More to the point, what works of inspired genius might we be losing right now, at a moment when we’re in dire need of as much inspired genius as we can summon? As Sherry Turkle, Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, puts it, ‘we are forever elsewhere.’

In the mid-1990s, the artistic mentalité provided an ideal vehicle for motivating a demoralized, downsized, and otherwise dissatisfied labor force.55 And artists provided the ideal work model for this new postindustrial labor force, as they • Are trained to work with symbolic forms, so they offer an ideal model for the newly christened “knowledge w

the lesson of the arts is that it is difficult to create compelling works of imagination without hard work as well as resources. It’s not surprising that the same is true of social imagination, which also requires time and resources—and space for criticism and trial and error. The great social visionaries of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

Many creative people think these are the only options—both for them and their audience. Either they give the audience what it wants (the entertainer’s job) or else they put demands on the public (that’s where art begins).