Aesthetic Evangelist - Brayson Williams

Key Ideas:

- Speaking on about the Community: "Typically the artist sets out to challenge the subjects, to expand their awareness and engage them in a process of critical self-reflection and analysis. The artists' role is to resuscitate their sense of "self-esteem" and to provide them with a meaningful creative experience that will allow them to become "participants in their own reclamation" 

- "For the community artist "art" or the "aesthetic" plays the same role that "science" does for the reformer, it is a universally-applicable language that allows them to transcend the specificity of their own social and cultural positions and that sanctions their intervention in any given community."

- "The trouble with a lot of politically motivated art is a failure of nerve. Artists who produce work that they know is not favored by our established regime are not necessarily taking risks, since they can forecast the results. Truly taking a risk means not knowing what's going to happen in the end. . . ."

1.) How can we develop art that is specific to the issue, but is able to touch many different communities?

2.) How can one recognize their privilege and still be able to create art that effects the masses?

3.) At what point does community engaged art go from inspiration to just "writing on the wall" and how do we keep that from happening?