What Really Matters

Where do economic and artistic health intersect?

In the Nov 15 2003 broadcast (Show 446) of Kurt Andersen's Studio 360 show on NPR, he interviewed Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class as well as an article in the January/February issue of The Washington Monthly entitled Creative Class War.

Both the radio show and the article bring up some interesting points about the state of arts and creativity in the US - and where new creative meccas are/will form (eg New Zealand and Canada). Additional questions include whether or not the US and its citizens need to find new ways of looking at the intersection of economic and artistic health. Are a country's or an individual's economic and artistic health independent, interdependent or mutually exclusive?

Bill Strickland: Artistic Transformations

“Bill Strickland's […] credo is that art lives at the center, not the periphery, of human endeavor. ‘My reason for starting the guild was to improve the neighborhood where I was raised. I thought the arts would give underprivileged children a sense of importance that they badly needed. It wasn't so much intended to turn them into master craftsmen or professional photographers but to give them confidence and motivation. That's still the goal here.’

“His degree of success is extraordinary. A review by the Harvard Business School found that 80 percent of the students who finished programs at Manchester went on to college."
--From The Genius of Manchester

Strickland’s experience suggests that we can’t afford to treat art as a luxury. Is art integral or optional? And does Strickland's success with "creativity" suggest new ways of looking at the creative process, and perhaps opening up to the idea that just as intelligence has many forms - perhaps the same is true of creativity? Howard Gardner has some interesting things to say about this in his book Creating Minds as does Ken Robinson in Out of Our Minds.