(music - bells)
- You can hear in artwork that something
really big is at stake.
You can hear this across nations, across continents.
- University of Chicago, it's a place
that takes art seriously.
- Constant intellectual interaction
between people in the department,
outside the building, in the supermarket.
(Wu Hung laughing)
- When we hold arts events, they tap
into the deep history and the theory of the arts.
You can think about the arts at the University of Chicago
as a grand experiment.
When you take that experiment
into the context of a different culture,
it feels extremely risky and you never know
what will come out of it, and that's
where the most exciting things happen.
(Enchanted music)
- When you look at any given week in the university's calendar,
we have artists from around the world
presenting, lecturing, performing.
- We have a responsibility to think carefully
about how particularly in the United States
our local contexts are always affecting
and affected by a world at large.
- COVID-19 does not carry a passport.
Global warming does not carry a passport.
So in light of these massive global difficulties,
the university calls on its citizens to be engaged.
- Art is something great for this
kind of global exchange or communication
because art is a kind of visual language,
so everybody can understand.
It's a moral issue.
And because you feel, humanity is a family.
It's a big family.
- And very often in the art world,
the relationship is one of extraction.
So we will take, but we don't give back.
- To have black, brown artists
from the global south be present,
speak to their own work to ensure that they are compensated
adequately for whatever work they bring
to the table and to ensure that they are
on board with how we will use
and engage this work as researchers.
- Collaborate, cooperate,
an ethics of belonging in the world
and responsibility to ourselves and our future.
- A number of our institutions
on campus are fundamentally committed
to cultivating and supporting exchanges
outside of the standard terms of exchange.
- At the Gray Center, we've had a speaking series
for the past year called "FarBar".
Every FarBar has been with someone
from a different part of the world
and engaging their work critically,
and also enabling them to bring it
to both our local audience in Chicago
but also our Zoom audience.
- You can't make sense of the world
and your own place in the world if you don't
have a sense and understanding of what's around you.
To get a sense, to make sense,
of what these people, these foods,
these cultural practices, are doing,
you have to go there, you have
to go get on a plane and go to these places.
- I want to be there in person,
right next to the human being that is hitting the drum.
I want to feel the vibrations in my body. Right there.
- What the university is good at
on the one hand is offering resources,
on the other hand is creating a kind of global space.
- From the south side of Chicago
to our international centers.
- London, in Paris, in Delhi, in Hong Kong, in Beijing.
- In Beijing, when the university was founding
the center, I said art had to be in it,
and should be in the center. (laughing)
So, actually they listened.
- The fact that you can have an idea
and then have not just the resources
but the space to even propose it, and to get it approved,
is really a privilege and an honor.
- The traffic between the cultures
that we visit and the artists that we bring
to campus has been enormously influential.
- There's a really great event that we did
in Hong Kong with the Chinese dissident poet Bei Dao.
He'd been prevented from doing public appearances
in China, to see hundreds of people turning up
to listen to this world-historical literary figure.
- Experiments don't always succeed,
and a true culture of experimentation
is one that not only one that welcomes failure,
but learns from it.
- How to push the boundary.
If you don't do that, then they'll never have new things.
Science, everything, you have to keep pushing this line,
you'll find what's on the other side.
- There's always a risk when you decide
to engage it and when you decide to take those
things seriously as being a site of knowledge production.
- Even when we disagree, we disagree out
of a spirit of generosity, and not a spirit
of negativity and critique.
Critique in the best way, not to be critical,
but to sort of help build something new.
- So it is, I think, our culture
of critique and reformulation,
and those reformulations produce better work,
better ideas, and ultimately, I think, better art.