The Defiant Imagination: Why Culture Matters

Max Wyman has assembled a very exciting, informed and motivating guide to how art informs, assists, liberates, challenges and heals. On various scales of size, such as from the individual artist to larger performance groups and their support networks, through to the audience interface such as the promotors, facilities, finance and business issues.......just an explosion of motivation for the artist reading this document. I am a singer-songwriter aged 45 and find this insider information very valuable in it's ability to educate me on the art/culture interface where I seek to understand the audience and to meet them with a satisfactory result. Wyman's purpose in this book is to guide the reader through the information with the goal of getting to action and effect, and to avoid getting lost in ideals or abstractions. Even when he deals in the later chapters with issues like the roles taken or contemplated by the business of arts, the role of business as a supporter of the artistic mind in various ways and possible roles of government in supporting the arts, Wyman is there to open up the issue to give motivation to the minds, the dreams, the promotion of culture and building on our shared heritages. It's about dealing with the open mind and looking at opportunities, not in trying to lock in anyone's attitude. Wyman is not promoting a set list of opinions at all. He enlightens and activates conscious deliberation and educates, he's not pushing an agenda except in trying to make people consider how culture is kept healthy and why that makes a difference in our daily lives. This is a book with a wide-ranging grasp of the people, arts activities in daily life and the human mind in it's various modern environments, and it deals with promoting the reader's ability to see yourself as a vital component of the world around you. I HIGHLY recommend this book to every creative artist. It's not just for one or two artist groups. All artists would be more accomplished if they knew more about the arts world around them. All of it. It's a brilliant beacon of light. Buy it, use it, underline it, highlight it, dog-ear the pages, and buy another one for an artist of some kind you admire.