“‘The important thing about imagination is that it gives you optimism,’ said Martin Seligman, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and the director of the Positive Psychology Center there.
His work is dedicated to studying human agency, which is predicated on efficacy, optimism and imagination. …
The hours spent fantasizing and daydreaming about future plans are valuable, Dr. Seligman said. They allow people to escape routine, and cultivate hope and resilience. …
‘Imagining the future — we call this skill prospection — and prospection is subserved by a set of brain circuits that juxtapose time and space and get you imagining things well and beyond the here and now,’ Dr. Seligman said. ‘The essence of resilience about the future is: How good a prospector are you?’
And that’s the case regardless of whether one’s imaginings of the future are over-the-top and unbelievable, or seemingly mundane. …
…Dr. April Toure, a psychiatrist who specializes in working with children and adolescents at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn [said] ‘Even though it’s not considered a core symptom of depression, the absence of hope is a common symptom.’ … Future thinking, or “the imagination and belief that something better is coming,” is crucial to getting through hard times.
Tariro Mzezewa, “Go Ahead. Fantasize.” NY Times (January 16, 2021)
Quotes
…art is—or should be—generous. But when working with place, artists can only give if they are receiving as well. The greatest challenges for artists lured by the local are to balance between making the information accessible and making it visually provocative as well; to innovate not just for innovation’s sake, not just for style’s sake, nor to enhance their reputation or ego, but to bring a new degree of coherence and beauty to the lure of the local. The goal of this kind of work would be to turn more people on to where they are, where they came from, where they’re going, to help people see their places with new eyes. Land and people—their presence and absence—makes place and its arts come alive. Believing as I do that connection to place is a necessary component of feeling close to people, and to the earth, I wonder what will make it possible for artists to “give” places back to people who can no longer see them, and be given places in turn, by those who are still looking around.
—Lucy Lippard, “The Lure of the Local” (New Press, 1997)
Points of Reference: Lucy Lippard on “The Lure of the Local”
“what it means to bother to know someone … is really a story about what it means to be known.”
—Mandy Len Cantron, “To Fall In Love With Anyone, Do This,” NY Times, January 9, 2015
Have a Happy, Interdependent 2016
“members and allies of this ‘field’ must leverage what power we are given within the commercial and academic (and also increasingly civic) spheres as ‘cultural workers’ to position ourselves outside, and in resistance to, these hegemonic power structures. As artist-centric institutions, this means using radical forms of participation to forefront self-organized, inclusive and equitable structures – this means creating new social imaginaries.
If our failing institutions are based on market capitalist economy, authoritarian republics and eurocentricity – then our ‘alternative’ institutions by necessity must be based on decentralized cooperative economics, participatory democracy, equality and ecology.”
—Sarrita Hunn, “Artists for Artists’ Sake,” Temporary Art Review, October 19, 2015
Sarrita Hunn on Artists for Artists’ Sake
“Someone who is highly self-aware knows where he is headed and why; so, for example, he will be able to be firm in turning down a job offer that is tempting financially but does not fit with his principles or long-term goals. A person who lacks self-awareness is apt to make decisions that bring on inner turmoil by treading on buried values.”
–Daniel Goleman, “What Makes a Leader,” Harvard Business Review, January 2004.
Daniel Goleman on values coherence
The simple answer is that you should get paid when someone is profiting from your labor.
…However, providing content or services to a friend without being compensated does not mean that one is being exploited. If the terms of the exchange are mutually agreed upon, and if one person isn’t immediately monetarily profiting from the labor of the other, then it may well be a fair exchange, and one that is part of how solidarity and community are built within the field. W.A.G.E. advocates for equitable compensation, not for the total monetization and commodification of every aspect of our lives; we leave that to neoliberalism.
—W.A.G.E. as quoted by Bean Gilsdorf, Help Desk: Support for Artists, Daily Serving, May 25, 2015
How will I know if I am taking artists’ energy in exchange for an exploitative promise of “exposure”?
many artists who are commissioned by producers are already successful gallery based artists, being brought into the public realm with a support team in place.
The speakers acknowledge the need to change institutional structure in order to allow new forms of public art to emerge, and the need for artists, producers and curators to gain skills to make public art work in reality. Another change that might be interesting to explore is how public art could shift hierarchies, and allow artists at different stages of their career to develop projects they have already initiated.—Katy Bienart, “Lighting the touchpaper: Public art as situation or spectacle,” Public Art (Now) blog, April 27, 2015
Katy Bienart on Public Art (Now)
money problems are the best problems to have, because when you get some money it goes away. It would be worse if I felt that the work we’re doing was irrelevant.
—Lia Gangitano, founder of alternative art space Participant Inc., as quoted by Andria K. Scott, “Consider the Alternative,” New Yorker, Feburary 16, 2015
R+D 