NN40, May 2008
Education for Sustainable Development? Or The Sustainability of Education Investment? A Special Issue
Sustainable Mozart: The Overlooked and Neglected Dimension of Culture in the Discourses on Sustainability
By Wolfgang Gmelin, NORRAG, formerly DSE, Bonn
Email: wolfgmelin@aol.comKeywords
Culture, Sustainability Discourse
Summary
This article is a comment on the narrowing down of the concept of sustainability to economics, ecology and sometimes politics, leaving out dimensions that may enrich the socio-political discourse, such as art and culture.
The title ?Sustainable Mozart? and some of the basic ideas have been taken from a series of workshops which were conducted during the Mozart year 2006 in Salzburg. It is an attempt to draw attention to the narrowing down of the concept of sustainability to economics, ecology and sometimes politics, leaving out dimensions that may enrich the socio-political discourse.
Art and culture could provide an essential contribution when it comes to perceiving change towards a sustainable livelihood and putting into question well trodden paths of consumption patterns and value systems. UNESCO?s Stockholm Action Plan of 1998 ?The Power of Culture? claims that sustainable development and cultural diversity depend on each other. Art is a means to represent the state of a society, yet it also permits to think ahead in view of a sustainable more just future for mankind which takes heed of the natural boundaries. Art and culture provide an emotional approach to the abstract intellectual concept of sustainability and address more directly the reality and quality of life, thus permitting an emotional experience of sustainability. Through the visions of artists there may be different outlooks on present reality and on what a more life-worthy future might look like. In the Salzburg thesis the organisers of the workshops have outlined the possible alliances of art and social options of how art with its capacity to critically question and condense the hitherto unthought and unseen can confront society with alternative possibilities of individual and collective thinking and action towards a richer understanding of sustainability. Art and culture may also give some essential orientation in the worldwide spread of information, and thus serve as a key competence in an otherwise information-flooded knowledge society.
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