or increasingly ... a moment. With such sincerely held convictions it is easy for art authorities to ignore the fact that the "Creative Abundance" system has turned out 268,927 people professionally trained in the visual arts, because they are not needed or desired for the "Culture Capital" system to function. To illustrate this fact, by example, students of the Fort Wayne School of Fine Arts reviewed and analyzed the issues of Art News which report on the "National Arts World" of New York for the same time period as covered by the statistics from the U.S. Office of Education on arts graduates. In this analysis they were able to determine that while 268,927 individuals throughout America graduated from professional training institutions, the gallery and museum system in New York exhibited and sold the works of 9033 artists. Approximately 181 artists were newly discovered while the rest constituted the already established stars. Even if this system wanted to recognize, which it does not all new artists, it could barely dent the hundreds of thousands of artists being trained. Therefore, the safest way is to totally ignore the phenomena as not fitting into their intellectual systems, not conforming to their institutional models. If the hundreds of thousands of professional artists are anathema to the "Culture Capital - Cultural Elitist" authorities, the rise of the Advocational Community Artist produced by the "Creative Abundance" system is still more beyond the pale of their interest. Within the "Creative Abundance" system of educational institutions the number of individuals who elect to become professional artists and artist-educators, still represent a small minority in terms of the general population, even though this minority represents the greatest number of professionally trained artists the world has ever known. A much larger group graduating from our educational institutions do not seek the arts as a profession, either because they are not interested enough, or because they are realistic enough to see the poor chances of making a living at art. These individuals instead swell the ranks of advocational arts groups throughout the United States that are also historically unprecedented in their numbers. A significant part of the Culture Explosion has been the rise of the amateur or semi-professional artist. These are persons who were introduced to the arts by the professional artists in the schools and while enjoying them as a means of self-fulfillment do not attempt to make them their principal occupation. In one of the only sociological studies of the Arts In America that has been done, Alvin Toffler, now famous for his bestseller, Future Shock, spent a year traveling throughout the United States studying the arts outside of the "Culture Capital." In the resulting book The Culture Consumers: Art and Affluence in America published in 1964, Toffler points out among his statistical findings that there are approximately 25, 000 community theatre groups in America with an annual audience of over 100 million people. Of the 1250 orchestras in America, over a thousand are amateur or community orchestras. According to Toffler the number of amateur musical instrumentalists jumped from 19 million in 1950 to 35 million in 1960 and the dollar value in instrument sales soared more than 175 per cent. In the visual arts, Toffler used an estimate by the National Art Materials Trade Association that the number of adult amateur painters and craftsmen had risen in number from 30 million in 1950 to 40 million in 1960, with over a million of them taking formal instruction. By now, says Toffler, these figures must be understatements. Even in small rural towns, the hardware stores now sell fine art supplies, and failing this, rural people can be well supplied by the national mail order companies that all stock a complete inventory of sophisticated art materials. Art supply companies are now multi-billion dollar industries as a result of the arts education complex and amateur artists. When Mr. Toffler published his book, he was castigated by "national" arts authorities for being unsophisticated and provencial because he concentrated his studies outside of New York, and because he measured the arts in "economic" terms rather than in literary or esthetic terms. And so, the "Culture Capital - Cultural Elitist" authorities choose to ignore the "Community Arts- Creative Abundance" system of arts as it continues to develop and grow, turning out individuals trained to think of the arts as a process useful to the individual and the community that he lives in. Not only has it turned out and continues to do so, hundreds of thousands of people trained as professionals in the arts, but it has turned out and is turning out millions of people from every walk of life who enjoy participating in the arts personally, and desire to have the arts play a more important part in the life of their community, no matter where in America that community is located. It has turned out the individuals who are community arts leaders in cities all over the country forming community arts councils. It h.as produced the community arts leaders in Fort Wayne who wish to create "A Community Arts School" dedicated to defining the artist and arts in terms of the role they can play in their own American community. WHY A "COMMUNITY ARTS SCHOOL" NOW Two hundred years after America achieved its political independence from Europe, through the development of a "Community Arts School" it will begin its true cultural revolution, by declaring its independence from the European "Cultural Capital - Cultural Elitist" arts system. As in our political