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Artist Joel Garcia asked the pointed question at last night’s Zócalo program, “What Is the Value of Art?” Put on in partnership with NeueHouse, KCRW, and Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, the program took place just days before Frieze Los Angeles—a week of art exhibitions, events, and big money—descends upon the city.

The panel spoke to a packed house at the ASU California Center. The conversation, moderated by curator Helen Molesworth, considered the long, entangled history of art and money in the West and what a decommodified art world might look like. They also interrogated the program’s premise—ideas of “value” and “art”—and found within it a space for curiosity and critical thinking.

Molesworth began by asking the panel to describe a formative work of art. For LAXART director Hamza Walker (who filled in at the last moment for his friend, CEO of Lucas Museum of Narrative Art Sandra Jackson-Dumont), it was the album covers that he encountered as a “young punk” in Baltimore. Artist and activist Andrea Bowers mentioned Judy Chicago’s “The Dinner Party,” which was on her mind because she recently learned more about the weekly potluck dinners the studio volunteers came to during the making of it. And Garcia, who is also a cultural organizer and co-founder of Meztli Projects, evoked the scene in Purple Rain where the camera pans in the crowd and you see the punks, the goths, and other folks coming together. “I want to be able to do that,” he said.

Hearing these examples, Molesworth observed that the panel was already opening up the traditional meaning of art: “It’s not ‘I went to the museum and saw Rothko and had to bow down.’ It’s being in community with others.”

This, of course, runs counter to the current media obsession with art that’s rooted in its market value. That connection isn’t new; art and money, Molesworth joked, have been in bed together in the West from their “Roman Catholic church marriage” onward. She turned to the panelists: Do you think the field is less tied to institutions and markets than it used to be? “What,” she asked, “is your hope meter at in this long game we’re playing with art? Because art really is a long game.”

“I want to believe it’s as-long-as-the-species-itself game,” Walker said. “We’ll continue to do it as long as we’re around. Market this, that, or the other. Good, bad, fact of life—I’m not bothered by it. It’s there. But it isn’t the end all, be all in any way whatsoever in terms of the gauge of the value.”

It isn’t about what’s being showcased at these art fairs, Garcia agreed, “it’s what’s on the outside of it.” He referenced the ’80s Chicano artist collective Asco who spoke of the unpopular in-between in the kinds of spaces where the “spotlight isn’t on [but] where a lot of the magic happens.”

Molesworth asked Bowers what she thought: “Do you see an increasing democratization of art or a decreasing democratization of art?”

Decreasing, said Bowers. “I see a decrease of democracy in general. I can’t separate art from capitalism. We’re stuck as artists and curators and directors in this f—ed up system.”

But there was a consensus among the panelists: if anyone can help change the current paradigm, it’s artists.

Illustration by Soobin Kim.

“We can create a new way of seeing things,” said Garcia. “We can create many worlds and where many worlds fit.” That’s why artists can take on the undefined and identify the gaps in systems and open them up in ways that aren’t rooted in white supremacy. Take the toppling of the Junipero Serra statue in Father Serra Park in downtown Los Angeles that Garcia witnessed firsthand. “Someone in policy may be so deep into it, they don’t see these points of intervention that artists can exploit,” he said.

What is it about art, Molesworth asked the panelists, that is so intertwined with justice and equity?

For Walker, what makes art so powerful is that it can mirror conditions, and by doing this, it can produce a “radical consciousness” of those conditions, if people let it. But rather than think about art in terms of solving social justice, he said that he finds it more useful to think about art as a space to ask questions: “Do I go to museums to look at art for solutions? To be honest in most cases, not necessarily,” he said. “I have to ask myself, what, if anything, am I looking for when I go to look at stuff? But there are those experiences that do inform me in terms of critical capacities, in terms of thinking that I don’t get through what I read in the newspaper.”

Art is not in the category of social justice, Bowers agreed; art is a category all its own. But as her passion and subject matter, she is constantly thinking through questions like, “how I can be of service, and what art can do?”

As the conversation came to an end, an audience member shared that when he first read the title of the event, money or commodification didn’t cross his mind. To him, the question was clear: “I thought of the value of art to people and improving society.”

