Can Art Really Change The World?

Can Art Really Change The World? 

Sure it can define cultures and be aesthetically pleasing but can it create any real world change? The short answer is yes, through arts activism. 

The pamphlet “Why Artistic Activism?” by the Center for Artistic Activism defines this as “a dynamic practice combining the creative power of the arts to move us emotionally with the strategic planning of activism necessary to bring about social change.” To see how this works, let me break this up into the planning of activism and power of the arts. 

The Planning of Activism

Bill Moyer in his book “Doing Democracy: The MAP Model for Organizing Social Movements” describes four different roles of activists: the rebel, change maker, citizen, and reformer. The rebel forces society to face its problems by showing how institutions and powerholders violate public trust by dramatic and nonviolent measures. Traditional theatre, meaning performance as “deliberate enactments of a phenomenon, emotion, or story for the public domain” (Theatre, Activism, Subjectivity), fits into this role perfectly. As I will elaborate on in the next section, it does this by rasing awareness about issues both current and historical and building empathy towards others in the community. The reason that I specified the type of theatre that fits into this role is that Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed would fit more into the change agent role. By putting the spectator in the protagonist's role and making the spectator change the dramatic action, try out solutions, and discus plans for change, it promotes citizen-based action in the broader society and can promote a paradigm shift, which is the role of the change agent. A similar thing happens in what Jill Dolan calls the “Utopian Performance”. She argues that “theatre and performance create citizens and engage democracy as a participatory forum in which ideas and possibilities for social equity and justice are shared”. Viewing theatre under this philosophy could put it under either of the roles that I have mentioned. That still does leave two roles unaccounted for, the citizen and reformer, and social movements require all four roles in order to be successful. The citizens in this case is the audience members or spectators of the performance, as they are the ones who will be able to demonstrate a democratic society and vote on the change. The reformer is the only one that the arts does not traditionally have, as their role includes working with official political and judicial structures to create and expand new laws and policies. The theatre, with three out of the four roles needed to advance social movements, can be the catalyst for change if we let it.

The Power of Art

The emotional movement of art is used to educate people through consciousness rasing and building empathy and intimacy with a community. 

In chapter five, of “Theatre, Activism, Subjectivity: Finding The Left In A Fragmented World”, Adrian Kear makes the argument that art shows the political by showing past historical events onstage. The argument takes from Bertolt Brecht and his argument that theatre should “make the audience realize that what it sees on the stage is merely an account of past events that it should watch with critical detachment” (Britannica). Kear goes on to say that history being put onstage can act as the art of interruption, interpreting everyday experiences of history and showing the continuity of social conventions and ideological information. He speaks of this phenomenon happening in Hamilton, and I would also like to include other examples such as Suffs: the musical, Newsies, and - especially when done in the United States in the modern day - Cabaret. 

Consciousness raising through art isnt just limited to the stage. As T.V. Reed discusses in “The Art of Protest”, the feminist movement used poetry to “give a name to the ‘nameless’ forms of oppression” felt in women’s personal lives. Poetry made the subjective objective by giving personal experience an outward form. It helped change what people thought of as political and made people understand that “the personal is political”. AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) raised public consciousness about AIDS by theatrical public demonstrations, such as “Die-ins”, and campy humour, such as “republican drag”, to spread awareness about AIDS. They also had a slew of flyers, artwork, and slogans, like the infamous “Silence=Death”, to accomplish this. Elizabeth Rodriguez Fielder spoke about how the Council of Federated Organizations held a mock election with real campaigns and real ballots to upend the misconception that black people in Mississippi were uninterested in voting and show how the voting registration process was racist. These all work because arts activism makes the information more accessible to the masses and is often more effective than direct forms of political communication. It’s one thing to read manifestos and listen to political debates, and another thing entirely to peek into someone else’s life and their struggles with sexism or see chalk outlines and “dead” bodies at a die-in of those who might die from AIDS. Art can force you to look at the problem that everyone else is avoiding in ways that don’t require much language or background knowledge of policies and new terminology and can connect us to issues on a more human level. 

That brings us to the topic of building empathy and intimacy. “The Revolution Will Be Improvised” speaks of intimacy-making. By placing communities in dialogue with each other, we can redefine how people relate to themselves and each other. An example of how art can do this is through improvisation. In a similar fashion to Theatre of the Oppressed, when a group of people play improv games, they can “prepare themselves for the inevitable conflicts, ruptures, obstacles, and disappointments that occur in human interactions.” 

Building empathy through art is most well seen through children’s media, such as Sesame Street, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, and, most recently, Ms. Rachel. These shows, whether intentionally or not, used Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) to teach simple lessons to children. SEL in the most basic of definitions, is teaching by grounding the lessons in ethics, for example, relating the topic taught to a story of some kind. In the same way that Sesame Street taught us to be a good friend and gave us a look into other cultures, art aimed at adults can serve the same purpose, often even using the same methods to do so. 

Refrences 

Accurso, Rachel. “Ms Rachel - Toddler Learning Videos.” YouTube, YouTube, www.youtube.com/@msrachel. Accessed 10 Sept. 2025. 

Augusto Boal. Theatre of the Oppressed. 1979. Pluto Press, 2019.

Cooney, Joan Ganz, and Lloyd Morrisett. Sesame Street, performance by Jim Henson, PBS, 1969. 

Dolan, Jill. “Performance, Utopia, and the ‘Utopian Performative.’” Theatre Journal, vol. 53, no. 3, 2001, pp. 455–79, https://doi.org/10.1353/tj.2001.0068.

Dutt, Bishnupriya, and Silvija Jestrovic. Theatre, Activism, Subjectivity. Manchester University Press, 2024.

Elizabeth Rodriguez Fielder. The Revolution Will Be Improvised. University of Michigan Press, 2024.

Masteroff, Joe. “Cabaret.” 1966. 

Menken, Alan, et al. “Newsies.” 2011. 

Miranda, Lin-Manuel. “Hamilton.” 2015. 

Moyer, Bill. Doing Democracy: The MAP Model for Organizing Social Movements. New Society Publishers, 2001.

Rodgers, Fred. Mister Rodgers’ Neighborhood, 1968. 

Taub, Shaina. “Suffs The Musical.” 2022. 

The Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica. “Bertolt Brecht.” Encyclopædia Britannica, 5 Apr. 2019, www.britannica.com/biography/Bertolt-Brecht.

Thomas Vernon Reed. The Art of Protest. U of Minnesota Press, 2005.

UNESCO. “What You Need to Know about Social and Emotional Learning.” Unesco.org, 2024, www.unesco.org/en/articles/what-you-need-know-about-social-and-emotional-learning.

Why Artistic Activism? The Center For Artistic Activism, 2018, c4aa.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/WhyArtisticActivism-designed-5-linear.pdf.