Urgent Evoke

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What purpose art in social innovation?

My first thought when I saw this task was "but Douglas Adams is dead" and the next was "uh, 'Look for someone who's already tackling the world's biggest problems with creative solutions and entrepreneurial ventures.' How does Douglas Adams fit that description?"


After all, when you think of social innovators, you think of Bill Gates spending his own money to combat malaria or fix the schools. You think of Jacqueline Novogratz and Patient Capitalism. You don't think of professional writers whose main claim to fame is that they made people laugh.


But Adams wrote satire, which is an art form dedicated to making us look at ourselves and acknowledge the things that don't make sense. A lot of art does this. Art exists as commentary, it's there to make us think. Art invites us to question, to investigate, to acknowledge, and without doing these things we fall into the trap of complacency. Art is a call to action, a driving force in social innovation.


But Adams is dead, and for some odd reason the next name to pop into my mind was that of Clive James. Clive writes in various places on pretty much any topic that seems to come into his head. One moment he's musing on the connection between golf-ball potato chips and climate change sceptics, the next it's porn and government ministers' expense accounts. Fascinating stuff, and as a fairly mainstream media person he reaches a broad audience with big ideas that really matter. Clive James is a voice of sanity in a world dominated by sound-bite media, a thinker with the ability to make his voice heard when he's thinking things that most people haven't got around to realising they need to think about yet. And the intro on his website certainly cla**** as social innovation: the aim of creating, in this latterday Babelic flux we call the web, an island of quality where every word is meant, and every image meaningful... - Beautiful stuff, the celebration of meaning in a world where people are increasingly confused.


And the Good Web Guide reviews his site thus: Clivejames.com is a generous and wonderful delight: this is the future for cultural multi-media websites... it ought to be a spur to an artistic renaissance on the internet... beautifully designed... In Audio there are fascinating dialogues. The (Video) archive a treasurehouse of wit and insight.


I've made clivejames.com the default homepage for my browser, so it's the first thing I see when I turn on the computer every day.

Views: 16

Comment by PJE on April 6, 2010 at 2:51pm
I like this very much.
Getting people to think new thoughts and to think differently does seem to me to be the beginning of change and laughter gets under our defenses, allows us to think things that might otherwise be too uncomfortable to face up to.

You mention writers and artists, film makers too, have the ability to bring people to new places of thinking and to help us to relate better to people at a distance and care more about the world.

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