New publication! Creative vs. conventional activism

Stephen Duncombe and Silas Harrebye’s evidence-based, empirical study demonstrates the effectiveness of creative activism The Copenhagen Experiment: testing the effectiveness of creative vs. conventional forms of activism On a busy bridge in Copenhagen, Denmark, C4AA Co-Founder and Research Director Stephen Duncombe, along with Silas Harrebye, designed and staged a public experiment. They tested the comparative …

How to talk about voter suppression

How do you talk about voter suppression and election issues without amplifying the doubts and fears seeded by those who benefit from voter suppression? This resource we’ve been sharing with our Unstoppable Voters Project participants. It’s an interview with Anat Shenker-Osorio in Rolling Stone: “There’s a Right and a Wrong Way to Talk About Trump’s …

REPORT: ASSESSING THE IMPACT OF ARTISTIC ACTIVISM

As the culmination of nearly a decade of interviews with practitioners of artistic activism, and over a year of reviewing the relevant academic literature and professional reports, the C4AA æfficacy project research team drafted a substantial report, Assessing the Impact of Artistic Activism. You can read and download the full report, or a short 4 …

Webinar #18: How Do We Know If It Works? Part 1

This is one of our most popular webinars. We’re sorry if you missed it happening live, but you can check out the video, which is 97.587% as great. Sign up for future webinars to get in on the live action. In this webinar, Steve and Steve talked with the fantastic scholar/activist Jan Cohen-Cruz and A …

What Would Jesus Do? (as a Creative Activist)

By C4AA Co-Founder Stephen Duncombe My proselytizing here is of a political rather than religious nature. It isn’t the divine figure of Christ I am interested in but the purely historical Jesus, a radical Mediterranean Jewish peasant building a revolutionary movement two millennia ago. Jesus of Nazareth was an activist, and, judging by the two-thousand …

Familiar vs. Novel – Everything is a Remix

First, if you’ve never seen Everything is a Remix, go watch it now. It’s a great primer on creativity, originality, and copyright. Recently Kirby Ferguson posted a new installment about the new Star Wars movie, The Force Awakens. Towards the end he makes a point about a sweet spot existing between the familiar and the …

How do you measure the impact of socially engaged art? 

In our new Æfficacy project we’ve been working with our colleague George Perlov, thanks to funding from The Open Society Foundations and The Compton Foundation to begin to answer that question. As a first step, we’re conducting a literature review on the topic and George will be spotlighting a few of the interesting things we’ve found so far. Today …

And what do I do now? Using Data Visualization for Social Change

Last week, the C4AA’s Steve Lambert attended the Responsible Data Forum on Data Visualization. In this article, Lambert discusses how data visualizations for social change can leverage emotion to achieve objectives. Those who visualize data can be reluctant to sully themselves in the messy world of emotions and empathy. If your goal is social change …

In Kansas, Climate Skeptics Embrace Green Energy – NYTimes.com

Attempts by the Obama administration to regulate greenhouse gases are highly unpopular here because of opposition to large-scale government intervention. Some are skeptical that humans might fundamentally alter a world that was created by God. If the heartland is to seriously reduce its dependence on coal and oil, Ms. Jackson and others decided, the issues …

Charting Creativity: Neurologically

Charting Creativity: Signposts of a Hazy Territory NY Times, Patricia Cohen, May 7, 2010 Grab a timer and set it for one minute. Now list as many creative uses for a brick as you can imagine. Go. The question is part of a classic test for creativity, a quality that scientists are trying for the …

Art Power

Boris Guys, Art Power (MIT Press: 2008) “Art becomes politically effective only when it is made outside the art market — in the context of direct political propaganda.” “Of course, one can easily argue that such propaganda art is simply political design- and image-making….They are making advertisements for a certain ideological goal — and they …

Politics of Surrealism

Some interesting tidbits from The Politics of Surrealism by Helena Lewis (NY: Paragon House, 1988) ” tried to link together two revolutions: that of the mind, by liberating the unconscious, and the social and economic revolution of the masses. The Surrealists always maintained that one of the most important ways to undermine capitalism is to …

Art and Revolution – The MIT Press

As hopeful as it is incisive, Art and Revolution encourages a new generation of artists and thinkers to refuse to participate in the tired prescriptions of marketplace and authority and instead create radical new methods of engagement. Raunig develops an indispensable, contemporary conception of political change—a conception that transcends the outmoded formulations of insurrection and …

Is "professionalization" in art equal to success?

I caught a link on We Make Money Not Art to this Artworld Salon article that contemplated the criticism of an increasingly professionalized art world. The article questions, “What’s wrong with professionalization?” after citing examples of back-handed comments towards the MFA and PhD in the arts. The questions it raises are: does “professionalization” make artists …

Power needs culture

from Terry Eagleton’s new book: Reason, Faith and Revolution (Yale: 2009) p. 150 “Culture is what beds power down, interweaving it with our lived experience and thus tightening its grip upon us. An authority which fails to do this will loom up as too abstract and aloof, and thus fail to secure its citizens’ unqualified …