Aesthetic Evangelists Response

The most memorable part of this piece, “Aesthetic Evangelists: Conversion Empowerment in Contemporary Community Art,” was Kester’s use of the word “fetish” in relation to community art projects. Fetish to me has a bit of a dirty connotation. It actually made quite a bit of sense to call community art a bit of a fetish because someone is getting gratification off an unusual desire to penetrate a social group “defined by their difference from a white, upper-middle class norm” (sorry no page numbers!). It seems that most of our social issues are due to the hierarchy of the “norm” repressing the “other.” This creates a sense of hierarchy in the world that separates the “norm” and the “other.” Therefore, it almost seems like helping the “other” or someone categorized as beneath you is keeping them repressed. It highlights the differences between people. Yet, it makes you feel good, and it looks really nice because we use awesome buzzwords. So, is community art helping or hurting?

Kester had also pointed out that no one was addressing the root problems of poverty, racism, and other social issues. Instead, there seemed to be some sort of scapegoat to blame, like his welfare example. Kester states, “Welfare ‘teaches’ young women to have illegitimate children and to shirk the responsibility..” (sorry no page numbers). I think Kester was critiquing the general public and those trying to help for quickly looking for something to blame. It seems that they really look at the surface characteristics of the problem for answers. If this is true, how often do community art projects really address the root of the problem? How often does the artist only relieve or address the effects of bigger issues? Is it making things better, worse or keeping them the same?

Kester also was drawing a line between the artist to a powerful figures that act as evangelical philanthropist. Yet, it almost seems like they are the same in a lot of cases. I think his examination of Dedeaux’s “Soul Shadows” showed that her practice was trying to use powerful figures in the gang community to get troubled youth to stay away from drugs. She was banking on her authority as an artist to push for some sort of change, and she is praised for it because she is taking a “risk” by interacting with people without inherited social privileges. I feel that an evangelical philanthropist could just as easily use their authoritative power and privilege to gain a similar feel good moment.

Lastly, I really liked this quote from Owen Kelly stating, “[the community] are our ‘clients’ and what that really means is that they are the raw material upon which we work..” (again sorry there were no page numbers). This spoke volumes about how Kester was seeing artists are treating the community. Kester kept coming back to the term malleable when describing a group of people, which seemed kind of wrong. They are not clay. Though the artist is trying to use them to create something with the community or shape them into a more desireable community, they are people with opinions and voices. The key word in Kelly’s statement is ‘client’ because it still recognizes as that voice that reports back to funders, to galleries, and to the public. Jarr’s piece in the Whitechapel felt like he was using the woman as objects rather than partners. He really didn’t take into consideration their voices and how they wanted to be represented and displayed. It’s just really important to recognize relationship dynamics between the artist and the community in these situations because though everyone is trying to achieve a good thing, it may not serve the community properly, exploit social statuses, and dehumanize people.