revolution, this revolt is a result of years of gradual growth and barely perceptible change. Politically, Americans in the colonies had co-existed with the European home countries and believed strongly and loyally in the aristocratic, despotic monarchy system, even as in day to day institutional existence they more and more practiced an alien democratic system. It was only when dramatic events occurred that clearly revealed how different a political and spiritual system had evolved on this continent did the Americans reluctantly, consciously explore those differences and declare their political independence. When they did, they did not throw out the intellectual heritage but modified it to the new goals and objectives of Democracy. In this political revolution for the most part the new Americans rejected the fine arts, for in Europe the fine arts were identified almost exclusively with the aristocratic and religious institutions they were finally and enthusiastically rejecting. While the church and Monarchy continued to patronize the artists that make up the Art History we know, the Americans pioneered in conquering a continent, excelling in the development of a unique social, political, and economic system that one day, as it has, could provide the foundation for the fine arts (o flourish in a freedom unheard of anywhere else on Earth and devoted to all of the people and not just the few. When America was building a nation, the few fine artists produced by this country continually were forced' to go to Europe to be trained and discovered. The wealthy few in America who wished to consume art had to import it at great expense from Europe ·or go to Europe at great expense to buy it The conventional wisdom was that there was and could be no fine art produced in a Democrary because of its emphasis and concern for the "unwashed" masses. In the meantime in "cultured" Europe, so few people nationally had the wealth, education, and leisure time to patronize the arts, the few arts institutions necessary to supply this small group of individuals in an economically feasible way, clustered in national capitals like Paris, London and Vienna. Anyone seeking to participate in the arts or to enjoy them as a consumer was forced to leave the provences and travel to these European capitals. The wealth, the educational institutions, the arts, and political power were and still are centered in such capitals today. By the turn of our second century as a nation the few arts institutions that existed in America were primarily located in the eastern section of the country and were considered by the "international" arts authorities of the European Culture Capitals as inferior because as they knew a Democracy cannot produce "true" art. At about this time the "Creative Abundance" system of public education began to quietly function in Kansas and Illinois: places geographically and philosophically remote from any "Culture Capitals." Such places if they were known at all in Paris were considered raw and forbidding inhabited primarily by savages. Leaping ahead to the end at the Second World War, America had become the undisputed political and economic power of the world. As a result the "Culture Capital - Cultural Elitist" center was moved from Paris to New York, along with many of the elitist European art authorities who came to settle there. Although the city was self designated as the "first" city of the land of America, one could still hear familiar phrases like "provencial" Americans are incapable of producing "true" art, or Middle Class Americans from the middle west make good scientists and businessmen, but not artists and intellectuals. In the meantime, these middle class, middle Americans, as well as their counterparts in every part of the nation were pouring a majority of their community and state wealth into the "Creative Abundance" educational system, with literally fantastic expenditures for arts facilities and faculties. And now, as New York arts institutions collapse and die from the lack of community support in their own city, arts councils in Tulsa and Anaheim are told that if they want "true" art in their communities they must export at great expense "true" artists from their Culture Capital and if, and this is a remote possibility, they have developed any indigenous arts talent they must send them to New York even if the chance is fantastically remote that they would have a chance of practicing their talents in a "Creative Scarcity" system that requires only a tiny few. Remember, that in spite of your own community wealth and resources, mere money cannot produce the magic of "true" art produced in a Culture Capital. At this point it must be mentioned that like the American colonies before our original revolution, the majority of arts leaders in the Nation still believe and are loyal to New York and the "Culture Capital - Cultural Elitist" viewpoint, for after all in their educations they were taught a common arts history, and if they were interested in the arts, all they could read were the articles in Time, Life, Look, Newsweek, Saturday Review, and other publications sincerely concerned about the arts, but with a vested interest in maintaining the "Cultural Capital - Cultural Elitist" system. Movies and later television supplied them with the same reinforced message: "True art and art in America must originate and remain in the Culture Capital. " Totally analogous to our forefathers in the colonies, individuals who enjoy the New Yorker and admire many of the artists that have come out of the Cultural Capital system have feelings akin to matricidal guilt at the idea of freeing themselves