Lea Schick is the editor and moderator of this debate forum. During the RETHINK exhibition she will facilitate the RETHINK ART discussions here on her blog. We will very much encourage you to participate in the debate! 

How can we get good at being as gods?

In her essay, The Art of Recognition Emma Ridgway, curator at the RSA Arts and Ecology Centre, argues that we now find ourselves in a time and situation, a new, improbable form of life, where we humans have become co-creaters of our environment – we have become as gods, but we do not yet fully recognize and accept this very frightening responsibility and even less do we know what to do with it! Rigdway claims that the arts have the potential to help us realize and submit to this new position. 

“The message that human progress has damaged nature is holding us back – we have become an integral and powerful part of nature – it is an uneasy responsibility.” (Rigdway) So how can we get good at being as gods? How can we become enlightened enough to generate technologies, behaviors and ways of thinking that will be adequate responses to the changes ahead of us? And what role might art play in this necessary rethink of our relationship to our world?” (Ridgway)

Read Rigdway’s essay and debate her statement and her questions here at the blog.
 

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Contributions for RETHINK ART

 

ABOUT RETHINK ART

The arts have a long tradition of engagement with issues in both the socio-political and environmental spheres. Art reflects contemporary and historical developments, challenges dominant paradigms, and asks key questions, raising awareness of powerful and controversial topics by highlighting both their essentials and their complexities. As a natural development of this tradition, many artists have inevitably addressed and continue to address climate change, a subject which with ever-greater urgency demands immediate and comprehensive action, and which promises dramatic changes for all of humanity, whether we face it successfully or not.

But is it possible to successfully apprehend and work with an issue as complex as climate change from an artistic, non-scientific angle? What role does and can art play in the all-pervasive challenge of climate change? Or conversely, is the widespread attention given to climate change today, with events like the 2009 UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, merely providing artists an exotic and lively arena within which to work, with lucrative results?

We here encourage you to read about and discuss which role art as or will get in the increasing attention emerging around climate change.

 

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Discuss the RETHINK ART contributions on the blog to the left.