Utopia by Design: Creation, Creativity and Visual Culture

Part of the Arts & Humanities Festival 2013: Being | Human

This event is free and open to all but booking is required.

The argument in this illustrated lecture is that to be human is to be creative, and that to be creative is to pursue a better world. It is grounded in Ernst Bloch’s critical theory of Utopian thought, especially that visions of a better world to come are encoded in the arts and popular culture. It is pursued via a confluence of theory and case study of the interrelationship between Navajo culture, theology and design as articulated both in the practice of weaving and in the theology of the Navajo creation myth. Yet it is an argument that at the same time goes beyond Bloch and the Navajo: It is contended that not only do the arts more broadly serve as representations of possible Utopias, but that creativity and design are also Utopian processes in themselves. The lecture concludes that Utopia is therefore something that we cannot delegate either to nature or to the supernatural, because as Bloch declares in The Spirit of Utopia: ‘Life has been put into our hands.’

Biography:
Dr Richard Howells is Reader in Culture, Media and Creative Industries at King’s College London. He is a cultural sociologist with particular interests in visual and popular culture, together with cultural and critical theory. His works takes place at the intersections of traditional disciplines and typically uses seemingly disparate but theoretically-informed case studies to shed light on the human condition. Although British, Richard studied at both Harvard and Cambridge and has been Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Center for the Arts in Society, Carnegie Mellon University. His publications include two editions of Visual Culture (Cambridge, 2003 and 2012, the latter with Joaquim Negreiros), and two editions of The Myth of the Titanic (1999 and 2012). His “Sorting the Sheep from the Sheep: Value, Worth and the Creative Industries” was commissioned by the AHRC and published in The Public Value of the Humanities, edited by Jonathan Bate in 2011, while his “Art, Controversy, and Power” appeared in Outrage: Art, Controversy, and Society, which he edited with Andreea Deciu Ritivoi and Judith Schachter in 2012. He is currently working on critical theories of Utopia.