from the motherland and declaring their cultural and intellectual independence. Like our ancestors, it means a loss of security that goes with being a conformist to a system that brands its heretics as "provencial" and "unsophisticated" in a field that prides itself on being synonomous with "sophistication." There is a certain terror involved in saying: "I am not sure of what role the fine artist in America is playing and what role he could or should play," as opposed to smugly saying: "I know what the role of the American artist is in America, because the accepted authorities in American art have told me, and I am as sophisticated as they are because I certainly agree with them." But, of course, we also have the comforting historical precedent of the Oracle at Delphi declaring Socrates the most sophisticated man in the world because he admitted that he knew very little and had many more questions in his mind than he had answers. Something akin to The Stamp Act or the Quartering of Troops in Private Homes in Boston is often necessary to motivate original thought. Something dramatically incompatible with your own convictions and values must occur that is absolutely intellectually and emotionally unacceptable to you and to the majority of your contemporaries. This "something" has been the continuing escalation of the definition of the American Artist as an alien outsider in his own land. If the art history of the western world is explored it reveals that the artists that constitute our intellectual heritage, up until fairly modern times were in the main accepted in their contemporary social order and fulfilled a societal function designed to promote that order. Social criticism by artists was one legitimate role for artists and acted out by such artists as Goya and Hogarth. But on the whole, artists fulfilled social roles that supported the societal system that nurtured them. There were not many artists or people utilizing them, but those artists were accepted as having a legitimate although sometimes low status in society. The romantic notion of the artist as an alienated rebel came about when his traditional aristocratic and religious patronage came to an end and the artist became dependent upon the free enterprise gallery system. No longer being able to deal directly with his patrons, the artist became alienated from the general public and community life. He gathered in intellectual and economically poor ghettos in European Culture Capitals, talked only to other artists, and became totally dependent upon the "intellectual-middlemen" of gallery owners and media critics for both economic sustenance and intellectual guidance. With only "Culture Capital" gallery owners and critics to decide the social roles for the artist, the most satisfactory one for them to promote was to have the artist defined as a mad, isolated, abnormal character whose only value was the occasional rare product that they could recognize and merchandise as "true" art. The Gallery owner and the critic were of course the only ones who would or could deal with such strange creatures. The image of the artists as an intelligent man of the world, thoroughly involved in the economic, philosophical and political happenings of his time, the artist as a Cellini or Michelangelo, was replaced by the mad genius, swimming through a fog of alcohol or fits of psychosis, but in his illness and isolation still producing masterpieces that are rejected by the galleries and critics until in a bitter poverty the artist dies. At this point the true worth of the masterpieces is discovered by the gallery owners and supporting critics, and assured of limited "scarce" supply the value of the works comfortably escalates as the years go by providing wealthy industrialists and nervous South American dictators with a safe and easily transported form of financial investment. This is not to say that some alienated and mentally ill artists have not produced "true masterpieces,;, but the "Cultural Capital - Cultural Elitist" authorities have turned this around and have promoted the idea that the artist can only create "true art" by being alienated and isolated from his society, which in America, is a middle-class, democratic, free enterprise, business oriented, society. In the last twenty years the "Creative Abundance - Community Arts" system has produced an estimated 350, 000 professionally trained individuals in the arts. According to the arts authorities in New York the "true" artists in America consists of several thousand alienated males living in intellectual, economically impoverished ghettos in the City of New York. Religiously, the artist is an atheist or follower of obscure oriental rites. Socially, he dispises both marriage and heterosexuality. Politically, he is a radical dedicated to the overthrowing by violence, the capitalistic free enterprise system. His chief leisure time activity is remaining stoned on a multiple variety of hallucinatory drugs. In short he is the perfect counter-culture hero, the complete negative and reverse stereotype of the middle class, middle American citizen that inhabits America. He hates Coca-Cola, General Motors, and cannot wait to see all the Burger Chef stands destroyed in the coming violent revolution in which the enslaved American workers will rise up from their factories and bring down their capitalistic masters. Then, a utopian socialistic state will be set up and the workers will humbly hand over the leadership positions held too long by businessmen and lawyers to the pot smoking, humanistic painters and sculptors. The utter and complete absurdity of this definition of the American artist is so