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Fiona Dornberger Aesthetic Evangelists

1. First of all, wow. I never realized why the government was so against removing public funding for the arts, and now I see why. Art has the power to change people's minds, to influence them to question systematic oppression and alert them to the fact that they are a part of the system, no matter the community in which they exist.

2. It's crazy how artists will try and compare their lives to those of communities they're choosing to represent, but truly have no similarities! Or simply use the projects to promote themselves in the art world, but never use the voices of the community.

3. The fact individuals can be made to believe that their circumstances are a result of their own faults, mistakes and sins, rather than a structural problem revolts me. I've seen this my whole life, represented in media, movies, books etc.

1. What is the best way to go about community based art in a way in which the individuals have a voice, but the issue can also be expanded to encompass a larger issue? I know this is a broad question, but it was never addressed in the article.

2.  How far should the artist go into politics? At what point does it become the job of the politician to rally the community into action?

3. What is the best way to enter and begin working with a community in which you have very little in common, without being disrespectful, or trying to compare your own personal struggle (which is totally ridiculous)?


Quotes I found interesting:

 In this way the new, community-based public art represents a transition from an earlier model of public art which involved the location of sculptural works in sites administered by public agencies—either federal, state or local governments or other administrative bodies

The "community" in community-based public art often, although clearly not always, refers to individuals marked as culturally, economically, or socially different either from the artist or from the audience for the particular project.

 In many community-based public art projects it is precisely the community whose voice is never heard.

a social system that is dedicated to denying the existence of systematic forms of oppression.

(although I would suggest that the artists' own imaginary construction of a given community plays a significant, if often unacknowledged, role in most collaborations)

Thus we have moral pedagogy (designed to counter the "bad" moral pedagogy of the state) rather than any real attempt to alleviate the actual conditions of poverty and joblessness, much less any attempt to address their root causes.

Thus politicians and philosophers have for at least the past century and a half been obsessed with mapping the mental and emotional landscape of the poor with the goal of regulating it to meet their needs.

I, as a white, more or less middle-class subject, clearly bore no responsibility for the social, cultural, and economic context in which his personal failure occurred.

Individual vs. systematic

that the artist is in a position to remedy this flaw

 It is important from a conservative point of view that social programs be supported by private foundations and individuals, rather than as a deliberate project of the state, because state sponsorship would constitute a kind of political admission that poverty is not merely a personal problem but is a structural effect of the economy which the state has an obligation to relieve

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