Prophets at a Tangent: How Art Shapes Social Imagination

Description

This Element asks if the arts can help us imagine a better future society and economy, without deep social gulfs or ecological harm. It argues that, at their best, the arts open up new ways of seeing and thinking. They can warn and prompt and connect us to a bigger sense of what we could be. But artists have lost their role as gods and prophets, partly as an effect of digital technologies and the ubiquity of artistic production, and partly as an effect of shifting values. Few recent books, films, artworks, or exhibitions have helped us imagine how our world could solve its problems or how it might be better a generation or more from now. This Element argues that artists work best not as prophets of a new society but rather as ‘prophets at a tangent’. Cover Title page Copyright page Prophets at a Tangent: How Art Shapes Social Imagination Contents Introduction: The Case for Tangential Imagination Anticipating New Truth 1 The Inherent Limitations of Art as a Tool for Social Imagination Impossible Prediction Invisible and Visible Bearing Witness 2 The Retreat from Prophecy: From Gods to Commentators, Direct to Indirect, Obvious to Opaque The Changing Role of the Artist Art against Rules and Algorithms The Political Economy of Art in Capitalism and the Risks of Easy Co-option Imagination in the Economy and Society: Being Big in Life The Ambiguous Relationship between Ethics and Aesthetics 3 Ethos, Art, and Social Imagination: Exploring the Tangents Cultivating New Perspective and Critical Consciousness Creating Slow as Well as Fast Art Co-creation Not Just Consumption Hacking as Ethos and Method 4 The Forms: How Can They Explore the Future? Politics, Campaigns, and Provocation Utopias: Fiction, Film, and Television and the Frontiers of Social Change Social Media and Data How Architecture Feeds Imagination, and the Paradoxes of Visibility How Art Can Play on the Technology Frontiers Frontiers of Perception in Art and Science 5 Collective Consciousness Seeing Ourselves in Time Values and Consciousness Spreading Universal Tools for Creativity on the Boundaries of Social Change and the Arts Collaborative Speculation: Artists Working with Others Liberating Time for Creativity and Exploring Our Own Tangents 6 Dialectical Creativity Saying Goodbye: Elegy and Nostalgia Making Way for Imagination The Anthropocene and the Post-Human Future 7 Combining Order and Chaos in Tangential Imagination Conclusions: Imagination at a Tangent Notes Acknowledgements About the Author