blatant that no matter how sympathetic to the traditional belief system of the Culture Capital, it simply cannot be intellectually or emotionally accepted by community arts leaders throughout the nation. It certainly is not accepted by us here in Fort Wayne, It is so gross a definition, many people throughout America not intimately involved in the world of the arts will most likely suspect the definition to be a satirical exaggeration more likely a product of a humorist like Art Buchwald or Al Capp than the work of serious intellectual leaders in the arts. As evidence that the "Culture Capital- Cultural Elitist" system indeed has reached this unacceptably absurd position one only has to read about the forced resignation of John Hightower from the Museum of Modern Art. As the previous director of the New York State Arts Council, Mr. Hightower brought to the Museum job the intellectually liberating experiences of having dealt with politicians, businessmen, institutions, and communities outside of New York City. It is with this perspective that he took the job and began by confessing the cooperative role the museum played in the economic life of certain New York Galleries. In the end, Mr. Hightower fell victim to the same system that dictated the alien role for the artist. Great pressure was put on him to act out the ultimate escalation of the artist as an alien to that of total political revolutionary. Thus, as Director he was forced to allow programs such as "Dial a Radical" in which, at Museum expense, and on the justification that it was "true" art, the Museum allowed such groups as the Black Panthers to record "hate" messages calling for the violent overthrow of the American Government. These messages could be heard by calling the Museum. This was done as a result of an artist's strike, generally supported by the New York intellectual community. The leader of that strike was Claus Oldenburg's brother, who upon Mr. Hightower's resignation has been hired to replace him as the director of the Museum. As further evidence, we have the problems of the California Institute of Arts located in Burbank, California. The California Institute of Arts was the result of a dream of Walt Disney to create an Arts School that would truly represent the American Democracy that he had expoused and extoled throughout his artistic life. It was his desire to take the money he had earned as an American artist to create the best arts school in the nation. Unfortunately, Disney died before the school facilities were completed and therefore, was not available to help set the school up or help decide its policies. The Board of Trustees being primarily businessmen and not on familiar terms with the arts were in a quandary as to what to do with a 42 million dollar facility naturally turned to "national" arts authorities in New York City and hired William Corrigan, Dean of the School of Fine Arts at New York City University. Seeking the 'finest" artists in America to be the faculty, he naturally hired "national" artists from New York. When his faculty and his first students were gathered together the Dean of the new school reflecting Walt Disney's concern for democracy allowed the faculty and the students to democratically decide together the purposes, practices, and policies of the school. After due deliberation, the faculty and students, decided that the role of the fine artist in America was as a revolutionary dedicated to the overthrow of the democratic, capitalistic, free enterprise system and the bourgeoisie American middle class. Since this was the purpose of the Art School they demanded that Herbert Marcuse, the advocate of violent revolution teaching at Berkley be hired onto the staff of the California Institute of Art. This demand was refused by the businessmen on the Board of Trustees and as a result the school has been in a turmoil ever since, with the faculty and students dramatizing their contempt to the surrounding middle class community by public nude bathing and public drug consumption. In contrast to this prevalent "Culture Capital - Cultural Elitist" definition of the American Fine Artist we have a research study of the American Fine Artist carried out by the University of Wisconsin Arts Extension Department in 1968. In this study, University researchers identified the Wisconsin professional artist by surveying the records of the Wisconsin Painters and Sculptures Show. This open competition professional arts show, sponsored by the State Professional Artist Association at the time the survey had been held in Milwaukee every year for a period of 42 years and annually received entries from thousands of Wisconsin artists from every area of the state. The criteria for the sample was that the individuals surveyed had to have been selected for the exhibit at least three times in the last 10 years or an individual who had won one of the major awards during the same period of time. The resulting sample consisted of several hundred artists. A questionnaire was designed to give a social and economic profile of the professional Wisconsin artist. The questionnaires were distributed by mail and while it may be surprising to some, the majority of those solicited responded and sent in their "no-name" questionnaires. The information received from this survey was in marked contrast to the "New York" description of the professional artist as an alien outsider. Roughly half were male and female with the majority, married and having children. The majority owned homes, had cars, television sets, etcetera. Roughly two thirds were Democrats and Independents with the rest Republican. The majority were Protestants