Expressionist artist Barnett Newman ’ s famous 1947 essay The First Man was an Artist presents the primordial being as an artist . “ Man ’ s first expression , like his first dream , was an aesthetic one . Speech was a poetic outcry rather than a demand for communication . Original man , shouting his consonants , did so in yells of awe and anger at his tragic state , at his own self-awareness and at his own helplessness before the void .” In the next paragraph , Newman writes of art as power : “ Man ’ s first cry was a song . Man ’ s first address to a neighbor was a cry of power and solemn weakness , not a request for a drink of water .”

Art is an expression of our lives and therefore is inherently meaningful . Art has the power to both constrain and expand the meaning we give life . Artistic meanings interpret the void , the tragic state that Barnett Newman prefaces . But power is portrayed with a different mathematics outside of art . In politics , power is not just what X & Y mean , but also power is what X can do to Y or vice versa . Vocabularies of power , therefore , include both meaning-making and instrumental and transactional aspects of what humans do to each other . Seen this way , the meanings and instruments of art contain both negative and positive values . For example , art can include poetic expressions of freedom or fascistic expressions of grandeur . Giuseppe Verdi ’ s choruses from operas such as Nabucco and I Lombardi roused the Milanese masses to seek freedom from Austrian rule and helped with unification , or Resorgimento , in the mid-19 ^th century . Before World War II , Leni Reinfenstahl ’ s film Triumph of Will on Hitler ’ s created the grandeur of a ( narcissitic ) man and spectacular crowd scenes now often associated with fascism . Closer to our time , twenty-two years old Amanda Gorman ’ s poetry at President Jospeh Biden ’ s inauguration evoked cascades of history to evoke light , “ if only we ’ re brave enough to see it / If only we ’ re brave enough to be it .” Four years earlier , President Donald Trump evoked dark images of an American Carnage in the less-than-poetic words of his inaugural address .

Art is multivalenced , but at the core of that enterprise is the artist . Art is often thought of as the expression of one ’ s creativity , emotions , and experiences . No matter if one is the creator or consumer of art , there is an element of freedom or agency . The reality is that art and arts communities exist within societal , regulatory , and economic hierarchies . The hierarchies and power that impact art , and artists , include government structures , communication networks , educational restrictions , and financial infrastructure . How artists navigate within and ultimately impact these structures has lasting impacts on culture , expression , and institutions .

In this issue of Arts & International Affairs , the question of how power and hierarchy interact with art and arts communities is explored . Sometimes this interaction brings

1 doi : 10.18278 / aia . 5.2.1

Arts & International Affairs Volume 5, Number 2, Winter 2020/1 | Page 5