Climate change art
Climate change art is art inspired by climate change and global warming, generally intended to overcome humans' hardwired tendency to value personal experience over data and to disengage from data-based representations by making the data "vivid and accessible". One goal of climate change art is to "raise awareness of the crisis", as well as engage viewers politically and environmentally.
Some climate change art involves community involvement with the environment. Other approaches involve revealing socio-political concerns through their various artistic forms, such as painting, video, photography, sound and films. These works are intended to encourage viewers to reflect on their daily actions "in a socially responsible manner to preserve and protect the planet".
Climate change art is created both by scientists and by non-scientist artists. The field overlaps with data art.
History
The Guardian reported that in response to a backlash in the 1990s against fossil fuels and nuclear plants, major energy companies stepped up their philanthropic giving, including to arts organizations, "to a point where many major national institutions were on the payroll of the fossil fuel giants," effectively silencing many environmentally-focused artists.In 2005 Bill McKibben wrote an article, What the Warming World Needs Now Is Art, Sweet Art that argued that "An intellectual understanding of the scientific facts was not enough – if we wanted to move forward and effect meaningful change, we needed to engage the other side of our brains. We needed to approach the problem with our imagination. And the people best suited to help us do that, he believed, were the artists." According to climate change in the arts organization The Arctic Cycle, "It took some time for artists to heed the call."
In 2009 The Guardian reported that the art world was "waking up to climate-change art." Reporting on the 2020 We Make Tomorrow conference on climate change and the arts in London, Artnet News commented that "instead of being seduced by sponsorships from deep-pocketed organizations invested in the fossil-fuel industry, institutions should look for new funding models."
Effects and influence
Representation and interpretation
According to Artnet News, climate change can be represented meaningfully through art because "Art has a way of getting ahead of the general discourse because it can convey information in novel ways." Climate change artworks differ in how they are interpreted by and how they impact the viewer. Laura Kim Sommer and Christian Andreas Klöckner conducted a survey of attendees of the Parisian art festival ArtCOP21 in 2015 regarding 37 artworks within the festival. The responses led Sommer and Klöckner's research to develop four characterizations of the works of art in terms of their content and the responses of the viewers to the artworks. The first categorization was labeled "the comforting utopia", which meant that the artwork had given off positive emotions but did not inspire people to enact positive climate action. The second categorization was labeled "the challenging dystopia", which meant that the artwork had given off negative emotions and greatly inspired climate nonaction. The third categorization was labeled "the mediocre mythology", which meant that the artwork had given off neutral emotions and did not inspire people to enact positive climate action.The final categorization was labeled "the awesome solution", which meant that the work of art had given off both positive and negative emotions but inspired people to enact positive climate action. The data collected by Sommer and Klöckner was categorized by them in 2019 into different psychological characteristics and connected these to functions of the brain to see where various emotions were triggered from observing the art and concluded that works of art that were not in "the challenging dystopia" category were generally more likely to leave audiences open to positive climate action, with "the awesome solution" works of art being the most likely of all the categories to inspire positive climate action.
Journalist Betsy Mason wrote in Knowable that humans are visual creatures by nature, absorbing information in graphic form that would elude them in words, adding that bad visuals can impair public understanding of science. Similarly, Bang Wong, creative director of MIT's Broad Institute, stated that visualizations can reveal patterns, trends, and connections in data that are difficult or impossible to find any other way.
In particular, climate change art has been used both to make scientific data more accessible to non-scientists and to express people's fears. Some research indicates that climate change art is not particularly effective in changing peoples views, though art with a "hopeful" message gives people ideas for change. Projecting a positive message, climate scientist Ed Hawkins said that "infiltrating popular culture is a means of triggering a change of attitude that will lead to mass action".
Students who are taught means to illustrate the concepts of global warming expressed through art can show greater learning gains than by learning the scientific basis alone. This was illustrated by a study conducted at a public high school in Portugal by Julia Bentz in 2018 and 2019. In this study, 70 high school students between the ages of 16 and 18 undertook two separate projects relating to arts and global warming. The first art project involved the students finding a small but impactful change in their lives that leads to positive global warming change and sticking to it for 30 days, where the data they collected was reflected in various group discussions and individual writing and art projects. The second art project involved the students reading global warming-focused short stories then discussing their takeaways in group discussions and producing art projects focused on specific topics concerning what they discussed. Bentz took first-hand observations of all of the various group and individual discussions & assignments and transmuted them into analytic memos that suggested that the above projects be used by teachers to more positively engage their students more effectively about global warming than a more fear-based approach.
Eva Amsen, writing in Forbes Magazine in 2019, argued that people who engage with climate change art feel a sense of belonging, a feeling of connection to a cause, and a sense of empowerment. Participatory climate change art, such as downloading warming stripes graphics for one's own locality or using a climate-related logo, provides an interactive element that gets people involved.
Lucia Pietroiusti, the curator of "general ecology" at the Serpentine Galleries, suggested "a radical redefinition of what constitutes an artwork...to include environmental campaigns," saying that "By calling something an artwork, you are allowing an institution to support it."
Expansion of formats
In recent years, the expansion of climate change art beyond purely visual representations has allowed for an expansion of audiences able to appreciate and experience this art, specifically those who experience Visual impairment. These musical forms of climate change art include pieces performed using environmental media to represent climate change and popular music whose lyrical aspects address climate change topics. Climate change composer Daniel Crawford said that "climate scientists have a standard toolbox to communicate their data, and what we are trying to do is to add to that another tool to that toolbox to people who might get more out of this than maps graphs and numbers". In the performing arts, there has been an increasing number of stage productions related to climate change, such as those performed by the global movement, Climate Change Theatre Action.A 2022 survey article published in Music and Science noted that music was already being written and performed to address the climate crisis, but said that music psychology research had not addressed that question directly. The article said that there is "strong evidence" for the power of music "to change listeners' and performers' emotions, moods, thoughts, levels of empathy, and beliefs", and urged further research.