with a large percentage of the minority religions represented being Jewish, a percentage larger than for the population as a whole. Approximately half the women were housewives and the other half being educators. Among the men, the overwhelming majority were professional educators. Only two or three of the total samples said that they received more than 5 percent of their annual income from the sale of their work. The majority responded that they enjoyed living in their own communities and desired to be an artist there rather than moving to New York City. However, to the question regarding whether they were satisfied with the community recognition or status they received as artists, the negative responses were virtually unanimous. The results of the Wisconsin study strongly tally with the survey of former graduates presently being conducted by the Fort Wayne School of Fine Arts. What emerges from both is a portrait of the American professional artist in marked contrast to the one presented to the public by the New York media. What is revealed in Wisconsin and Indiana, and we suspect all over the nation, is a professional artist of middle class origins, living as a middle class American, either as a housewife, or as an artist-educator, accepted in his community for his role as an educator and not as an artist, because everyone knows that an artist is that alien stranger residing in New York portrayed in the movies and on television. This brings us to the second dramatic impetus for the creation of a "Community Arts School." As arts educators and developers, many of us could honestly accept the increased numbers of young people desiring higher professional education in the arts because while we knew the "Culture Capital" system would not support the employment of them, we were sure that they could be fed into the educational system. Even when the majority of higher education institutions for prestige purposes de-emphasized arts education degrees and urged their students to take "fine arts" degrees to prepare them for nonexistant occupations, community arts developers had enough evidence to show that after a year or so of frustration most of the "fine arts" graduates would go back to school, take additional education courses and get their teaching licenses. What is occuring was inevitable but nevertheless still comes as a shock. Because of the concentration on zero population, the stock market, or any number of societal reasons, the "Creative Abundance" system seems to have reached certain demographic limits. While the numbers of art majors have increased geometrically, the numbers of available pupils and schools and the number of necessary teachers are now approaching a balance. In other words, we have now reached the over production of artists that can be accommodated by the system producing them. In short, we have arrived at the point where the graduates of an art school cannot be taken care of by having them teaching in a college, university, high school or elementary arts program. As long as you could bury artists in the educational system they could remain virtually invisible. If artists outside of New York are invisible, you can ignore them. But if you suddenly have a tremendous surplus of unemployed graduates from Art Schools, you must deal with them, you must explore the purposes to which they must be put. And, in the process you must discuss the roles of all the artists no matter where they presently reside and how they are earning their living. We are extremely aware of this problem in Fort Wayne, because we have been forced to tell our entering freshman that they are entering a profession that institutionally does not exist. We explain to them that in the past they could always be gainfully employed as a artist-educator, with recognition and salaries coming from the community as a teacher and not as an artist. In every case the response of the student is the question: "Why??" This "Why?" must be faced as a question of enormous complexity, as much filled with problems as it is with enormous opportunity. This question of "Why?" is not a small and isolated one in American life. It is a pressing concern of state legislatures. For example, a few weeks ago the Chicago Tribune in a Sunday special explored the problems of higher education in Illinois. It dealt at length on the problems of what higher educational institutions in the state should be doing for preparing students for the realities of American life. The article revealed that the State legislature had cut the engineering departments because there was a surplus of aerospace engineers in the country. It was also cutting the budgets of education departments because there was a shortage of teaching jobs available. In other words, there was an obvious concern about the numbers of individuals being trained and the jobs available to such individuals. In the same article, the problems of private colleges were outlined, showing that like the public institutions they, too, were plagued by problems of financing and spending priorities. As an example, they detailed the problem of one well known private college which had to double their annual request for funds from alumni because in keeping with their educational priorities they needed the additional funds to complete the construction of their 2 million dollar Fine Arts Center!! Priority indeed, when you realize that this Center will be used to professionally educate an increased number of arts majors for societal roles that utterly do not presently exist in American Community life!! It is not our intention to call for the abolishment of the "Creative-Abundance" system because it