A Selfless Art was conceived as companion and counterweight to A Restless Art, the yin to its yang. It was a response to crises in the world and in my own life, which together challenged the basis of my ideas. I did not lose confidence in the value of co-creation but I did come to question how it could be done today. I began thinking about the book in Spring 2023 and worked on it for over a year before deciding that I did not have the strength to write it. I still believe in the project, but it has been put aside until 2027 or 2028 while I meet other commitments. Whether it will eventually be written is only partly in my hands.
‘We are living off expired or expiring stories’
These words of Vanessa Machado de Oliveira help explain why our institutions, political, educational and cultural, are paralysed or failing. It’s why we struggle to change how we live, despite knowing that change is vital. It’s why some are drawn to autocrats who promise the deceptive comfort of old stories.
Finding better responses to humanity’s complex challenges depends on how we make sense of the world — the stories through which we interpret reality. I have no idea what that those stories will be but I am sure that their meaning is inseparable from how they are created. Modernity’s stories burst from the Enlightenment’s heroic idea of the artist. We’re still in thrall to that expiring story and it does not serve us well. Our fragile, interdependent world needs a new idea of art and a new way of creating it.
Co-creation has been my life since 1981, most recently on a European project to co-create new operas in Ireland, Spain and Portugal. The purpose of my work is empowerment; co-creation its method. Although the concept, ethics and practice of co-creation are still contested, it has become so established that I subtitled my last book How participation won and why it matters.
But that was 2019. Since then, global and personal crises have led me to a profound rethinking of a concept and practice that is being appropriated to serve existing interests, prevent change and give unrealistic new life to old stories. There is a simple choice at the heart of this:
- Does co-creation enable the exploitation of people’s most personal assets for the benefit of others, disguised as a democratisation of value creation?
- Or is it an ethical practice able to transform not only the art we value but how we see ourselves, each other and the world that sustains us?
A Selfless Art is an idealistic and personal project. I recognise both my own privileged position and the challenge to existing ways of working and living. But the need for change seems undeniable. Humanity’s destructive relationship with itself and with the natural world of which it is part is unsustainable – environmentally, politically, socially and culturally. Co-creation is not the answer to these complex challenges, but it might be the path along which we can search for answers.
François Matarasso 