Molesworth observed how, after an hour of conversation, that showed just how open to interpretation the value of art remains. It reminds us, she said, that one of the biggest “values” of art is that it gives us a “critical questioning relationship with those terms.” It’s important, she continued, to recognize that art plants seeds “not only of beauty and love but also of disrepair to break things that need to be broken and repair things that need to be repaired.”

That’s why art is “so valuable to all of us, and so crucial to all of us” she said, bringing the conversation to a close, because “it is so fungible.”

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All artists exist within a larger ecosystem of creativity. Artist Ward Shelley’s timeline-inspired paintings and prints of interrelated people, places, facts, and events visualize this ever-evolving cultural milieu on mylar. His subjects range from politics and the evolution of science fiction to downtown New York’s counter- and sub-cultures. These works are both complex and beautiful, but they are also unique in part because his gallery prices them based on the arduous, sometimes years-long research required to develop them. This pricing calculation is antithetical to most galleries and artists; typically, until an artist’s own market is truly established, the amount their work sells for is determined by its size.

Like the works themselves, Shelley is more interested in the ecosystem of the arts than in profit. He often makes multiple versions of a painting—and produces and sells editioned prints—as he continues to discover new connections and histories about his subjects. “Sharing information is the most important aspect of making art to me—at times I send hi-res image files of works to those who ask,” Shelley has explained. “I rely on the trust and honesty of friends and peers who ask for files, hoping they won’t turn around and sell the file to a company that will mass produce and sell prints without my knowledge … but I’m willing to take that risk, since I’m more concerned with sharing than selling the information and images I create.”

As an artist, art consultant, and director of the Patty Disney Center for Life and Work at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), my life and work revolve around not just art and its creation but also the economic sustainability of being a contemporary artist. For my colleagues and me, who essentially function as a career services office, that means acknowledging that artists of all disciplines—from music and film to fine and performing arts—enter the art world as entrepreneurs, working as their own managers. Each individual artist must design their own strategy to chart a path to their own definition of success. Some endlessly search for the nonexistent guidebook, while others use the journeys of artists before them as a guide. Most approach lifelong creative careers with endless curiosity and innovation, making it up as they go.

It can be tricky for emerging artists to ascribe monetary value to their work—and to balance the importance of its financial worth with a multitude of other personal, cultural, and creative values. There have been plenty of articles published on the production cost of Urs Fischer’s “You,” a 38-by-30-by-8-foot excavation of the foundation of Gavin Brown’s Enterprise gallery in New York in 2007—$250,000. What is its value, and how does one price (and sell) a hole in the ground? I can’t find the retail price, which isn’t surprising—partly because of the piece’s nature and partly because that’s how the art world works. Until a piece enters the secondary market, and especially if it’s being sold by one of the top 10 galleries, regular people probably won’t be able to find out what it costs. This is one of the reasons the largely unregulated art world appears to be elitist and opaque. That is changing slowly, and in part due to new technology: The online brokerage and search engine Artsy and other platforms make works and prices public and accessible to everyone, even though galleries can still choose not to list artwork prices on the platform.

“Work, Spend, Forget (Dissected Frog Polemic)” by Ward Shelley (2013). Courtesy of the artist and Pierogi Gallery, New York.

Art tends to make headlines beyond art publications only when the market determines astronomical and seemingly absurd monetary values. But in our line of work, we always keep in mind that the artists we’re training create work that has different kinds of value: in activism, decolonization, politics, privilege, gender disparities, identity, and so many other aspects of economics, sociology, and consciousness. And sometimes they bring value to the art world itself. David Hammons joined New York City street vendors to create his 1983 Bliz-aard Ball Sale, selling snowballs of various sizes to passersby. The work comments on the absurdity of the art market, questioning class, race, and capitalism. Today, art schools around the country teach Hammons and his work, which continues to push boundaries and make waves, as examples of both conceptual brilliance and biting societal critique.

