ABSTRACT
Suddenly wondering whether Sustainability in an Imaginary World was the cause or effect within the research frame pushed our thinking on the social agency of art further than we had anticipated it needed to go. In response to the instability of these questions of agency and causal arrows, a final chapter lays out the remaining methodological step. Borrowing a largely discarded idea from evolutionary biology, it suggests an explicit shift away from trying to make sense of art’s social agency in terms of cause, with all the challenges of isolating and understanding their effects, to embracing the project itself as an effect. Sustainability in an Imaginary World, that is, can be seen as a crystallizing of larger atmospheric conditions, complete with all the emergent dynamics an integrated artistic process ‘ought to’ entail. The fit with our dyadic theory of art should be obvious: art as effect, as the result, that is, of paying attention to the world via the aesthetic. As a capacity to listen and feel the world around us in a spectrum that ‘sees’ outside rational, analytical frequencies. Our “hopeful monster” approach breaks down into three steps: crystallization as an orientation to the work as effect, or as Andy Stirling called it, a “condensation point,” something distilled from the larger environment; emergence, as the moment the creature becomes ‘monstrous,’ where the artistic vision takes the crystallizing beyond its derivative relationship to context; and resonance, or what the monster is hopeful for, that resonating relationship with the broader world where its emergent properties take on meaning and value. In this regard, we walk a long, circuitous route from our opening theoretical propositions to a final alignment with our larger evaluative strategies.
