Doris Sommer, director at Cultural Agents, a Harvard University Initiative and an NGO www.culturalagents.org at the 5th edition of the OECD Summer Academy on Cultural and Creayive Industries and Local Development, 2022. More info https://oe.cd/sacci

2. ARTS AND POLICY
A CITY CERTIFICATE
http://renaissancenow-cai.org

3. Brunelleschi, Medici, Florence 1436
• “The Dome is the highest structure in Florence at 375
feet. One of the biggest problems was how to create the
supports for the dome. No one could figure out how to
do it, so they ran a competition.
• “The Medici knew Brunelleschi, he had already been
working for them. It isn’t a coincidence that right in the
same year that the dome was completed, the Medici took
control of Florence. The success of the undertaking was
not only good for Brunelleschi; it was also good for the
Medici as it showed the population they knew what they
were doing. They knew when to bet, when not to bet.
• They understood the role art could play in their
promotion.”
www.bellaitalia.co.nnd-the-medz/florence-duomo-brunelleschi-aici

4. Billboard in Lima that produces
drinking water from humidity.
The smog-free tower in Rotterdam,
makes stones from polluted air. 4

5. Good Government , Lorenzetti, Siena Palazzo Pubblico 1339
Art means making something new.
It is a process not the product, “Work of art” is result.
● Without art there is no entrepreneurship.
● -no interest in the world, no enchantment.
● - we lose love for the world, don’t care for it.
What good are the Humanities?
● The very question reveals erosion of the field.
● Meanwhile STEM pursues 21 C [humanist] skills.
○ Creativity,
○ Critical Thinking,
○ Collaboration,
○ Communication
● The Humanities interpret art, with JUDGMENT
● The Humanities train disinterested judgment.
5

7. La Paz, Zebra Crossing

8. Peter Svarzbein "Make the Border Safe Again"
https://gentleartofwandering.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/El-Paso-streetcar-conductor.jpg

9. Svarzbein and his Daft Trolley
http://www.judburgess.com/james-no-bond-blog/2017/12/4/peter-svarzbein-and-his-daft-trolley

10. El Paso Border Trolley Pulling into a Stop
https://gentleartofwandering.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/El-Paso-streetcar-conductor.jpg

12. Tirana, Apartments

13. Tirana, fast forward

14. Black Fleeting Star, Bogotá

15. Mutual Regulation, Bogotá 1995 // Antanas Mockus PPT 2005, Harvard University

16. Antanas Mockus, Super Cívico

17. Homicide Reduction Bogotá // Antanas Mockus PPT 2005, Harvard University

18. Tax Revenues Bogotá // Antanas Mockus PPT 2005, Harvard University

19. Making the Altar, sections filled 10 trucks, from rural Paraguay to the Pope’s Mass in Asuncion 2015
https://www.lanacion.com.py/pais/2021/07/01/mano-a-mano-ln-con-koki-ruiz-el-compromiso-del-arte-es-trabajar-con-la-gente-crear-una-transformacion-social/

20. Altar of Corn, collectively created with Koki Ruiz to host Pope Francisco in Paraguay, July 2015

22. Immanuel Kant, Renaissance 2.0
Critique of Aesthetic Judgment (1790)
● “Determinant judgment” depends on rules, but not “aesthetic judgment.”
● Pre-conceptual, subjective, and therefore almost immediately inter-subjective. The
feeling needs validation: “What do you think?”
● “… partly to restrain the officious pretentions of understanding. . .” Also to
disconnect from desire. The agreeable is an object of desire.
● #45 “That is beautiful which pleases in the mere act of judging of it (not in
sensation or by means of a concept).
● #19 "The ought in aesthetic judgments is only pronounced conditionally. We are
suitors for agreement from everyone else, because we are fortified with a ground
common to all.”
22

23. What we know bores us. Kant dixit, Shklovsky got it.
● VI “As a matter of fact, we do not, and cannot, find in ourselves the slightest . . pleasure
from the coincidence of perceptions with the laws in accordance with the universal
concepts of nature (the categories), . . the discovery, on the other hand, . . . is the ground
of a very appreciable pleasure, often even of admiration.” [*without pleasure we wouldn’t
have bothered to understand; then it bores us. We search for new knowledge. Art
communicates ideas and feelings that do not yet have names. Our agreement stimulates
naming. So, aesthetic judgment generates new concepts. ]
● “The judgement of taste is entirely independent of the concept of perfection.” SS 15 [Perfection is
boring too, because it’s predictable.]
● Cultural Relativist: “a Negro must necessarily (under these empirical conditions) have a
different normal idea of the beauty of forms from what a white man has, and the Chinaman
one different from the European.” SS 17 [But that idea does not engage free, aesthetic
judgment. It depends on a pre-existing concept.
● Aesthetics is the pleasure of cool and disinterested judgment. It can communicate a new
perception and create a “Common Sense.”
● Aesthetics and modern democracy develop together; depend on one another. 23

24. Viktor Shklovsky, “Art as Artifice” 1917
(Rejects ‘thinking in images;’ universal themes; economy of expresion.)
Habitualization devours work, clothes, furniture, one’s wife,
and the fear of war. “If the whole complex lives of many people go on
unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never been.” And art
exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one
feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the
sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known.
The technique of art is to make objects “unfamiliar,” to make forms
difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of
perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of
experiencing the artfulness of an object: the object is not important... 24

25. Friedrich Schiller
Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794)
● Letter #2: It would appear to be unseasonable to go in search of a code
for the aesthetic world, when the moral world offers matter of so much
higher interest, and when the spirit of philosophical inquiry is so stringently
challenged by the circumstances of our times to occupy itself with the most
perfect of all works of art - the establishment and structure of a true
political freedom.
● The very spirit of philosophical inquiry itself [Reason] robs the imagination
of one promise after another, and the frontiers of art are narrowed, in
proportion as the limits of science are enlarged.
● [But] #9: Art, like science, is emancipated from all that is positive, and all
that is humanly conventional; both are completely independent of the
arbitrary will of men 25

26. 26

27. Spieltrieb
Barbaric REASON/ Savage PASSION /PLAY 27

28. “Man is only completely a man when he plays” Letter #15
● #2: . . in preferring beauty to freedom. I hope that I shall succeed in
convincing you that this matter of art is less foreign to the needs than
to the tastes of our age; nay, that, to arrive at a solution even in the
political problem, the road of aesthetics must be pursued, because it is
through beauty that we arrive at freedom.
● #9: The gravity of your principles will keep them off from you, but in
play they will still endure them. Their taste is purer than their heart,
and it is by their taste you must lay hold of this suspicious fugitive. In
vain will you combat their maxims, in vain will you condemn their
actions; but you can try your molding hand on their leisure. . . .
Everywhere that you meet them, surround them with great, noble,
and ingenious forms; multiply around them the symbols of
perfection, till appearance triumphs over reality, and art over nature.
28

29. Playdrive as opportunity and obligation

30. PRE-TEXTS
is an educational protocol
that can support a range of goals
for your organization, whether you
start with literacy, innovation, or
citizenship.
When the goals interlock, we
achieve high impact at low cost.
With a single prompt: “Use a text
as material to make art,” the
whole person thrives. Partners
around the world attest to the
results, using local arts and
resources.
UNESCO: Education for Peace