Even as arts educators spend a great deal of time exploring how art reflects and refracts the issues of our time, many institutions still consider it unnecessary to educate students about how to actually make a living as an artist. They neglect practical skills such as marketing, budgeting, and communications. Yet artists all over—who have immediate, nearly free access to a global audience—need these skills, which allow them to take control of their sales and networking strategies. That, in turn, increases their visibility and the chance of securing a show, grant, fellowship, or residency anywhere in the world.

This is the arts ecosystem into which I am trying to prepare students to enter—one of opportunity, access, innovation, and excitement. My job is in part to help them feel prepared and confident to use the tools available to challenge the status quo and move the cultural needle forward.

Many of the students are teaching me in the process. In fall 2022, recent CalArts MFA graduate Eliot Burk, a composer, presented his final recital, Seven Strategies for Ending Music. The performance had several parts in several locations, and included volunteers destroying nearly 300 instruments, already in various states of disrepair. I was among the audience members watching as they dropped or hurled saxophones, guitars, clarinets, cellos, and other instruments over the campus balcony outside of CalArts’ Herb Alpert School of Music, to crash against the concrete slab below.

The piece critiqued the field of music as a whole and the human-object relationship that creates sound. I was strongly moved by the entire performance and happening; to me it was a beautiful sensory, meditative experience. But the loudest initial audience response emerged from assumptions surrounding the value of the instruments—the objects—rather than the intention of the project as a whole. But what if, rather than thinking of art and the people and objects that make it in terms of monetary value, we looked at this performance as just one part of a Ward Shelley ecosystem? An art world where we don’t deny that things—supplies, time, and higher education—cost money, but where we also recognize the value of creativity is fluid, subjective, and does not always translate to currency? That is an art world I want to help cultivate, and participate in.

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The event was convened in conversation with LA2050, an ongoing initiative by the Goldhirsh Foundation, which since 2013 has awarded grants to organizations working to make progress on the question “what does it mean to make Los Angeles the best place to connect, create, learn, live, and play?”

In the past, the Goldhirsh Foundation has awarded these grants based on a public survey that asks participants to choose between organizations. This year, the group has shifted its funding model and asked the public to vote not on specific organizations, but on the issues.

“It creates an opportunity to open up this conversation,” said Garcia, who urged the audience to participate in the survey, and to think carefully about what the real needs driving these issues are.

For example, youth development, which, as Garcia pointed out, is classically thought of as supporting young people through tutoring or sports activities: “Here’s an after-school program, go play basketball. And that was it,” he said. But youth development touches on so much more, he said, gesturing to panelist Gloria Gonzalez, the youth development coordinator at Youth Justice Coalition, an organization working to challenge race, gender, and class inequality in the Los Angeles youth incarceration system.

Gonzalez and leaders of other like-minded organizations across the city and the county regularly work with young people who are the most vulnerable to the policies and practices that funnel students out of the school system and straight into jails or prisons—and she spoke about the issues they face and how to help them the most.

Today, in L.A. County, it costs taxpayers around $800,000 to $850,000 to pay for a year of juvenile detention for one person. That money, Gonzalez suggested, could instead go to community organizations who are working to help improve the situations of these young adults through jobs and housing. “There are no dollars that are being shifted from probation to support young people to excel in life,” said Gonzalez. Her task? “[H]olding the folks in power in these elected positions to look at what the community needs and what the young people need.”

The panel unpacked other major issues that Angelenos are passionate about, such as public parks. Garcia asked the panelists: “For folks listening, what should they consider when supporting organizations that are about green space?”

Sissy Trinh, founder and executive director of the Southeast Asian Community Alliance, said that when it comes to parks and green spaces, the question we need to be thinking about is: “How do we create humane places that provide opportunities for everybody for a diverse set of uses?”

That might mean shading and seating for the elderly. Or public programming for people who can’t afford it. For houseless residents, Trinh added, two of the biggest things they ask for—besides clean bathrooms—are water fountains and charging stations for cell phones (if they need to reach their social worker or if they’re on a list to get housing, a cellphone is a lifeline). “There are all of these different things parks can do,” she said.

