Culture as Commons

“Lewis Hyde describes it as “that vast store of un-owned ideas, inventions and works of art that we have inherited from the past and that we continue to create.” I would expand that definition to include the places we inhabit, the resources we share, and the ways we create. The cultural commons is an environment in which people can freely assemble (such as the Internet or a city park), have access to resources that are malleable like ideas, images, and language, and engage in forms of production and distribution that value exchange, collaboration and stewardship.”

-Sarah Shultz, Walker Art Center

Culture as Commons is the intellectual and physical assets that are freely available to both possess and interpret by every citizen of a community. The term can be broken down to its component parts. But as this New Yorker article points out, there is no easy definition of culture.

The first of 6 definitions of the word culture in the Oxford English dictionary may be what we as art educators historically find most relevant, “The arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively: 20th century popular culture.” The OED goes on to include 58 words and terms, which contain “culture” including; car culture, culture gap, culture war, lad culture, pop culture, café culture, culture clash, culture hero, culture shock, drug culture, guild culture, high culture, shame culture, surf culture, beauty culture, coffee culture, culture center, culture contract, culture heroine, culture jamming, culture vulture, culture warrior, police culture, popular culture, adversary culture, corporate culture, dependency culture, enterprise culture, material culture, physical culture, monoculture, subculture, cyberculture, counterculture, and I’ll just make up a last one to include all of the above, metaculture.

Culture could be defined as the proclamation of individual and collective identity, an experiment and experience that school aged students are constantly struggling with and which continues to evolve and change throughout all of our lives. Many of the definitions above are distinctions of subcultures with unique social and intellectual ideals and values. My culture may have changed a dozen times in one month in middle school, and only slowed down slightly until I reached my mid twenties. My culture right now, includes my professional culture and family culture, two cultures which allow themselves to co-exist harmoniously within myself.

As a teacher, being able to

The contemporary definition of “Commons” immediately brings to mind The Creative Commons, which was founded in 2001 and created to provide free and legal digital media to the public. I would love to compile a collection of free and legal media resources to share with my students, right now one of my favorite resources are images the Getty released sometime last year. There is such a wealth high art culture available on the Internet. AP art history classes must be having a lot of fun with virtual museum tours and such. Commons can be described as assets belonging to everybody for the benefit of all.

The way that Sarah Shultz describes Cultural Commons in her article includes the idea of cultural expression through identifying ourselves within the larger culture of our community and even within a global society. Shultz also talks about Cultural Commons being more than about intellectual space, but also about the physical space of public space, including schools, and the communal space of the Internet. Students can use the Internet to discover global cultural communities that they can connect with in meaningful ways. Much different from my days in school where I may have had a pen pal. Students can also create an identity for themselves on the Internet. I’m sure many secondary teachers have discovered that they have at least one student who is Internet famous.

Our job as educators is to help students use the Cultural Commons in a way that empowers them. It is so hard for me to separate the power and potential of the Internet from how I see teenagers using it in dangerous ways. In this ultra cyber world, we as educators should really be teaching students about the power of their digital identity and how it could both empower them or potentially harm them. From teaching them about intellectual and digital property law and copyright, to expressing the importance of presenting themselves in a positive light to a digital world, there is a lot teachers can do to prepare our students to be positive contributing members of this new digital culture.

In my own curriculum I have increasingly worked toward collaborating with my local community and including my students in community events, so that they can begin to develop a meaningful identity within their culture. This semester I would really like to work with different members of the community to create a collaborative piece of public art which incorporates ecological art and environmentally friendly design.