Sometimes having your creative activist methodology appropriated by the powers-that-be has an upside. Witness the Yes Men style pro-bono campaign the Chicago-based advertising heavy, Leo Burnett, waged to save a small library in Troy, Michigan from the Tea Party.
Author Archives: Stephen Duncombe
My Political Faith
The following is a short piece I wrote for an on-line journal called freq.uenci.es who asked me to write about spirituality. At first I said no; I don’t think of myself as a spiritual person. But then I started thinking about some of the training work that Lambert and I do in the School for …
Is This What Civil Disobedience Looks Like? — Nathan Schneider
Nathan Schneider, from Waging NonViolence makes an excellent point here in his coverage of the mass arrests of Occupy Wallstreet on the Brooklyn Bridge about what are we trying to “demonstrate” in our demonstrations: “One might wonder, however, whether causing such an obstruction is really the proper mode of civil disobedience given the purposes …
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8 Reasons Young Americans Don’t Fight Back
Steve sent me this article in response to a question we were batting about around why there is seemingly no public outrage surrounding the burn the public or boil the public “debate” on the debt limit, especially in comparison to what has happened or is happening in Egypt, Spain, Israel and elsewhere. I think the …
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Poor Immigrant as Muse
The following is an article about the artist Tania Bruguera and and her year-long project of living with and “as” an immigrant in NYC. This raises the question of: How does this art address and/or effect poor immigrants’ lives? The most charitable reading is that the artist intends to use her position of power and …
Mussolini on Total Politics
“We play the lyre on all its strings: from violence to religion, from art to politics.” – Benito Mussolini, 1932, from MOMA’s Chaos and Classicism show
Art as Terrorism — Antanas Mockus
Antanas Mockus, was a mayor of Bogota Columbia who used innovative, creative methods to build civil society. The following is from an interview between Mockus and Pedro Reyes (From Marisa’ Jahn’s Byproduct) PR: How do you imagine the role of the artist as social agent? AM: I think one could veery convincingly put forward: “Commit …
BJ Fogg’s Behavior Model
What Causes Behavior Change? My Behavior Model shows that three elements must converge at the same moment for a behavior to occur: Motivation, Ability, and Trigger. When a behavior does not occur, at least one of those three elements is missing. go to site for the rest
Charting Creativity: Neurologically
Charting Creativity: Signposts of a Hazy Territory NY Times, Patricia Cohen, May 7, 2010 Grab a timer and set it for one minute. Now list as many creative uses for a brick as you can imagine. Go. The question is part of a classic test for creativity, a quality that scientists are trying for the …
Art Power
Boris Guys, Art Power (MIT Press: 2008) “Art becomes politically effective only when it is made outside the art market — in the context of direct political propaganda.” “Of course, one can easily argue that such propaganda art is simply political design- and image-making….They are making advertisements for a certain ideological goal — and they …
Why Metrics Are Killing Creativity in Advertising
“Thing is, you cannot truly quantify creativity. And in ever-increasing fashion, our clients’ (and our own) rote dependence on the dusty world of metrics is exactly why creativity is going to hell. When marketing decisions are based on numbers, we lose completely the desire to “waste” time being creative. And heaven forbid we ever again …
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Sublime Accidents
A public service ad for a seatbelt campaign in the UK, gone viral with lots of press too. Nice tension between beauty and horror. But if I didn’t before, will I wear a seatbelt now? Or does this serve the function of reinforcement? Or merely an e-mail forward as banal statement of concern? Hard to …
A promise not satisfied
“Aesthetic art promises a political accomplishment that it cannot satisfy, and thrives on that ambiguity. That is why those who want to isolate it from politics are somewhat beside the point. It is also why those who want to fulfill its political promise are condemned to a certain melancholy.” Jacques Ranciere, “The Aesthetic Revolution and …
Bottle Bank Arcade
OK, it’s essentially an off-beat ad campaign by Volkswagon, but it does say something about modeling social behavior through fun. Bottle Bank Video
Test Marketing Michael Moore
NY Times article (9/20/09) on Michael Moore and how he tests the effect of his movies: “Although I’m trying to say things I want to say politically, I primarily want to make an entertaining movie,” he said. “If the art of the movie doesn’t work, the politics won’t get through.” To make sure the politics …
Where's Conservative Art? Crunchy Con
Asking our question (kind of) from the other side of the aisle. See especially the comments section. Where’s Conservative Art?
Politcal Communications Strategy
Interesting blog piece from the Huffington Post from a political communications strategist about How To Win: Ill Communication: President Obama’s Misguided Health Care Strategy, by Ben Wyskida
Politics of Surrealism
Some interesting tidbits from The Politics of Surrealism by Helena Lewis (NY: Paragon House, 1988) ” tried to link together two revolutions: that of the mind, by liberating the unconscious, and the social and economic revolution of the masses. The Surrealists always maintained that one of the most important ways to undermine capitalism is to …
Power needs culture
from Terry Eagleton’s new book: Reason, Faith and Revolution (Yale: 2009) p. 150 “Culture is what beds power down, interweaving it with our lived experience and thus tightening its grip upon us. An authority which fails to do this will loom up as too abstract and aloof, and thus fail to secure its citizens’ unqualified …
Gihan Perera: Internal Efficacy
Gihan Perera: Grounding our Inner Leadership Spirit & Sustainability Profile “In so much of my political work, the benchmark of that was external. It was intellectual, and I mentally related it to my impact on objective conditions. However, so much of what I felt about my larger purpose was so non-related to those benchmarks. What …
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