Culture Making (eBook)

Recovering Our Creative Calling

Andy Crouch (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2023 | 1. Auflage
320 Seiten
IVP (Verlag)
978-1-5140-0577-4 (ISBN)

Infos

Christianity Today Book Award winner Publishers Weekly's best books The only way to change culture is to create culture. Most of the time, we just consume or copy culture. But that is not enough. We must also do more than condemn or critique it. The only way to change it is to create it. For too long, Christians have had an insufficient view of culture and have waged misguided 'culture wars.' But Andy Crouch says we must reclaim the cultural mandate to be the creative cultivators God designed us to be. Culture is what we make of the world, both in making cultural artifacts as well as in making sense of the world around us. In this expanded edition of his award-winning book Crouch unpacks the complexities of how culture works, the dynamics of cultural change, and tools for cultivating culture. Keen biblical exposition demonstrates that creating culture is central to the whole scriptural narrative, the ministry of Jesus, and the call to the church. With a conversation between Crouch and Tish Harrison Warren as the new afterword, this expanded edition addresses the current landscape and forges a way for the future of culture making. Enter into it with guided questions for reflection and discussion for a deeper experience.

Andy Crouch (MDiv, Boston University School of Theology) is senior strategist for at the John Templeton Foundation. For more than ten years he was an editor and producer at Christianity Today, including serving as executive editor from 2012 to 2016. He serves on the governing boards of Fuller Theological Seminary and the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities. Andy is the author of books such as Strong and Weak, Culture Making, and Playing God. His writing has appeared in Time, the Wall Street Journal and several editions of Best Christian Writing and Best Spiritual Writing.From 1998 to 2003, Andy was the editor-in-chief of re:generation quarterly, a magazine for an emerging generation of culturally creative Christians. For ten years he was a campus minister with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship at Harvard University. He studied classics at Cornell University and received an MDiv from Boston University School of Theology. A classically trained musician who draws on pop, folk, rock, jazz, and gospel, he has led musical worship for congregations of 5 to 20,000. He lives with his family in Pennsylvania.

Autor

Andy Crouch (MDiv, Boston University School of Theology) is partner for theology and culture at Praxis, an organization that works as a creative engine for redemptive entrepreneurship. His books include The Tech-Wise Family, Playing God, and Strong and Weak.

Textauszug

2

Cultural Worlds

Culture is what human beings make of the world, but not everything that human beings make shapes culture.

In 1979 the flamboyant artist couple Christo and Jeanne-Claude (in our culture, people signal artistic flamboyancy by using only their first names) conceived of a project called The Gates. They imagined lining the paths of New York City’s Central Park with saffron-colored curtains mounted on steel arches. A proposal to the New York City Parks Department was rejected—the department said that Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s proposal was “in the wrong place and the wrong time and in the wrong scale”—and the idea languished in their studio, dormant though never forgotten, for more than twenty years. Only a few people in the community of artists knew about the project.

The vision for The Gates, as with all art and all culture, was to make something of the world—in this case, the “world” of Central Park, which is itself a grand exercise in world making by the landscape designers Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux. Even when The Gates was just a set of sketches and pastel drawings, it was already a cultural good in one sense—the work of human beings trying to make something of the world.

But if The Gates had never been actually produced, it would never have become a fully realized cultural good. Go back to the diagnostic questions we asked in chapter one and imagine asking them of The Gates in the year 1999 when it was just a collection of sketches, proposals and maps, along with further ideas found only in the artists’ imaginations and conversations. What does The Gates, circa 1999, assume about the way the world is? What does it assume about the way the world ought to be? We could certainly answer these questions. The Gates, circa 1999, assumes the existence of Central Park, its significance in the life of New York City and its wider significance as an emblem of the possibilities of urban spaces. It assumes the chilly, leafless, barren terrain of a New York February (the project was always envisioned for midwinter). It assumes that the world should be adorned, at least from time to time and temporarily, with billowing fabrics that reveal and yet sometimes also conceal paths, hills and valleys. It assumes—in significant tension with many artists’ convictions, especially in the modern and postmodern eras—that art should be colorful, accessible, fun and free to the public.

But then move on to the next three questions. What does The Gates, circa 1999, make possible? What does it make impossible, or at least much more difficult? What new forms of culture are created in response? We’re stuck. There is little to say because The Gates, twenty years after it was first proposed, had had almost no effect to speak of. About the only cultural artifacts that had been created in response were a few bureaucratic documents categorically rejecting the artists’ proposal. And perhaps those documents did make some things impossible, or at least much more difficult, if they discouraged other would-be flamboyant artists from proposing any such works for Central Park. The Gates, circa 1999, was an artifact—a human effort to make something of the world—but it was not yet fully culture. Which is another way of saying that it was not yet—and as far as its creators knew, might never be—shared by a public.