no longer can invisibly accommodate the artists it has and is training. Nor is it our object to diminish the place of the arts in education because the traditional arts world does not need more artists. We are convinced that the arts in every great abundance are an important means of improving the quality of American Community life for everyone. But it is our intention to revise the definitions of the arts and artists that has become necessary of the American Educational Revolution. It is our intention, in fact, to continue this ArtisticEducation-Cultural Revolution by expanding the educational programs to include the creation of new societal institutions and programs designed to utilize on the community level, the artistic talent educational institutions like ourselves are producing in our arts training programs. It is our purpose to have arts education programs geared to the social, economic, political, and philosophical realities of American community life. BASIC PRINCIPLES OF "THE COMMUNITY ARTS SCHOOL" The first principle is that we intend to concentrate on developing an "American Community Artist" instead of a "National Artist." By this we mean, an artist trained to find a meaningful role in a typical American community like Fort Wayne, Indiana or Toledo, Ohio, rather than one trained to live in and conform to the momentary intellectual dictates of an "International Culture Capital." What we don't mean is an artist isolated from the world at large. The "Community Artist" will be happy to know that other artists are doing anywhere in the world. But the artist we visualize will be sophisticated enough not to believe that he must conform in his artistic work or life style to any standards proclaimed by the arts authorities of any solitary community. In order to develop the American "Community Artist" we reject all of the basic concepts of the "Culture Capital - Cultural Elitist" arts world. One of the most important rejections is the intellectual notion, based on the economic necessities of the New York gallery system that there is just one kind of "true" art for any historical moment and that the art work that proceeded that moment is automatically, intellectually and economically worthless. It is a notion that breeds the intellectual absurdity of adolescent artists being proclaimed as supposedly reaching their artistic maturity, triumphant heights and obsolescent decay within a period of a year or so. This is an exact institutional correlation to young rock and roll musicians being discovered, exploited and discarded in dizzying swift fashion for the purpose of quick profit. Another basic principle of the "Community Arts School" is that there is no necessity for only one kind of art on a national or international basis since the limitless possibilities of variety are inherent in the very nature of the arts processes. A simultaneous abundance of artistic styles and an abundance of different kinds of artists is an ideal of the "Community Arts School." Such an intellectual free enterprise system holds no terror except to individuals who have a vested interest in an existing "Culture Capital." The role of the American "Community Artist" and "Community Arts" student will be to have his art grow out of his own intellectual convictions and talents, and the value of his art being its acceptance by, and contribution to, his own community, wherever that community is located in this great vast nation. Through the ubiquitous American education system the "Community Arts" student has in cities like Fort Wayne throughout the country the intellectual traditions of the entire Eastern and Western world at his fingertips. He has the means of gaining the basic skills and crafts that constitute all of the arts disciplines. In the communities themselves he has the wealth of industry and commerce, a population with more affluence and leisure time, and a sophisticated, ever more educated potential audience for his art becoming for a variety of reasons concerned about the esthetic quality of life in their community. In addition, on a feedback principle the very educational institutions training him to be an artist can be producing more potential patrons for the artist he wishes to be when he or she graduates. In short, the intellectual possibilities in the development of a "Community Arts School" pales into absurdity the idea that a handful of authorities anywhere can contain the full creativity of a nation and proclaim that its national artists are a small group of isolated drug orientated marxist revolutionaries. One of the absolute basic principles of the "Community Arts School" is the enthusiastic acceptance of the fact that American communities are based upon the democratic middle class, business oriented, capitalistic, free enterprise system. It is extremely important to remember that our original revolution was not carried out by a group of hopelessly poor peasants, but by an educated middle class. It has been this same middle class growing in wealth and numbers that has created and sustained America's social, economic, and political institutions, including those submitting this proposal, and those this proposal is being submitted to. It is this same, grown still larger, middle class and hardly impressed with Karl Marx that presently and in the future still will be defining the American community including its artistic and cultural life. For many years, it has been fashionable among American intellectuals inspired by European Marxist intellectuals, to make the American middle class or "Bourgeoisie" the principal scapegoat for all the evils of this nation, and as supporters of our governments