oad in our land seem to be the main culprits (helped along, of course by our growing consumer culture), although I will discuss what I perceive to be yet a third force in this trend below. Finally, a recent personal experience which I had while participating in the planning and execution of a memorial performance hour, while difficult to articulate the substance of, both valorized and strengthened my own thinking about the function of art. (This I will also treat below.) All of these intuitions, experiences, and understandings (subtle distinction among these at best?), fortunately, found a place to come to stand with my participation in the course Urban Festivity offered at Northwestern University. They especially resonated with a text for the course, Culture In Action, the catalogue for the series of public art works created in the Chicago area in 1994 for the program SculptureChicago. Gradually it became clear to me that the current offerings by SculptureChicago could provide the focus for an activity which could address my diverse needs and concerns. Before detailing the plans for and the actual events of the trip, it is necessary to clarify some of the theoretical understandings which guided the structuring of the activity. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------Theory rears its ugly headThinking, analyzing, inventing (he also wrote me) are not anomalous acts; they are the normal respiration of the intelligence. Every man should be capable of all ideas and I understand that in the future this will be the case. Jorge Luis Borges ("Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote") If, as Clifford Geertz tells us, art is notoriously hard to talk about, surely culture is just as difficult. But when we try to talk about art as culture or its converse, culture as art, we are very much adding to our difficulties. To put my position as simply as possible, starting with the point upon which cultur...