Alpine Recreation Center in Chinatown is a great example. During the peak of the pandemic, she said, it became a site for distributing vaccines and personal protective equipment such as masks, and for offering COVID testing. It also functioned as a homeless shelter that distributed food. “Parks can be amazing spaces that bring together community, that bring together health and environmental justice and economic justice, and but often times they’re just spaces for over-policing,” said Trinh, who said that a lot of her organization’s work is around green gentrification, which often results in spaces being managed, operated, and used ways that over-polices people of color, houseless residents and street vendors.

The panelists agreed that over-policing is an epidemic in Los Angeles, and argued for reframing the conversation about community safety—“always parallel to policing,” Garcia said—to one about community wellness, in which residents have safe and healthy opportunities to “go out and do the things they need to do to be OK,” as Garcia put it. Gonzalez suggested that one way to achieve community wellness is to invest in peacebuilders—trusted people in the community who receive training “to support and uplift the community and uphold safety that doesn’t involve the over-policing which we see happening.”

The panelists also responded to questions from viewers watching live on YouTube. One wanted to know: “Is LA County too big to implement some of these broad-based solutions to these issues? Do the solutions need to be localized?”

“All three of us would say L.A. isn’t too big to implement some of these broad-based issues,” said Garcia.

California, Trinh noted, has the fifth biggest economy in the world, and it currently has a budget surplus. “It isn’t that we don’t have enough resources, it’s just how we’re utilizing them,” she argued.

Before wrapping up the conversation, Garcia asked the panelists to discuss how people watching could take action now. “Besides voting for these issues, what are things they should be aware of for housing, youth development, education, green space?”

Gonzalez suggested that viewers do some research to find which issues align with what they feel most passionate about. “Every organization is different and the services that they provide, and the atmosphere and resources are very different,” she said. Conversely, every person has their own skills, relationships, and connections they can bring to an organization that make an impact. 

Getting involved with an organization shouldn’t be a one-time deal. Using the analogy of working out, Trinh pointed out, you can’t jog once and expect to be in shape. You have to be consistent. “A lot of time people go in they want to do one big splashy event and they’re done,” she said.

That’s not how social justice works. But for those with limited time, getting involved doesn’t have to demand a big and splashy effort—it could be something small, like 15 minutes a day, Trinh added—everything from donating, to reading to “yelling at your elected officials.”

Vote here now for the issues that matter most to you. 

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Nurse, currently the founding director and CEO of the Francis Crick Institute, visited Zócalo yesterday with Caltech developmental biologist Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz, author of The Dance of Life, for a conversation that reflected on his scientific and philosophical insights into human life throughout his career as a geneticist. The Zócalo/Caltech event touched on the similarities between artists and scientists, the prospects for curing cancer, and Nurse’s startling discovery of his own genetic history. The scientists also reflected on striking similarities between their professional and personal lives.

Nurse recalled his initial interest in natural history in his youth, when observing butterflies spurred him to question the differences between living and nonliving things. He later recognized that cellular reproduction lay at the core of that question, and that its simplest instances promised to shed light on the mechanisms behind human life. Leland Hartwell, who was studying genetic methods for cell cycle studies to understand cancer, inspired Nurse to learn about yeast development and genetics.

“I wasn’t a geneticist at that time, and I wasn’t working on yeast at that time, but I decided I would learn both of those things,” Nurse said, recalling that the line of research wasn’t highly regarded by other scientists back then. Still, he decided it would be more fulfilling to investigate an important but under-studied area than to focus on a topic already receiving heavy attention.

That choice eventually resulted in a Nobel Prize in 2001, which Nurse shared with Hartwell and biochemist and molecular physiologist Tim Hunt. Their discovery of protein molecules that control cell division in yeast cells shed light on cell reproduction in general, and also had important implications for understanding the growth of cancer cells.

From Nurse’s work, the conversation turned to his personal genetic history as Nurse recalled growing up in a working-class household in Great Britain and being the first in his family to attend college. As an adult, when Nurse requested a complete copy of his birth certificate for a visa to the United States, the document revealed to him that his sister was, in fact, his mother, and his father was unknown. It was a deeply ironic revelation for the geneticist, who described having to reorganize his personal understanding of his entire family tree.

