[MUSIC] What's the value we create right now? This is gonna be a little bit of a festival of quotations throughout the ages, but I align myself with that great social observer Fran Lebowitz who observed that original thoughts, like original sin, happened a long time before we were on the scene. Let's look at, if you like, a plethora, of reassuring observations about the value of arts and culture through the ages and then what makes it valuable right now. Let's look at what hasn't changed. Arts and culture from the time we were hunter-gatherers have been part of what we need for creative expression. In Desmond Morris' heroic work, The Artistic Ape, which followed, by 40 years, his equally heroic work The Naked Ape, we can see that from the earliest time that we are able to find any records of our existence, creative expression and artistic celebration are an important part of marking the occasions of who we are as a species. Now, more recently than that, C.S. Lewis remarked, or answered his students when they asked him on the eve of World War II. You know, why do we have to learn about culture in a time of war? What possible meaning could this have for us? And he noted that we have to learn about it, we have to be aware of it because it is who we are. It's in our nature. It helps us derive meaning from what going on around us, and that's really the business of art and culture, is we make meaning. This kind of creative expression isn't found in every form of communication that we have and really nobody said that better than William Carlos Williams. >> It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there. >> Next stop in our parade of values is educational value, let's call that profound learning. As a way of experiencing the world around us, for having new thoughts, but being able to make connections between disparate views of the world, which we generally accept as the highest form of intelligence, arts and culture are one of the ways that we can improve those skills and broaden those views. A long time ago viewers of this painting would have recognized the symbolism, the holy family, the dog is an emblem of loyalty, the peacock as a symbol of both the resurrection and the need for constant Christian watchfulness in daily life. This would have been, this painting, an educational lesson around faith, beauty. This would have been a time when books were very, very rare and not accessible to the thousands and thousands of people who would have seen this painting. If you move forward a little bit in history you can see that part of the value of our institutions is to create the understanding now that we don't all have the shared context. So for example you can look at this Puritan influenced church built in New England in the 1700s in Holderness, New Hampshire and you can trace aesthetically a direct line between this church and the severely defined Ad Reinhardt paintings that we see in 1954. Helping people make those connections is an important part of the value that we create. The performing arts contribute in countless ways to education and understanding and to social observation. Just one example, the timeliness of the Royal National Theatre in England with their production of Timon of Athens, which is a very uncomfortable fable of greed, conspicuous consumption, death and ruin, being presented at just about the time of the financial collapse in 2007. That's a model of didactic entertainment. Now, in the non-profit higher art forms we don't talk a lot about entertainment. But entertainment has an enormous value. People need to go outside themselves to step outside their daily lives. And if you don't think that that has value for people then you really haven't followed the enormous explosion of cable TV. Another kind of value we create now is that of convening, of civic engagement. The jury's divided on this one, but I've included it because I've personally seen it in action, throughout this country and in other countries as well. I believe that this kind of civic engagement and value lies not in the idea that if we all go to see a play together we'll never despise one another. It would be lovely but I don't think it's true. I think the value of civic engagement and the development of our skills as members of a civil society is more along the lines of what Martha Nussbaum talks about when she reminds us that arts and culture help train us in the socratic method, the ability to hold more than one truth in our heads at the same time, and this is a fundamental building block of being able to have any kind of civic exchange. And of course anything that brings us together helps create or combat the isolation of a life lived online. The idea that we need increased social capital was made popular by Robert Putnam in the book Bowling Alone. A lot of his ideas were built on that of the French anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu. And these often struck a chord because we do often feel alone. So the educational and convening values, the sense of being part of something that's bigger. These help us create empathy. Reading a novel, seeing a play, going to a film. We haven't really come up with any other better mechanism to help us be aware of how other people may think. And finally, I would cite as one of the irreplaceable values of the arts, it helps us understand our place in the continuum of humanity. I know, I know, I can feel your eyes rolling, but just think about it. We're all born. And we're all going to die. And that journey, that inescapable journey is what binds us together. And the markers for that journey are the things that we create. If you look at an extraordinarily inclusive piece of work, like Neil MacGregor's, A History of the World in 100 objects from the British Museum and the Smithsonian's recently done something very similar. You can see that we can trace who we are by what we've made and what we've held on to in a way that, if you look at the Cyrus Cylinder, this was created in the 6th century BC. It's still the only proven system for peace in the Middle East. And finally I really like the work of Alain de Botton, philosopher and wonderful thinker who talks about the value of the arts as therapy for everyday lives. One of the images he uses is this painting by Pieter De Hooch called At the Linen Closet. This is from the 17th century but giving an aura of dignity and beauty to an every day event, something that could be considered very banal. This painting can help us look at banal events in our own lives with a sense of dignity and beauty and observation in a fresh way. Now I haven't talked about the economic value of the arts and I expect a lot of people won't like that. But personally, I feel that the economic value of the arts has been discussed and sometimes stretched until it snaps as an argument in favor of public support of the arts. In the end, I think, the value that you create in your community, with its needs, its identity, Its particular foibles, will be both universal and unique to your community. And as a leader, the challenge is, how you discover and create value for your community. [MUSIC]
