CREATIVE REBELLION FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY: THE REINVIGORATION OF AMERICAN POLITICAL LIFE THROUGH PUBLIC ART

Abstract

Drawing on the work of Tocqueville, Nietzsche, Camus, and Marcuse, this work argues that there is an urgent political and societal need for greater support of public art projects and better access to these sources of funding. More art in public spaces would revive and animate communal environments, create new relationships between the individual and the public, strengthen feelings of community, and foster the desire to participate in the public. All art creates participatory desire and behavior, but visionary art is how political progress through individual rebellion can be best accessed and articulated. This work defines visionary artistic creation as the union of instinctual creative energies and rational reflection. Mainstream art, despite its aesthetic rearrangements, fails to connect the viewer with questions that will engage them over time. Visionary art, especially the public and social, is needed to seek out and materialize the newest, alternative possibilities for our individual lives, for our societies, and for the political systems under which they abide.