Zernicka-Goetz also asked Nurse about his view that “the best research is both intensely individual and utterly communal.” Researchers are often driven by personal motivations for success and their own interests, but support from one’s broader community is equally essential, Nurse explained. He stressed the importance of finding a balance between respect for individuals’ work, and for the communal support that enables their contributions to scientific research. It was this philosophy that led Nurse to step into a role outside of the lab as director general of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund (now Cancer Research UK), in 1996.

Over the course of the conversation, the scientists constantly returned to the links and similarities between artists and scientists, and the importance of creative thinking to academic research. Creativity, they agreed, drives ideas. By putting certain ideas or concepts that don’t normally go together, “they produce something else that’s different and new,” said Nurse, adding that it’s “the juxtaposition that’s interesting.” Often, Nurse said, scientists can get stuck on the same track. But by embracing creativity, he said, it fosters the ability “to change your mind and think of things in a different way.”

During an audience question-and-answer session, one person over the live YouTube chat circled back to the question driving the event: What is the meaning of life?

“I don’t know what the meaning of life is,” Nurse prefaced, but remarked on the meaning individuals can find in supporting their family, friends, and colleagues. He also offered a broader perspective:

“On a bigger scale, the meaning of life, whilst you’re on the planet, is to try and improve the lot of humankind. That may be through some intellectual discovery, it may be entirely local, it may be by producing some wonderful piece of art, it may be by political leadership in some sense, but it has to be aimed at improving the lot of humanity—whether small or big—in whatever arena you can be most effective.”

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Einstein and his brain are iconic objects—a sacred scientific hero and a sacred relic––but thinking differently about him now can help us revise outdated ideas about genius and about ourselves. There are several reasons to question Einstein’s genius: First, the very idea of “genius” has come under critical scrutiny in contemporary research on creativity. Second, a new view of the social basis of creativity has emerged in the last quarter century; new ideas are created in social networks, not in individuals or individual brains. Third, the idea of a biological brain is being superseded by a new paradigm that sees the brain in a social context. It has become increasingly clear in the life and social sciences that humans are the most social of the social species. We can now say with some confidence that the “I” is a grammatical illusion. We all, as Walt Whitman claimed in Song for Myself, contain multiples; the self is a mosaic, not a unitary ego, in a scientific sense as well as a poetic one.

This doesn’t challenge the uniqueness of Einstein and his achievements but it does change our understanding of that uniqueness.

When we identify Einstein as a genius, we learn more about ourselves and our culture than we do about Einstein. The term “genius” rests on the concept of the individual as an entity that stands apart from society, history, and culture—even outside of time and space. Culturally, genius is also gendered and divinely inspired—so to meet a genius is to meet a male god. The element of the male divine spins the genius right out of the world into a sacred space. It sets Einstein and his brain apart from the rest of us.

In the real world, there is no such thing as the lone wolf genius. Every genius, like every person, is a social network. And every genius stands on the shoulders of a social network, not the shoulders of giants. For the commonly accepted concept of “genius” to be meaningful it would have to be rooted in genes, neurons, or both. In that case, geniuses would appear at random and scattered across intellectual and cultural landscapes. On the contrary, the most comprehensive studies of genius by social scientists have demonstrated that geniuses do not appear at random. Instead, genius clusters.

The fact that creative acts and actors cluster was recognized in the ancient world. Modern research shows that creative clusters appear predictably during times of rapid decline or rapid growth within civilizations. We also know that new ideas, theories, and technologies emerge simultaneously in different places in the same cultural neighborhoods and share a family resemblance. The particular version that prevails and the person or persons who get credit for the innovation hinges on negotiation, politics, public relations, personalities, connections, and in some cases (take, for example, the electrical engineer Nikola Tesla) the outcomes of patent disputes.

The notion that Einstein’s “own thoughts,” were responsible for his insights into gravity waves ignores his collaborations with Michele Besso and Michael Grossman during the construction of the general theory. It was Grossman, for example, who helped Einstein with the geometry and the concept of tensors he needed to formalize the theory. In the same way, the portrait of Einstein as a lone wolf patent clerk who published the revolutionary 1905 papers leaves out a network of his influences—from Newton to Lorentz, and Poincaré to Minkowski. It also obscures the roles of his friends, teachers, and colleagues in physics, of his first wife Mileva Marić, and his math assistant Walther Mayer.

