Arts And Culture

This book explores the role that arts and culture can play in supporting global international development. The book argues that arts and culture are fundamental to human development and can bring considerable positive results for helping to empower communities and provide new ways of looking at social transformation. Whilst most literature addresses culture in abstract terms, this book focuses on practice-based, collective, community-focused, sustainability-minded, and capacity-building examples of arts and development. The book draws on case studies from around the world, investigating the different ways practitioners are imagining or defining the role of arts and culture in Belize, Canada, China, Ethiopia, Guatemala, India, Kosovo, Malawi, Mexico, Peru, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand, the USA, and Western Sahara refugee camps in Algeria. The book highlights the importance of situated practice, asking what questions or concerns practitioners have and inviting a dialogic sharing of resources and possibilities across different contexts. Seeking to highlight practices and conversations outside normative frameworks of understanding, this book will be a breath of fresh air to practitioners, policy makers, students, and researchers from across the fields of global development, social work, art therapy, and visual and performing arts education.

The Canada Council for the Arts is the country’s largest provider of grants for artists and arts organizations, benefiting not only writers, visual artists, performers, and musicians but Canadian culture as a whole. In The Roots of Culture, the Power of Art Monica Gattinger outlines the history of the Canada Council, the impetus for its foundation, and the ongoing debate about its goals and impact. Tracing the Council’s gradual shift from focusing on artistic supply and building the roots of Canadian arts and culture in its early years to its expanded focus on the power of the arts in society over time, Gattinger describes how leaders have navigated core tensions inherent in the Council’s activities. She examines the arguments for and against “art for art’s sake” and pursuing broader social and economic aims through the arts, as well as the inherent political conflicts between serving the needs of the artistic community and the needs of Canadian society, between leadership and followership, between autonomy and collaboration, and between emerging and established artistic practices. Combining lively storytelling with insightful analysis, and beautifully produced with dozens of photos of the art, people, and events that have shaped the organization through the years, The Roots of Culture, the Power of Art is essential reading for those with an interest in Canadian arts and culture and cultural policy.

Drawing on international examples, this book interrogates the relationship between the arts, culture and community development. Contributors from six continents, reimagine community development as they consider how aesthetic arts contribute to processes of peacebuilding, youth empowerment, participatory planning and environmental regeneration.

In Art & Energy, Barry Lord argues that human creativity is deeply linked to the resources available on earth for our survival. By analyzing art, artists, and museums across eras and continents, Lord demonstrates how our cultural values and artistic expression are formed by our efforts to access and control the energy sources that make these cultures possible.

Engagement in the City: How Arts and Culture Impact Development in Urban Areas explores how the arts contribute to cultural and economic development, physical and mental health, education, and social capital. The book can be helpful for scholars and community leaders interested in facilitating arts-based initiatives to improve their communities.

Arts and Cultural Management: Sense and Sensibilities in the State of the Field opens a conversation that is much needed for anyone identifying arts management or cultural management as primary areas of research, teaching, or practice. In the evolution of any field arises the need for scrutiny, reflection, and critique, as well as to display the advancements and diversity in approaches and thinking that contribute to a discipline’s forward progression. While no one volume could encompass all that a discipline is or should be, a representational snapshot serves as a valuable benchmark. This book is addressed to those who operate as researchers, scholars, and practitioners of arts and cultural management. Driven by concerns about quality of life, globalization, development of economies, education of youth, the increasing mobility of cultural groups, and many other significant issues of the twenty-first century, governments and individuals have increasingly turned to arts and culture as means of mitigating or resolving tough policy issues. For their growth, arts and culture sectors depend on people in positions of leadership and management who play a significant role in the creation, production, exhibition, dissemination, interpretation, and evaluation of arts and culture experiences for publics and policies. Less than a century old as a formal field of inquiry, however, arts and cultural management has been in flux since its inception. What is arts and cultural management? remains an open question. A comprehensive literature on the discipline, as an object of study, is still developing. This State of the Discipline offers a benchmark for those interested in the evolution and development of arts and cultural management as a branch of knowledge alongside more established disciplines of research and scholarship.

In this new volume, 28 Scandinavian researchers and others who are active in arts and culture seek to answer the questions: What has been the effect of regional and local investment in arts and culture? And what positive and negative experiences have there been? This book describes and analyzes the extent to which cultural investments at local and regional levels have stimulated development and led to essential processes of change for the community in general. Of special interest is how different places manage to "turn the tide". What do their development processes involve? Which ways and means do they use to go forward in order to change their paths and start anew? These are just a few of the important questions addressed in this book. One of the most important findings is that while you can never transfer the successful renewal of one place to another like a blueprint, certain common patterns in the cultural processes are discernible. The contributors to this book show the breadth of theoretical tools that can be used to increase awareness of the significance of culture for regional development. Throughout the book readers will find a multitude of theoretical concepts, from entrepreneurship theory, organizational institutionalism and cultural economy, to cultural planning and art management. This book will appeal to scholars and practitioners of urban and regional studies, and cultural and creative economics.

For an undergraduate introductory level course in humanities. An introduction to the world’s major civilizations. This Fourth Edition is an introduction to the world’s major civilizations–to their artistic achievements, their history, and their cultures. Through an integrated approach to the humanities, Arts and Culture offers an opportunity to view works of art, read literature, and listen to music in historical and cultural contexts. In studying the humanities, we focus our attention on works of art, literature, and music that reflect and embody the central values and beliefs of particular cultures and specific historical moments.