Thelma Golden: How art gives shape to cultural change

That for me is the poetics of encryption. Artists are already using generative AI as a tool to reimagine our relation to the perennial big ideas. Like: What is identity? What is spirituality? What is cultural heritage? How can the human resist the fast-moving disruption to our lives and to our long-standing imaginaries? These are the questions that... See more

“Part of what we want to do is not just create a model of how audio can be transformed,” she said, “but also make a push forward for creator-driven culture so that this culture isn’t being shaped by the platforms and technologists, but the artists and creatives and talent.”

Like our own imagination, art can wander off, seeking out the edges, the borderlands, the mysteries. Indeed, this autonomy is art’s power and part of its emotional appeal. But this very ability to separate from everyday material life may also make art impotent in trying to shape the world from which it has escaped. At most it can be a nudge or a su

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“I realized that internet policy-makers and internet artists have similar interests, but different skill sets. Internet artists make work that questions themes of data extraction, surveillance, provenance, identity, and this open display creates a cultural shift that then provides enough momentum for a policy shift. Then once it moves into that ter

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for art to serve social imagination, it has to be organised in ways that allow time for it to be absorbed and adapted, so that it becomes an act of co-creation rather than just an act of consumption or an enjoyable way to pass the evening.15 If it is only an object for the passing gaze, then it is, perhaps, bound to fail. Experiences that are share

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These artworks have the capacity to alter our perceptions: of ourselves, certain concepts, the history or present or future of the world. Many of my favorite visual artworks reorient my perception of beauty (making a beautiful thing boring, making an ugly thing interesting); many of my favorite literary artworks change my perception of morality (by... See more

We are so used to understanding the purpose of art in Romantic terms, as the fruit of individual artistic genius, that we forget that for most of history art had a plainer and more direct purpose: it was a tool of education. The point of art was to render tough or knotty lessons easier to absorb; to nudge our recalcitrant minds towards accepting id

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