Art and the World After This JUNE 2021 by David Maggs PERFORMING ARTS Metcalf Foundation The Metcalf Foundation helps Canadians imagine and build a just, healthy, and creative society by supporting dynamic leaders who are strengthening their communities, nurturing innovative approaches to persistent problems, and encouraging dialogue and learning to inform action. Metcalf Innovation Fellowship The purpose of the Metcalf Innovation Fellowship is to give people of vision the opportunity to investigate ideas, models, and practices that have the potential to lead to transformational change. David Maggs David Maggs carries on an active career as an interdisciplinary artist, and arts and sustainability researcher. A former student of Jane Coop, André Laplante, and Marc Durand, he is the founder and pianist for Dark by Five, has written works for the stage, and collaborated on large augmented reality projects. David is the artistic director of the rural Canadian interarts organization Gros Morne Summer Music (gmsm.ca), and founder and co-director of the Graham Academy, a youth training academy founded in honour of his teacher and mentor, Dr. Gary Graham. He initiated and co-produced the CBC documentary Channel film The Country, exploring the Canadian government’s handling of Indigenous identity in Newfoundland. As a fellow at the University of Toronto’s Munk School for Global Affairs, David co-authored Sustainability in an Imaginary World (Routledge Press, 2020) with mentor and long-time collaborator John Robinson, which explores the relationship between art and sustainability. David is now a senior fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Sustainability in Potsdam, Germany, working on culture and climate change, and a Metcalf Foundation Innovation Fellow working on disruption and transformation in Canada’s non-profit arts sector. David has co-developed national arts gatherings in collaboration with the Banff Centre of Arts and Creativity is a regular collaborator with Mass Culture, and has been a featured speaker at the Canadian Arts Summit, the International Transdisciplinarity Conference, the National Valuing Nature Conference, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, the Sustainability Through Art conference in Geneva, the Narratives of Transformation conference of the International Association for Analytical Psychology (Berlin/Kyoto), and elsewhere. CONTENTS FOREWORD ....................................................................................................... 6 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY .................................................................................... 7 INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................. 11 Who pushed the button? .................................................................................................... 11 Background and context .................................................................................................... 12 Speaking for the sector ...................................................................................................... 13 Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................. 14 PART ONE FOUR DISRUPTIONS ....................................................................................... 16 The Disruption of Activity .......................................................................... 17 The pandemic and the flood ............................................................................................... 17 Town halls and new social networks .............................................................................. 18 Always right, always wronged? ....................................................................................... 19 Roots of defensiveness ....................................................................................................... 20 The Disruption of Society .......................................................................... 21 The promise of pluralism ................................................................................................... 21 The perishing of pluralism? ............................................................................................... 22 Twin toxicities ...................................................................................................................... 23 The Disruption of Industry ......................................................................... 25 Curtains: The non-profit business model in the digital age ........................................ 25 The creative economy: an ace up our sleeve? ............................................................... 26 The Disruption of World ............................................................................. 29 Transformation at every turn ............................................................................................ 29 Making and un-making the Western, Modernist world ................................................ 30 Art in the Anthropocene ..................................................................................................... 32 The Complexity Economy .......................................................................... 33 Integrating the disruptions ............................................................................................... 33 The innovation paradigm we need .................................................................................... 34 PART TWO THREE QUESTIONS ........................................................................................ 38 What Are We Doing Here, Anyway? .......................................................... 40 Finding the baby in the bathwater .................................................................................... 40 The critical paradox of creative practice ......................................................................... 41 The work of art in the world ............................................................................................... 43 Art as the power of attention ............................................................................................ 44 The meat or the mast? ........................................................................................................ 45 Aesthetic value or social value? ........................................................................................ 46 Is This an Ecosystem or a Zoo? ................................................................ 48 Transformation, innovation, and systems ....................................................................... 48 How ecological is our culture? .......................................................................................... 48 Apex and keystone species ................................................................................................ 49 Rewilding the arts ................................................................................................................ 53 Loss aversion ......................................................................................................................... 55 Can We Learn Our Way Out? ..................................................................... 57 Innovation and learning ...................................................................................................... 57 Predictive forecasting vs. strategic foresight ................................................................ 57 Motorboats, sailboats, and our four disruptions ............................................................ 59 Art and the promise of R&D ............................................................................................... 60 R&D and the promise of art ................................................................................................ 67 The aestheticization of the world ..................................................................................... 68 Post-script ............................................................................................................................. 71 6 FOREWORD This paper continues a proud tradition at the Metcalf Foundation of offering leading practitioners a platform to address pressing questions in fields relevant to its mandate. It also reflects a cross-disciplinary approach much favoured by the Foundation. Most writing on the arts falls into three conventions. First there are the artists themselves, the Margaret Atwoods and Ed Burtynskys and Karen Kains of the world who raise people’s consciousness about social injustice, or environmental degradation, or the aesthetically sublime. They do this primarily through their respective art forms, not through an all-inclusive sectoral lens. Then there are the academics, who write about aesthetics and management theory and fundraising and public policy, in traditions well-grounded in the social sciences and humanities. Despite the quality of their work, the results are typically expressed in forms and language that most artists, let alone the general public, find alienating. And finally, there are the journalists, the most powerful communicators of all, who do excellent research and weave convincing narratives, often publishing significant articles and books with real relevance and broad public readership. In their commitment to facts, journalists almost inevitably