By Matt McDermott
There is an art to everyday life. Whether it is work, family, relationships, spirituality, politics or a specific artistic practice, there’s an art to our creative engagement with the world around us. The constant change that constitutes our evolving way of being the people of Chicago includes literature and the visual and performing arts. The art of everyday life, however, is more expansive than traditional artistic practice alone. That is why we chose our working term to be culture. Below are three of the many possible ways of defining culture that we use when trying to be consistently Cultural Chicago.
culture The way of life of a people, including their attitudes, values, beliefs, arts, sciences, modes of perception, and habits and thoughts and activity. Cultural features of forms of life are learned but are often too pervasive to be readily noticed from within. (“Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy,” Simon Blackburn, OUP, 1996)
In this era, one cannot easily have a public discourse that does not acknowledge the crossover between the categories in the definition above. Attitudes, values and beliefs shape our modes of perception. Science investigates and analyzes how our very ability to perceive works on a functional level. The arts manipulate and accentuate perception while also playing the crucial role of drawing attention to or critiquing what is “learned but [is] often too pervasive to be readily noticed from within.”
It is not an accident that a throwaway consumer culture has resulted in the multi-generational use of found objects in art. Or that environmental activists look at the built-in obsolescence of our current platforms for culture: iPods, laptops, TiVOs, etc., and ask how it all will be responsibly disposed? Likewise, artists create work that critiques/explores the acceleration of time by the Internet and cell phone culture, as well as raises questions about biotechnology and its implication for our conception of humanity.
Aspirationally then, while publishing significantly on the literary, visual and performing arts in Chicago, we hope to leave the door open for broader analyses (both lighthearted and serious) of our metropolitan culture.
“It is especially interesting that in archaeology and in cultural anthropology the reference to culture or a culture is primary to material production, while in history and cultural studies the reference is primarily to signifying or symbolic systems. This often confuses but even more often conceals the central question of the relations between ‘material and symbolic’ production, which in some recent argument […] have always to be related rather than contrasted.” (“Keywords,” Raymond Williams, Fontana Press, 1988)
Cultural Chicago is edited with the assumption that the economic nature of/influence on the arts is accepted as a commonplace understanding. It should no longer be notably political to see in an art work the social and economic character of the time when it was created. Consider the concept of valuation, which is crucial in the art world, the financial world and the retail world (to name just three). If there is something to be discovered by following concepts of valuation across those different fields, we’ll publish it.
Issues of gender, race and sexual orientation all raise potent discussions in zones from the workplace to the political domain. Is it likely that the debate can be fully explored if these different areas for discussion are treated as silos? The realities of the workplace can be addressed by a poet, a water cooler conversation and a political group meeting: how much the better for all these voices to come together within our experience as citizens of this great city? Cultural Chicago aims to not forget the totality of city life within which the arts exist.
“Those who work in the field of cultural practices are unlikely to mistake their field as utterly central. Men and women do not live by culture alone, the vast majority of them throughout history have been deprived of the chance of living by it at all, and those few who are fortunate enough to live by it now are able to do so by the labour of those who do not. Any cultural or critical theory which does not begin from this single most important fact, and hold it steadily in mind in its activities, is in my view unlikely to be worth very much.” (“Literary Theory,” Terry Eagleton, Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 1996)
Chicago is very supportive of its artistic community. Chicago is drawing new talent due to its affordability in comparison with the coasts. Nonetheless, the arts community is largely living at the economic fringes in comparison to its audiences. Many people whose work you appreciate make their living outside of the arts and always will. Do not assume the actress on stage is not getting up early as you do to head to a law office or restaurant. The arts as a full-time occupation is more often an anomaly than not.
Yet, by and large, our arts community is sincerely appreciative of the support it receives to create and present its work. The arts audience and arts practitioners are interwoven in their mutual creation of our city’s cultural life. As Eagleton notes above, the public life of the arts rests on foundations built by the audience's often more prosaic labor. Due to the support of institutions, the city government, and the public, we are lucky to enjoy a cultural life that is so rich that the depth and breadth of our literary, visual and performing arts community is too extensive for any one of us to fully grasp.
Ultimately, Cultural Chicago seeks to profile and celebrate local arts for the local arts audience whose support makes Chicago’s artistic culture possible. We will also be venturing further afield to explore aspects of city life (culture) conceived more broadly.
We are always looking for writers who have specialized knowledge of an area of Chicago culture, artistic or otherwise. If a section of this statement matches your writing interests, contact us with a description of what intrigues you about our city life and culture.