Artistic Citizenship

by Mary Schmidt (Editor), Randy Martin (Editor)

Artistic Citizenship asks the question: how do people in the creative arts prepare for, and participate in, civic life? This volume, developed at NYU’s Tisch School, identifies the question of artistic citizenship to explore civic identity — the role of the artist in social and cultural terms.

With contributions from many connected to the Tisch School including: novelist E.L. Doctorow, performance artist Karen Finley, theatre guru Richard Schechner, and cultural theorist Ella Shohat, this book is indispensable to anyone involved in arts education or the creation of public policy for the arts.

Genres: Nonfiction, Art

218 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

Reviews

[Zivile · Rating 5 out of 5]

What is an artistic citizenship? But the better question is: what is the duty of artist as a citizen?
Artists are the most free people when it comes to terms of expressing the society's fears, problems, biases. Artists are the ones who can critique and teach us about the unspoken problems which do exist in every community.
But does it sometimes become a risk to express those ideas? Well, yes, so that's why this book is even more important to read, because we cannot allow artists to be silenced.

[Meaghen · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found this book disappointing. The idea of artistic citizenship is an important one, but the connections that were drawn were not as insightful as I expected. Furthermore, the essays were exclusively focussed on the US, which isn't unusual for American books, but they were also so thoroughly connected to the immediate response to 9/11 despite being published in 2006, that they seem to have no further use only 5 years after publication.