A Proposal to Establish a Community Arts School

              a proposal to establish
A COMMUNITY
AR S 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 lzfe.
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 governmen~ 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 lzfe.
The purpose of es_tablishing 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 Governmen~ designed
to explore and experiment in the area of creating a maximum
number of roles for thefine 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 ideal,s 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 school,s 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 thefine artist into the mainstream of
American life w~ must define the arts in terms of the realities of
American Society.
This is a very difficult task because it call,s for the actuality of
sociological analysis. It call,s 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 conj arming 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 axtol 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 cumplete 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, th<:J 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 1965, 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.
Beca:u;e these questions are being raised in Tulsa, Des Moines,
Denver, Grand Rapids, and many other dties 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 beer 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 economicfailures 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 todtly 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 iT! 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 ab out 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 D(!U)ey,
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 art.s 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 elitisf,S dominating the
fine arf,S 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 Art.s­Creative
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.
Bu~ 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 art.s 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 arf,S in the schools
even while there were no art.s in their soot filled factory homes,
and as a result became artist.s 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 arf,S 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 U.S. Office of Education estimates that close to 45 billion
dollars is expended annually for education. Roughly 3 billion
comes from the federal government, 18 billionfrom 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 "Ctflture 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 Chronic al of Higher Education, shows that 9. 2
percent of the freshmen chose the fine arts as a probable major
field 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 Ar~
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 artis~ 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
903 3 artists. Approximately 181 artists wer~ 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 pe<Jple. 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 17 5 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 has 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 Capital­Cultural
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 reluetantly, 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
werefinally 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 continen~ 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 to 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 wereforced'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" systfmt of public
education began to quietly function in Kansas and fllinois: 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 resul~ the "Culture Capital- Cultural Elitist" center
was move,d 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" ar~ 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
sophi~ticated 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 Ac~ 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 artis~ 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 Capital­Cultural
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 wnrld 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.
& 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. & 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.
& further evidence, we have the problems of the California
Institute of Arts located in Burbank, California. The California
Institute of Arts u;as 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 emter;­prise
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 Demoo:rats 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. Bu~ 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 lzf e.
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.
Bu~ 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 conj orm
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 stules 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, where­ever
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 traditz'ons 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 abso/ute 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 accep~ 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 America! "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 Arts­Creative
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 for 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