Art and poverty

Many people see art, whether it’s literature or painting or film or theater, as a useless activity or product for the benefit of an elite group of people, not for the poor.

If people don’t have adequate food or shelter, what good is art, no matter what the medium?

Gregory Wolfe, publisher and editor of Image, a journal that focuses on art, faith and mystery, spoke about art and poverty in January at the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology. An adaptation of his talk appears in the latest issue of Image (No. 84).

 

The Potato Eaters by Vincent Van Gogh

 

This is a topic that many people concerned about justice issues, including many Mennonites, have trouble with. Many respond like the disciples, particularly Judas, responded to the woman who anointed Jesus with an expensive perfume (John 12:1-8; Mark 14:3-9). What a waste! The money spent on that could have been used to feed the poor.

But Jesus blesses her action. Wolfe comments: “The anointing is wholly gratuitous, which also happens to be one of the fundamental characteristics of art.”

Over the centuries, Wolfe points out, the poor have shown their desire for beauty. In the Catholic tradition, for example, look at the great cathedrals as well as household shrines and murals.

Art comes in many forms and serves many purposes. Folk art has a long tradition and often comes out of poor communities. Pop art, however, has become mostly a commodity that makes millions for various corporations.

Many concerned about justice fear art may be a distraction. However, says Wolfe, “beauty, whether manmade or natural, evokes in us the desire to protect what is both precious and vulnerable.”

I volunteer for Circles of Hope, which seeks to help people move out of poverty. The people I’ve come to know show that they aren’t solely concerned about money. They want to live, to enjoy life with their families and friends. And they are quite creative in finding ways to get by on little.

Kansas governor Sam Brownback signed a bill last month preventing Kansas families receiving government assistance from using those funds to visit swimming pools, see movies, go gambling or get tattoos. As the Washington Post writes: “There’s nothing fun about being on welfare, and a new Kansas bill aims to keep it that way.”

These legislators seem to have no clue how poor people live or the struggles they face to survive.

In an earlier issue, Image ran an interview with Roberta Ahmanson, who has worked to serve the homeless through a nonprofit called Village of Hope. She notes that the founder “intuitively understood that the places you bring people to speak to them about their own value.” Village of Hope, she says, “is probably the only homeless shelter in the world that has stained-glass windows and an 18-foot vase and Albert Paley gates.”

Art reflects beauty. It also reflects the artist’s own poverty. An artist creates a “nothing” that does nothing. But while it “does not in itself alleviate the suffering that poverty entails, … it remains one of the most compelling means by which we can be turned from distraction and denial and enabled to dwell for a time among those we would pass by.”

While poverty isolates people, art brings us together.

We all need bread and roses, food and art. Beauty enriches our lives and makes us want to enrich others’ lives as well.

Scientists judge climate change reporting

Reports keep coming out about climate change. For example, despite the record snowfalls in the eastern United States, December 2014 through February were the hottest winter (or summer in the Southern Hemisphere) ever recorded, since such records began being kept in 1880. Yet some articles play down such findings.

Now a group of climate scientists is reviewing articles and trying to counter some of the misinformation being published. Calling themselves Climate Feedback, the group includes scientists, oceanographers and atmospheric physicists.

The group is making use of a browser plugin from the nonprofit Hypothes.is to annotate climate journalism on the Web, writes Laura Dattaro in “How Climate Scientists Are Annotating Climate Reporting” at cjr.org, the website of Columbia Journalism Review.

“Readers with the plugin, or with a link created through it,” writes Dattaro, “can read an article while simultaneously reading comments and citations from a cadre of experts. Click on the headline, and you’ll see an overall rating, based on the article’s accuracy, fairness, and adherence to evidence.”

Climate Feedback lists about 25 scientists who contribute criticism, and more can apply as long as they’re actively publishing climate research.

Dattaro gives a couple of examples of articles the group has critiqued. The first one was an article by Steve Koonin, a theoretical physicist and former BP scientist who now heads NYU’s Center for Urban Science and Progress, which was published in the Wall Street Journal’s Saturday Essay section last December.

“Koonin argued that it’s too early to shape climate global policy because the specifics of the science are not settled,” writes Dattaro. Climate Feedback uses a rating system much like that for rating movies: four points (rather than stars) is the top grade. Six scientists gave this article a rating of a half point, which places it between “poor” and “very poor.”

Another Wall Street Journal column got a similar review. Danish author and analyst Bjorn Lomborg, has been accused of having links to the Koch Brothers, who are notorious for funding misinformation around climate science, writes Dattaro. Lomborg claimed “climate-change alarmists” are ignoring a wealth of climate data that “are actually encouraging,” to the detriment of us all, according to the review.

A major spokesperson for Climate Feedback is Emmanuel Vincent, a climate scientist at the University of California, Merced’s Center for Climate Communication. He says he wants to see a more scientific point of view on what is said about climate change. “Climate change has been taken a little bit outside of the realm of science,” he says.

Many magazines employ fact-checkers (though fewer than used to), but Vincent says that’s not how he sees his group. According to Kattaro, he says “the ultimate goal isn’t to fact-check but to foster more scientific thinking in journalists and ultimately build more communication between the two parties.” The group often makes responses on articles in the comments section of the magazines where the articles appear.

New York Times climate reporter Justin Gillis says: “We’ve seen some pretty serious misrepresentation of climate science in certain news outlets. I would hope those outlets would take the comments seriously.”

Editors still make the call about what gets published. Vincent’s hope is that journalists and scientists will be more critical in their work and will “listen to each other (while also informing the reader),” writes Dattaro.

Unfortunately, too many readers aren’t interested in facts, only ideology.