The important point is not that Einstein worked with and depended on others. It is that Einstein is those others—they are embodied in his self as a social network. When you understand all the people who went into Einstein being Einstein, does the label “genius” really help us understand him or is it merely a representation of untutored awe and worship?

What did Einstein’s genius cluster look like? Einstein’s 1905 papers came in the midst of a cultural flowering of ideas, inventions, and discoveries across the full spectrum of the arts, humanities, and sciences between 1840 and 1930. Einstein’s genius cluster in physics included such luminaries as Planck, Tesla, Marconi, Westinghouse, Madame Curie, the Wright Brothers, Emmy Noether, and Edison. The two great innovations in physics that would remain at the core of physics throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century—relativity theory and quantum mechanics—were born in the early 1900s.

Expanding that genius cluster to encompass music brings in such names as Sibelius, Puccini, DeBussey, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and Charles Ives. Innovations in literature include the rise of the novel, American Transcendentalism, Realism, Stream of Consciousness, various forms of Modernism, Naturalism, the growth of children’s literature, and the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. There was a sympathetic mutuality that linked Cubism (represented by Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” 1907) and Relativity Theory. Both involved challenges to conventions regarding absolute time and space.

The period 1840-1930 also witnessed a veritable Copernican revolution, the emergence and crystallization of the social sciences. This period can be considered the classic Age of the Social. It ushered in the idea that we are through and through social beings.

Ultimately, by looking at the myth of Einstein’s brain, we can understand how the myth of individualism is at odds with the evolutionary reality that humans are always, already, and everywhere social. Einstein’s singular status is not a matter of genes, neurons, quantum phenomena, or the biological brain; the architecture of his brain reflected his experiences in the world, all of the social networks he encountered in his life. Since the1990s, developments in social neuroscience, studies of brain plasticity, epigenetics, and network theory have fueled the development of an explanation for Einstein’s genius—a social brain paradigm.

The idea that we have social brains arose from hypotheses about the connection between brain size and social complexity. Beginning in the 1920s and then more systematically in the 1950s, these hypotheses were explored in studies of non-human primates. Two conflicting hypotheses fueled this research: larger brains led to larger and more dense social networks; or larger and more dense social networks led to larger brains. Over time, it seemed more reasonable to hypothesize that brain size, and the size and density of social networks, were coupled in co-evolution.

All of this led to the crystallization of the social brain hypothesis, which entered the neuroscience literature in 1990. This hypothesis initially identified specific regions of the brain (including, for example, the amygdala and the insula) as “the social brain.” More recent studies suggest that the whole brain must be considered a social and cultural entity. In other words, the brain is a complex organ that originates and functions at the nexus of biological, environmental, and social forces. By the 2000s, the social brain hypothesis was finding its way into studies of autism, schizophrenia, and other classic topics in psychiatry.

The story of pathologist Thomas Harvey removing Einstein’s brain during the autopsy in 1955 is well known. However, there were no studies of Harvey’s brain slides between 1955 and 1985, and those done between 1985 and the early 2000s proved, in the end, to be sterile. The noteworthy features of Einstein’s brain some researchers identified were controversial, and many experts who studied Einstein’s brain found nothing unusual. One brain scientist said it was just an old, diseased brain. These studies were guided by the false assumption that the mind is the brain, and by an inability to “see” social life as the locus of causal forces that shape our behaviors, emotions, and thoughts.

And yet, the myth that we are our brains lives on in science, politics, and the culture. It is the basis for Bush’s proclamation of the 1990s as the Decade of the Brain, Obama’s 2013 BRAIN initiative, and comparable policy pronouncements in Europe, the Middle East, and China. Brain research remains haunted by the myth of individualism, which is at its root the myth of the brain in a vat. (The Matrix is an artistic gloss on this metaphor.) The social brain, though, proposes a far more powerful concept: Network thinking, which is capable of connecting the smallest parts, such as neurons, across multiple scales to the global network of information and communication. Don’t think of a brain in a vat, but of a connectome—in which everything from cells and neurons to neural nets, to the body, its microbiome and its organs, and to social relations and the environment are linked by a circulation of information.

