Prophets at a Tangent
How Art Shapes Social Imagination

This Element asks if the arts can help us imagine a better future society and economy, without deep social gulfs or ecological harm.

Geoff Mulgan (Author)

9781009321655, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 2 March 2023

75 pages
22.7 x 15.2 x 0.5 cm, 0.13 kg

This Element asks if the arts can help us imagine a better future society and economy, without deep social gulfs or ecological harm. It argues that at their best, the arts open up new ways of seeing and thinking. They can warn and prompt and connect us to a bigger sense of what we could be. But artists have lost their role as gods and prophets, partly as an effect of digital technologies and the ubiquity of artistic production, and partly as an effect of shifting values. Few recent books, films, artworks or exhibitions have helped us imagine how our world could solve its problems or how it might be better a generation or more from now. This Element argues that artists work best not as prophets of a new society but rather as 'prophets at a tangent'.

Introduction: The Case for Tangential Imagination
1. The Inherent Limitations of Art as a Tool for Social Imagination
2. The Retreat from Prophecy: From Gods to Commentators, Direct to Indirect, Obvious to Opaque
3. Ethos, Art and Social Imagination: Exploring the Tangents
4. The Forms: How Can They Explore the Future?
5. Collective Consciousness
6. Dialectical Creativity
7. Combining Order and Chaos in Tangential Imagination
Conclusions: Imagination at a Tangent
References.

Subject Areas: Cognition & cognitive psychology [JMR], Social, group or collective psychology [JMH], The arts [A]