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Hello
and welcome.
From an
early age I loved doing music. 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
'living artfully' (watch my
Inaugural
Lecture).
I
believe that 'art' transcends '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. This is a form
of care. In fact, it is a type of (often overlooked) care-work. Art
matters. 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 recognise what we have reason to
value, and come to know what is it like to be human. I
suggest that recognising what we have reason to value is a basic
human need - albeit one that often goes unrecognised and un-cared
for. 'Seeing', 'hearing', and then taking responsibility to fulfil
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 all part of an on-going quest for living
artfully. I'm pursuing this through a number of current research
projects, including Developing Inclusive and Sustainable Creative
Economies (DISCE),
and Cultures of Care (www.culturesofcare.com). For me, culture is best
understood in terms of our systems of value recognition.
Understanding and critically interrogating our systems of value
recognition (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
On
May 21st, 2021 I was invited to speak at the United
Nations General Assembly High-Level Event on Culture and
Sustainable Development. My panel talk was on 'The status of
artists, cultural professionals and organizations: Equitable
digital transformation to support COVID-19 recovery. A video of my
talk is available here. The full programme of the event is
available here.
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 2021 (c)
Google Scholar: Nick Wilson