Can Art Professors Deduct Travel Overseas to Look at Art ?

Story highlights

• Michele Elam says art is emerging as potent tool of Occupy Wall Street movement
• She says this especially true of Shepard Fairey affiche that recalls black power imagery
• She says epitome links movement to long history of marginalized people striving for equity
• Elam: Art serving social function in Occupy as it urges interracial unity, galvanizes social change

Art has emerged as a major vehicle for expressing the Occupy Wall Street motility.

In addition to news this week that street art from Occupy Wall Street and Occupy D.C. was being collected by the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, the movement's Arts and Culture Committee showcased spoken give-and-take performances and poetry readings in Manhattan'south Zuccotti Park.

Elsewhere in the city, a group known equally Occupy Museums demonstrated at New York's Museum of Modern Fine art, the Frick Collection and the New Museum protesting the corporatization of art, and the "No Comment" pop-upwards exhibition similarly represented itself equally art inspired by the motility. Then there'south the sudden popularity of anti-institution Guy Fawkes masks, distant kin to the masked protests of the Guerrilla Girls, a collective of anonymous artists who habiliment Gorilla masks to protest sexism.

Just perchance most provocatively, Shepard Fairey -- the artist who famously created the Obama "Hope" poster -- contributed "You Are Invited to the Occupation Party," featuring a portrait of a woman evocative of the black ability movement, and placing Occupy Wall Street within a deeper history of civil rights protest.

Occupy fine art might just be the movement's most politically potent tool in its dramatic reframing of the racial dynamics of a populist insurgence oftentimes characterized every bit largely white and "hippie."

Fairey's "Y'all Are Invited" is an especially compelling example. It offers an image of a immature black adult female with turtleneck sweater and iconic Afro, a la Angela Davis -- the "uniform" of the Blackness Panther Party of the 1960s and '70s. The poster'due south retro look recalls a militant past, nearly startling in our new millennial moment, and surely is meant as a challenge to the idea that as a society we are anywhere well-nigh "mail service-race" enlightenment.

For bear witness of this, we need expect no further than the grossly disproportionate use of force by Oakland metropolis police in immigration peaceful Occupy protesters recently. Comedian and social critic Jon Stewart said on his belatedly-dark show that the simply threat that could possibly warrant such a police response was Godzilla. His annotate, though humorous, was seriously spot-on, for the "beast" perceived every bit a threat in that urban center has long been its black and chocolate-brown citizens. It is no accident that the Black Panther Party was founded in Oakland, where for decades inequities in health, education, income and incarceration have affected the communities of color there.

Indeed, some accept called for more black people's involvement in the movement, but Fairey's "You Are Invited" goes beyond an appeal for and to blackness people. Imagine its even more revolutionary effect equally a affiche carried by people of all backgrounds and social position, symbolically calling for a pan-indigenous alliance.

Of form some may complain that this repurposing of black power imagery associates the Occupy movement with a dated and narrow cultural nationalism with no place in our post-ceremonious rights era. The affiche'due south invitation to an "occupation party" -- suggesting both a political party too as a hip, happening upshot -- may non mobilize a younger generation unfamiliar with appeals to rise up or sit in. Others may criticize the poster as implying a purely token inclusiveness that masks the existent tensions betwixt the occupiers' often competing and sometimes confused agenda.

These are justifiable concerns. Merely "You Are Invited" is powerful precisely because it invites identification with this long history of marginalized people striving for social and economic equity, nevertheless imperfect and unfinished those efforts.

More subtly merely as importantly, the poster is a mini-tutorial, offering some much needed management and education to a new movement missing some important elements for success. Occupiers are invited to take a folio from the past, for instance, and get revolutionary with some style. The Panthers dressed for success and worked their absurd await to peachy political effect. Even more essentially, they also had a plan. The Panthers' Ten-Point Program, which called for "State, Bread, Housing, Education, Clothing, Justice and Peace" and included a successful Free Breakfast for Children programme, sought very practical forms of redress (some realistically possible, some less and then) to the social and economic injustices they experienced.

"You Are Invited," with what we might call its blackness fine art of occupation, is a reminder of the historical relationship betwixt art and politics. Plato was broken-hearted nearly the power of art to rouse emotions and claiming authorization, and to exist sure, art can be reduced to mere propaganda and demagoguery. But we should non forget that Aristotle, Plato's own student, disagreed with him, insisting that the arts had a profound social function.

In 1926, the renowned black intellectual, W.E.B. Du Bois, argued passionately that art should be used for social justice, that beauty can and must be marshaled for a larger good: "I am one who tells the truth and exposes evil and seeks with beauty and for dazzler to set the world right." Similarly, the "No Comment" organizers merits that, "The purpose of the exhibition is to provide a platform for an open up dialogue about serious sociological problems."

Let the Occupy movement's camps and protests and marches continue generating such art -- art that inspires interracial unity where it may not still be, fine art that reminds us of the voices unheard, art that galvanizes applied social alter when cipher seems to give, fine art that, in Du Bois' words, tries to brand the globe both beautiful and right.

windsorhatic1946.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2011/11/01/opinion/elam-occupy-art/index.html