Will the arts in America change after the election of Barack Obama?

Quick answer: not that much.

Considered answer: quite a bit, but not as you might expect. As with September 11, 2001, the profundity of the event will likely manifest itself in relation to the attitudes, emotions and responses of people and society in general. In other words, the content and production of art may, or may not change, but we have. I think (okay, hope) Americans will undergo a deepening of our sense of subjectivity and a more nuanced regard for what is significant in the scheme of history. We may also become less convinced by standardized representations in the old languages of mass media and political labeling. No doubt, the sobering effects of a new economics will also add to the chill on the values of the glory days.

This is, of course, speculation. But it is arguable that the psychic shift in the country will be in how we value ourselves individually and subjectively rather than in response to broader symbolic themes. It might be that instead of objectively defining ourselves by the American Dream and all of its variations, we will come to recognize ourselves in and as part of the American Story. Dreams are all well and good, and they forever should guide our aspirations and imagination. But it is more realistic - as well as painful, comic and hopeful - to acknowledge that stories are symbolic, too, and they can be unique. After all, we make up our own lives and there is great meaning in that.

From one perspective, the Obama – McCain election was all about dreams and ideals versus actualities and personal stories. McCain is unquestionably an heroic figure, with the scars to prove it. For a while, he relied on his military and war experiences and stressed his Old West maverick style in Congress. During the latter part of his campaign, he kept hammering home his message about the American Dream and concluded his rallies like a football coach, repeating a “Fight Fight Fight” mantra to sympathetic crowds. With cheerleader Sarah often at his side, it seemed like an exercise in nostalgia. When McCain spoke about himself as a leader in global affairs, he assumed the blustery pose of the tough American who would not back down.

Obama, on the other hand, offered the country – and the world – a story. His life and its particulars were the message. It said, more powerfully than McCain’s biography, that regardless of circumstances, with hard work, a careful intelligence, a strong family, and some luck, anything is possible in America. McCain’s dramatizations and attacks took on the appearance of a crude Hollywood movie compared to Obama’s narrative and his conversational emphasis on the stories of people’s lives. The McCain-Palin attempt to portray Obama as merely a great speech maker did not work because, though he is a great speaker, his measured, reasoned, low-key talking went past traditional political stylizing and encompassed personal and elemental issues.

The media, of course, missed this quality of Obama, since the media is intent on “finding” and propagating their own “big”stories. By now, the American public is well aware of the media’s ploy and its well rehearsed voices. We remain largely unreceptive to media hype, due partly to the attitude of such undermining forums as You-Tube, The Onion and The Daily Show. Besides, we simultaneously generate our own responses on-line, through our cell phones, and in a hundred other ways below the radar of polling.

In other words, to the frustration of pollsters and marketeers, we are writing our own stories. And creating images, adding voices, music and moving pictures to them. And have been for some time. There is, for sure, a great amount of superficiality and narcissism in the practice of endless blogging, flickering and MySpace life. And, while there has been ridicule of on-line life, there has been less critical insight into it and consideration of how to improve its quality.

The Obama campaign realized something about the Internet and the people who use it. Let’s say his election allowed for the engagement of something private for users (and not only for those on the Internet). If September 11, 2001 put the stakes of the country on the line and internationalized the role of the United States for a generation, voting on November 4, 2008 involved individualized reflective thought and decision making. It does not matter that, in the end, the breakdown of votes was 54% - 46%. In every case, overnight, who you are and how you voted became not just a demographic but a personal commentary on age, race, and, oh yes, a new political reality. It also became part of the stakes in the future.

Back to the arts. I am thinking that our newly realized subjectivity and ability to, if not transcend, at least address matters of race and generational change will contribute to the assertion of the significance of our lives and stories as lived. We may become skeptical of heroes, epics, and ridiculous spectacles where puny men in capes, masks, or pirate garb assail Evil Villains Intent on World Domination. As a culture, we are already past prime time homogenization and blockbuster enticements. Movies may make millions of dollars, but their appeal is to selected audiences. Besides, no one is fooled by the fact that commercial success is equal to artistic accomplishment.

Overall, rather than accepting the gross imagery of previous cultural conceptions and mediated stereotyping of ourselves as Americas, we might be in a place to acknowledged the complexity of our stories and the ways we tell them. You know, from the mid-1990s, the books most Americans read were memoirs and autobiographies, as if the need for stories about ourselves– usually equal parts tale of disaster and triumph – were part of our collective desire.

In the arts, for some time, grand, culturally symbolic, dominating artists, artwork or projects (visual, performative, musical, literary) have not resonated in American life. In the post-art world after Pollack and Warhol, Cage, minimalists and post-minimalists, interculturalists and technoartists, we live – wondrously – in a time of extraordinary artistic diversity, with great richness and complexity everywhere. Anyone who pays attention to the arts today knows this. We are in a period where there is art in everyday life, even though we have not figured out how to experience and talk about it on its own terms.

Moreover, the great art of the past and that of those living around the world are instantly accessible. But, more significantly, so, too, are artists living next door to us, who show their work in galleries downtown, who live and create in our midst – as they always have. It is their stories and their ways of representing them that should be sought out and explored. Instead of considering contemporary artists’ work and ideas on the scale of Great Art or in terms of some inherited or propagated theory of “symbolic meaning,” it could be time to regard artists as storytellers – and image makers, performers, poets, musicians, technologolists, researchers, thinkers, eco- and social artists – who have a lot common with us and whose work can be the basis of what we say to each other. As we share narratives about ourselves, and the work of artists, who we should personally talk with without self-interested intermediaries - the conversation can only get better.

Why not? We already have seen what telling stories can do to change our history.