international policies, for all the evils of the world. Middle class taste, middle class standards, middle class morals, middle class work ethics, middle class religion, have all become epitaphs for that which is of the least quality, the most crass, the most mindless, the most unethical, and the most foolish. Of course, when middle American can be prefixed to such titles the contempt and horror can be increased geometrically. Because these epitaphs are so broadly used and ill defined it is difficult to understand what they mean and why they are so terrible, especially since they are so often used as intellectual weapons by individuals who in so many characteristics, such as educational background, regional origin and annual income, comfortably fit into the parameters of the middle-class themselves. One explanation for these blanket indictments may be that since the majority of Americans can be classified as middle-class anything, including those things which can be seen as bad in the country, must of necessity involve the middle class. By then, taking the intellectually shallow point of view that everything in America is wrong, the blame can put on those most involved, who happen to be middle-class Americans. Thus, since everything is wrong in America it is the fault of the middle-class because of their thoughts and deeds which divide up into such sub-elements as middle-class taste, morals, ethics, politics, and aspirations. It is, of course, most pertinent that one does not hear the phrase, "Middle-class intellectualism" thus by omission denying the possibility of serious thought among those from the middleclass, i.e., the majority of Americans. Since American communities like Fort Wayne are middle-class, middle-American in nature, nothing intellectual can be expected from them. As a basic principle of the "Community Arts School" we are not going to take the equally absurd point of view that every aspect of middle class American life is a paragon of virtue and quality. But we do take the point of view that we are middle-class Americans, working with middle-class students, in middle-class institutions, for the benefit of other middle-class institutions and individuals. As such, we believe, we are as capable of serious, sophisticated, intellectual, and cultural thought and action as any individuals and institutions in any other community existing upon the face of this earth. Unlike a "Culture Capital" we do not ascribe our intellectual powers as a unique exclusive possession of this particular community, but instead, believe that the same thing can be said for any other middle-class American community of similar size anywhere in this great country. This is not said in jargonistic hyperbole but with the firm knowledge that America has vastly changed since the youth of Sinclair Lewis and to not recognize this fact is far more provencial than the ignorance he so potently described in "Main Street." We cannot say that the arts have even begun to reach their potential in middle-class cities like Fort Wayne, or that the artist has begun to have a recognized and honored place in such communities. What we are saying, is that we believe that the American middle-class community is ready and capable of defining new roles for the American artist as part of its total community development, and will do so faster when we in the arts accept as we are doing in forming the "Community Arts School" that all the American middle-class community institutions are our allies and not some kind of "ideological" or "class" enemies to be cursed and overthrown. The original Americal "Political" Revolution was created and supported by American middle class intellectuals. The coming American "Cultural Revolution" in which the American artist is integrated into the mainstream of American life as the "American Community Artist" will be accomplished in the same way, by the same kinds of people. "COMMUNITY ARTS SCHOOL" STRATEGIES A basic strategy of the "Community Arts School" will be to consider the "placement" of its graduates in the middle-class American community as an institutional objective equal in importance to teaching its students the formal principles and techniques of the various arts mediums. Using the city of Fort Wayne as a laboratory, the faculty and students together will be involved in experimental programs designed to foster the recognition of the artist in Fort Wayne and utilizing that recognition attempt to create new institutional roles for the professional artist while not denying and even fostering the continuing growth of the advocational artist. New courses in the curriculum of the school under the heading of "Community Arts Development" will be organized in cooperation with Indiana University, the Fort Wayne Community Schools, and the Community Arts Council. These courses will be designed to orient the art student to a social-economic-scientific approach to his profession that can complement the traditional aesthetic philosophical approach to the arts. These courses will help the student to intellectually and emotionally prepare him or her for the experimental and entrepreneurial attitude he or she will need carving a place for themselves in the middle-class American community. In these courses the art students will be enlisted in doing some of the vital sociological research into the role of the arts in America that so overwhelmingly has not been accomplished up to this point in time. In addition, as a part of "Community Arts" education, the students in cooperation with Indiana University, the Community Schools, and the Community Arts Council, will participate in "Action-Research" projects