City Culture and Artistic Creation

Abstract

The world of nature and its countryside and wilderness environments (on land and sea) undoubtedly provide extremely important resources for artistic creation. Without nature -- without its energies, rhythms, colors, shapes, textures, sounds, harmonies, discords, and causal relations, art would never have been able to thrive. But despite the essential artistic importance of nature, in Western culture it is generally recognized that the greatest achievements of art are to be found in cities. Cities contain not only the greatest cultural resources for creating art but also the most developed facilities for presenting and preserving it. After noting some philosophically influential theories of the city, I explore the city's diverse resources for artistic creation and see how they are related to the essential structure of urban life. These resources include material culture as well as the more symbolic level of social, political, historical, and aesthetic cultural resources. In considering the question of how cities deploy their basic structure and defining resources to advance artistic creation, I give special attention to New York City's role in the artistic flourishing of the Harlem Renaissance. The paper concludes by suggesting that the city is not only a wonderfully rich source for the creation of works of art but that it also can also be considered as itself embodying a work of art, a product of creative human design and expression that can be understood, appreciated, and evaluated aesthetically.