Editor’s note: This commentary is by Karen Mittelman, who is the executive director of the Vermont Arts Council. She worked previously for 19 years for the federal government, most recently as director of the Division of Public Programs at the National Endowment for the Humanities. She holds a doctorate in U.S. history, and recently published her first novel.
Each year, the Vermont Arts Council and the governor’s office present awards to outstanding artists and individuals who have made significant contributions to the arts in our state. Last November, we gathered in the Statehouse – underneath a beautiful newly gilded dome, one week after the election, the same week that the world marked 80 years since Kristallnacht and a century since the armistice that ended World War I. This October, we are preparing for the awards ceremony at Middlebury College, against the backdrop of chaos in Washington, D.C., and deepening cynicism about the role of the federal government.
All of this has me thinking about the connection between the arts and democracy. There have been days, recently, when the news headlines rocked me to my core. And I have wondered, as many of us have, what is happening to our democracy and to the values that I hold dear.
What does it take for us to live well together, to treat each other with reason, civility, and compassion?
I believe the arts are an essential part of the answer to that question.
According to a recent survey by Americans for the Arts, people who participate in the arts are 20% more likely to vote. It seems that those of us who engage in the arts are also the most inclined to be civic-minded, and to engage in democracy. The arts may, in fact, call us to citizenship, offering skills that are urgently needed to mend a democracy that many of us feel is broken.
Like art, citizenship can be viewed as a practice. We need to practice ways of relating to our fellow citizens with civility and compassion. To confront deep divisions, we need to be reminded of all the ways in which we stand on this earth together.
Art lifts us above petty boundaries and urges us to transcend our personal point of view, to stand in the shoes of a person from another country or another race, someone who thinks about God, or their grocery bill, or the ocean differently than we do.
James Baldwin once said he thought he was alone in the world, that his personal pain and heartbreak were unique – and then he discovered literature.
“It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive. Only if we face these open wounds in ourselves can we understand them in other people.”
What could be more fundamental to our ability to be good citizens, than the courage to fully recognize our own wounds before we turn to face each other?
Art calls us to citizenship. It prepares us for the practice of democracy. The struggle we face as individuals to create something meaningful from our own lives also gives us the threads that can begin to connect us to each other.
One of my writing teachers composed this exercise: Write a poem of four lines. To begin, go to an ugly place looking for beauty. In the first two lines of your poem: write the chaos, weakness, and destruction. In your last two lines: write the beauty, find the order and the power.
And I believe with all my heart that is what we need to do now – and what art enables us to do, to find creative solutions in the face of terrifying change: Go to a broken place looking for beauty. First, call out the chaos and damage that is evident all around us. Then awaken ourselves to the beauty, the order, the power. In writing our four lines, and reading them to each other, perhaps we can fortify ourselves and strengthen the bonds of citizenship that have unraveled.
There is one more aspect of artistic practice that is instructive when we think about democracy: failure. We learn from our elementary school art teachers that failure is part of the creative process. Nearly every effort is only a rough draft, that clears the way for the true work to come. In the words of another writing teacher, “Those are the pages you had to write to get to the poem underneath.”
When you fail as an artist, you learn from your misstep. Sometimes, that misstep evolves to become part of the next dance or the next poem. Artists can take an errant brushstroke or an oddly shaped piece of marble and transform it into something wonderful, fresh and alive, perhaps even revolutionary.
This is the aspect of art I am choosing to focus on in our present moment. As artists, or as citizens, we don’t really have a choice. We are compelled to begin again, to try to imagine something new. And we have to trust that the medium we are working with – whether it is clay, stone, or democracy – is resilient enough to be disrupted or even broken, and then to be creatively rebuilt, again and again.
Let’s believe that the moment we are living through is only a rough draft. These are the pages we have to turn to discover the poem underneath.
