Vision For The Future
I don’t know why “The Future” has always fascinated me. I remember reading Megatrends and other books and articles about what the future might hold pretty early in my career. I went to a lot of conferences like Poptech, Summit, TEDActive, and Silicon Alley gatherings here in New York. I have always felt that we can’t and won’t be able to build what we cannot “see.” The act of ethically seeing and imagining is a part of the skill set of many artists and cultural workers, and that is why I have worked so hard to make the case that artists need to be at the center of our thinking about the future–in every realm of human and civic endeavor.
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What sealed my commitment to this principle was reading Joshua Cooper Ramo’s book about foreign policy, The Age of the Unthinkable: Why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us and What We Can Do About It, where he asserts that: “...there are forces for change at work that are invisible using old ways of seeing.” He says that people’s inability to recognize or understand change at the time it is happening is the source of our world’s greatest historical disasters. And then my jaw dropped reading the next sentence: “Artists with their tuned instincts for the new, often do.”
Whoa! If Ramo is right (and I choose to believe that he is), it makes the validation, recognition, and support for contemporary artists not a luxury to be left to the vagaries of the market, but rather, a cultural and societal necessity.
What is your vision for an equitable, inclusive, and ethical vision for the future?
