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Hello
and welcome.
From an
early age I was destined to be a musician. I played and sung my way
to university, music colleges in London and Berlin, and then the
life of a freelance singer. I gave up singing professionally in the
late 1990s, but this didn't stop me 'finding my voice' in other
areas. I worked in arts management & concert promotion, small
business research, and teaching in a business school. For the last
decade my professional home has been in the Arts and Humanities
faculty of King's College London, where I'm Professor of Culture &
Creativity and (from June 2020) Head of Department of Culture,
Media & Creative Industries. Over the years, I've made lots of
discoveries. Recently, I've come to realise that my work is unified
in its underlying focus on what I call 'aesthetic reason' and
'artful living' (watch my
Inaugural
Lecture).
I
believe that 'art' is much more than 'the arts'. Art matters
because it is the distinctive human practice where we give sharable
form to our experiences of being-in-relation with the natural
necessity of the world - quite simply, the way the world
is. The arts matter not just because they can be
entertaining, thought-provoking, uplifting, challenging,
comforting, a source of employment, and major contribution to
national productivity (GDP), (they are all this, and much more
besides), but because they are where society gives permission to
value aesthetic knowing. It is this kind of knowing that helps us
come to know what is it like to be human. This is an
ultimate concern we all have. It is a need - albeit one that often
goes unrecognised. 'Seeing', 'hearing', and then fulfiling this
need through art is then an act of care that is central to human
flourishing.
My
teaching, research and leadership in the areas of culture, media
and creative industries is positioned against my on-going quest for
'artful living'. For me, culture is best understood in terms of our
systems of value recognition. Understanding and critically
interrogating these systems (the market, politics, education,
science, healthcare, and - yes, the arts) is one of the most
important tasks we can possibly embark on.
I
regularly upload writings and links to publications, as well as
information about my current research interests and projects. More
details of my work at the Department of Culture, Media & Creative
Industries, King's College London is available on the CMCI
website.
Please
do get in touch if you would like to collaborate!
Credit: David
Tett
In
2020 I published The Space that Separates: A
Realist Theory of Art (available to order as hardback
or ebook from
Routledge,
Amazon and other on- and off-line bookstores). The official
blurb is below - but suffice it to say, this is a book that seeks
to get at what art is (from a critical realist
perspective) and which is motivated by the belief that we can, and
should, open ourselves to living 'artfully'. This is all
the more important as the reality of the climate emergency
confronting everyone of us becomes daily more
evident.
"The Space that Separates: A Realist Theory of Art radically challenges our assumptions about what art is, what art does, who is doing it, and why it matters. Rejecting the modernist and market-driven misconception that art is only what artists do, Wilson instead presents a realist case for living artfully. Art is defined as the skilled practice of giving shareable form to our experiences of being-in-relation with the real; that is to say, the causally generative domain of the world that extends beyond our direct observation, comprising relations, structures, mechanisms, possibilities, powers, processes, systems, forces, values, ways of being. In communicating such aesthetic experience we behold life’s betweenness – "the space that separates", so coming to know ourselves as connected."
Providing the first dedicated and comprehensive account of art and aesthetics from a critical realist perspective – Aesthetic Critical Realism (ACR), Wilson argues for a profound paradigm shift in how we understand and care for culture in terms of our system(s) of value recognition. Fortunately, we have just the right tool to help us achieve this transformation – and it’s called art. Offering novel explanatory accounts of art, aesthetic experience, value, play, culture, creativity, artistic truth and beauty, this book will appeal to a wide audience of students and scholars of art, aesthetics, human development, philosophy and critical realism, as well as cultural practitioners and policy-makers.
The Palgrave Handbook of Creativity at Work
is
co-edited with my colleague and friend Lee Martin. It is comprised
of 30 chapters which explore the subject from a diverse set of
perspectives. As I outline in the final chapter's synthesis of
ideas, I believe that the handbook offers a genuinely new,
constructive (albeit challenging) way of thinking about creativity
(at work) as a structured practice of care. Chapters are available
to download here.
Entries I've written on "authenticity", "early music", and "Werktreue" are included in this new comprehensive encyclopedia of historical performance in music (2018).
.
I was honoured that my article "What's the problem? Cultural capability and learning from Historical Performance" features in this inaugural edition of Historical Performance (2018). For more details click here.
Towards Cultural Democracy: Promoting
Cultural Capabilities report launched, June 21st, 2017.
Downloadable
here.
This
research report with Jonathan Gross examines the cultural
eco-systems of Creative
People and Places projects and offers new ways to understand
what place-based programmes can seek to achieve in the long term.
The report also sets out some important considerations for the
development of flourishing cultural eco-systems.
Download your copy
here.
Caring for Cultural Freedom: An Ecological
Approach to Young People's Cultural Learning, launched
October 31st, 2017. Downloadable here.
Huffington Post article (24th May, 2017) by Tony Woodcock discusses the 'Entrepreneurship in Music' conference in Oslo, Norway in April, 2017, in which I gave the opening Keynote.
As
a conflation of the words ‘creativity’ and ‘if’ (as in
‘what if?’), creatifity carrys with it an aspirational
message about human creativity that is imaginative, emancipatory,
and value-positive. This is a message that informs my approach
to creativity research and practice.
“Creativity requires the courage to let go of
certainties”
Erich
Fromm
Contact: info@creatifity.com
Copyright 2020 (c)
Google Scholar: Nick Wilson