Culture requires a public: a group of people who have been sufficiently affected by a cultural good that their horizons of possibility and impossibility have in fact been altered, and their own cultural creativity has been spurred, by that good’s existence. This group of people does not necessarily have to be large. But without such a group the artifact remains exclusively personal and private. It may be deeply meaningful to its owners—Christo and Jeanne-Claude may have treasured their sketches and maps in the privacy of their studio—but it has not reshaped the world for anyone. At least not yet.

As it happened, in 2003 a new mayor and new parks commissioner finally approved a somewhat revised proposal for The Gates. Michael Bloomberg, a successful businessman turned mayor, was clearly motivated more by millions of dollars in potential tourist revenue than any intrinsic artistic merits of the work itself. Christo and Jeanne-Claude had modified their plan so that no trace would be left when the installation was removed, and they themselves underwrote the $20 million in costs with proceeds from sales of their other works. And Central Park was a different place than it was in 1979, thanks to various cultural developments—cleaner, safer, more hospitable and far more widely visited by New Yorkers and out-of-town visitors alike. On February 12, 2005, “The Gates, Central Park: 1979-2005” unfurled for a sixteen-day run.

Hundreds of thousands of city residents and visitors walked through the park during those sixteen days. And suddenly it became possible to answer the three questions that were unanswerable before. What did The Gates make possible? Artists and city officials answered this question differently: the artists could point to the ways that the installation helped visitors see Central Park’s winding paths afresh; the mayor pointed to the revenue the city earned from the influx of tourists. What did The Gates make impossible, or at least much more difficult? It made it impossible to reserve a hotel room in Manhattan during the two weekends of the installation—normally not a problem in the dead of winter. The artists’ willingness to fully fund their own artwork, praised by Mayor Bloomberg, might well make it more difficult for public support of the arts, especially grand public installations, to gain widespread support. What new culture was created in response? Newspapers and magazines published articles celebrating, criticizing and interpreting the project; reproductions of the artists’ sketches and drawings, formerly languishing in their studio, were sold at a premium to eager buyers, with the proceeds funding a New York arts foundation; and no doubt, the fertile imaginations of Christo and Jeanne-Claude were already at work on an even grander project somewhere in the world, its prospects enhanced by the popular success of their venture in Central Park.

REAL ARTISTS SHIP

Culture making requires shared goods. Culture making is people (plural) making something of the world—it is never a solitary affair. Only artifacts that leave the solitude of their inventors’ studios and imaginations can move the horizons of possibility and become the raw material for more culture making. Until an artifact is shared, it is not culture. In the pithy words attributed to Apple Computer founder Steve Jobs when his engineers were tempted to put off the release date of the first Macintosh: “Real artists ship.” Jobs was willing to flatter his engineers, with their attention to detail and passion for perfection, by calling them artists—but he also was calling them back to the fundamental requirement of every software developer, to “ship” a working product to a wider public.

In February 2005, The Gates shipped. It crossed the threshold from personal project to shared cultural good. And yet, at another scale, The Gates never set sail at all. For billions of people, The Gates came and went without notice, moving no horizons and generating no new cultural artifacts. Indeed, if you live far from New York City, The Gates may not have had the slightest cultural effect on you until you read these pages. For a few million people, at least for a few weeks in February 2005, The Gates was culture, but for most of the world it might as well have stayed in Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s studio.

So just as we can’t speak of culture without speaking of particular artifacts and specific things, we can’t speak of culture without speaking of particular “publics”: specific groups of people who are affected by particular acts of making something of the world. Once again, we’re reminded of the danger of talking about “the Culture,” as if it were an undifferentiated, single thing. Just as we must always ask which cultural goods are meant by a reference to “Culture,” we must also ask which public receives and responds to those goods. If real artists—and real engineers, lawmakers, novelists and general contractors—ship, they have to have a real shipping address. Beyond the addresses where their cultural artifacts arrive, those artifacts are not culture at all.

The insight that culture has many different addresses, and that not every cultural good affects the same public, is the most basic form of “multiculturalism.” Multiculturalism begins with the simple observation that the cumulative, creative process of human culture has happened in widely different places, with widely different results, throughout human history. Before the rise of modern technologies of communication and transportation, the work of culture making could be going on simultaneously in myriad locations, each cut off from the next. Over thousands of years, one generation made something of the world and handed on an enriched (but perhaps also, in other ways, impoverished) world to the next. As this process was repeated over and over, in realms from the preparation of food to the nature of political authority to the stories that were told to make sense of the stars, cultures developed—historically continuous traditions of a particular, multigenerational public who shared a set of...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 12.9.2023
• Nachwort: Tish Harrison Warren
• Verlagsort: Lisle
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Religion / Theologie ► Christentum ► Moraltheologie / Sozialethik
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften
• Schlagworte: ART • Artist • Change • Christian culture wars • Create • creating content • Creative • Creativity • cultivator • Cultural • culture maker • Playing God • Pop culture • role in culture • social issues • Strong and Weak • Vocation
• ISBN-10: 1-5140-0577-8 / 1514005778
• ISBN-13: 978-1-5140-0577-4 / 9781514005774