designed to utilize their arts skills in a variety of continuing highly visable community arts projects. In both the academic and action research the students will be brought into personal contact with leaders, individuals, and institutions outside of their art classrooms and art subject matter. The community will become his classroom in importance to his formal classrooms on the campus. In the majority of Art Schools and Art Departments in the nation, the art student is still being isolated intellectually and emotionally from such people as workers, businessmen, housewives, doctors, lawyers, politicians, and educators, because he is being trained to fulfill a mythical role in a mythically satisfying culture capital where in his fantasies the student will achieve easy fame and fortune. In the majority of Art Schools and Art Departments, the art student is still being taught to fulfill the role of the 19th century European artist. It is the hope of the "Community Arts School" to create the more difficult but exciting in its reality challenge of producing a 20th century American artist. Another major strategy of the "Community Arts School" will be to engender in the students the realization that "Community Arts" means an active relationship and partnership with the other arts disciplines in his community. For what is true in regards to the dichotomy in the visual arts between the "Community Arts - Creative Abundance" system and the "Culture Capital - Creative Scarcity" system, is equally true in the case of all the other arts disciplines. Hundreds of thousands of individuals are being trained in theatre, music, and dance, for non-existent positions in the "Culture Capital." These individuals must also find their defined places as American "Community Artists." "In unity there is strength" is an old adage, but one that is relatively new to the arts. For even as arts schools have produced students alienated to society as a whole, so have they produced multitudes of graduates so myopic that they can see no relationships between themselves and artists in other disciplines. A principal motivation/or the development of Community Arts Councils everywhere has been the realization on the part of "Community Artists" and other community leaders supporting the arts, that the American Community, musicians, actors, dancers, painters, and poets all face the same problems of community definition and community support. They have in increasing numbers come to realize that they can achieve greater progress by intercooperation rather than by internecine intellectial and economic warefare and the doubtful claims of artistic superiority for this arts discipline or that. Therefore, using the Community Arts Council as a coordinating agency, the "Community Arts School" will provide its visual arts major practical educational experiences in the other arts disciplines. This will be done by having them work on projects with the Fort Wayne Civic Theatre, Fort Wayne Ballet Company and the Fort Wayne Philharmonic that are fellow members with the School of Fine Arts in the Fine Arts Foundation. The students will participate in other programs and projects designed to promote the acceptance of all the arts and artists in the community. He will be taught to recognize that to develop the arts in the community, he must realize that all the arts institutions are inseparably interrelated, and in turn; they collectively must be related to all the other basic institutions of the community, if they are to grow fast enough to provide him with dignified employment as an artist by the time he graduates. In effect, the students in cooperation with his teachers and other community leaders will be analyzing the community as a complete "human system" made up of a variety of vital socialeconomic and political "systems." He will be analyzing the local arts institutions as a "cultural system" and formulating strategies of how to integrate this "cultural system" into the total community where presently there is limited interaction and acceptance for the arts. It is understood, of course, that in taking this "Community Arts - Creative Abundance" approach, we do not know what kind of arts or artists will result. We do not know what roles we will be able to create for the artist in communities like Fort Wayne. What we do know is that we cannot accept the traditional "Culture Capital - Cultural Scarcity" system that denies the possibility and probably opposes the development of the American "Community Artist." We feel that American communities like Fort Wayne are ready to have the arts play an important role in the raising of the quality of community life. We know that such communities have the artistic and economic resources to accomplish such purposes. We know that as a nation we have already moved fantastic lengths toward the development of an American Civilization based upon creative abundance, pluralism, and intellectual diversity. Therefore, we feel that in following the precedents already established in developing the arts in a democratic framework, and by sharing in the faith of such known pioneers as John Dewey, and in the faith of thousands of still unknown Americans who believed in creating an American civilization, when conditions were so much more unconducive, we are carrying on a unique American enterprise that pragmatically and spiritually promises nationally significant results that appear to us to be worthy of national support in the process of achieving them. Fort Wayne Fine Arts Foundation 324 Penn Avenue Fort Wayne, Indiana 46805 |
Date Digital | July 30 2015 |
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