It’s been 65 years since Einstein’s brain was removed during the autopsy and still the most insightful discussion of it was found not in the halls of science and philosophy, but in TV land. On July 21, 1999, David Letterman audience members were allowed to ask questions of “Einstein’s brain,” a model brain in a beaker of green gelatin. After they presented their questions, they were told that due to Einstein’s death in 1955, they were addressing dead tissue, which could not answer. This comedic vignette did more for neuroscience than all of the papers and lectures on Einstein’s brain.

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But the way that we organize our scientific research is bafflingly tribal. As a practicing scientist who has moved through large-scale industrial projects at IBM and Hitachi, as well as small-scale spin-outs, before shifting back into academia in the late 1990s, I have long been puzzled myself.

From outside the world of science, the public might imagine a system in which someone directs this enterprise, suggests what science is most important for society, and outlines what ought to get done. After all, the public pays for it, whether through our purchases, our taxes, or our charity. But this is not what happens. And ultimately, the public understands very little of the process.

A clearer sense of the greater science ecosystem is required to figure out what role science should play and how society can best make that happen. Who gets to do research in the 21st century, and why? How has it changed over time? Is science in good shape, and how can we know? When I started asking these questions I realized there’s a lot that even scientists still don’t know about themselves.

Amazingly, science is still generally “bottom-up.” We choose what research to do by encouraging scientists at universities to suggest ideas. They share these confidentially with a number of colleagues who rank them formally and select a few to fund. Much of the funding comes from taxes, and governments pass the responsibility back to the panels of scientist to decide which of their colleagues to invest these public monies in.

Scientists have long emphasized that freedom to decide what science they do is much more likely to give long-term rewards for the society that funds them. “Choose outstanding people and give them intellectual freedom” emphasized Nobel Prize winner Max Perutz as his key principle in running the enormously successful and vital Lab of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. Yet, non-anecdotal evidence supporting this argument can be hard to pin down.

A review of Nobel Prize winners in the last half-century does reveal that most had no idea what they would accomplish, and could only articulate the path that their achievements had taken many years later, in hindsight. The molecular-based light emitters that now give sparkling mobile phone screens were undreamt of by Alan Heeger, who attempted to make unpromising plastic films conduct electricity in the late 1970s. Similarly, DNA pioneers Crick and Watson just wanted to understand the structure of DNA, not to use that knowledge to fix genetic diseases or do mass screenings of cancers.

In many countries, science is strongly believed to be directly useful to society. But once again, clear economic benefit is hard to assess. Science research comes from different locations, from the industry-dominated United States (80 percent of scientists in industry) to university-dominated Spain (less than 30 percent). A common saying is that “the best form of technology transfer is the moving van that transports the Ph.D. from his or her university laboratory to a new job in industry.” In reality, the United States is littered with university technology-transfer offices built on the dream of San Francisco’s Silicon Valley—or in the U.K., Silicon Fen around Cambridge. They are now waking up to portfolios of undramatic patents no one wants.

There is a great deal we simply don’t know about the scientific ecosystem today. Even counting how big the herd of scientists actually is and whether it is growing or shrinking, has been surprisingly difficult. While we collect simple data through yearly Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) government surveys, this hides the complexity of who is a scientist and what they really do.

Trying to square my personal experience of the intense world of science with these answers led me to the concept of an ecosystem of science. I realized that although there were myriad discussions between scientists on specific topics, there was no overarching description of how the whole system works and what the implications are. On the whole, collectively, science is useful, but how does that square with the parts?

In the ecosystem of science there are individuals and teams, but the ideas they build, and the bridges they build between ideas, can last much longer than either the individuals or the teams. Together this produces robust and persistent scientific knowledge, an interconnected library bequeathed to future generations. But the disjointed ways this library is added to, and how much as a society we are paying for each new idea, is hardly discussed. So, for the past few years, I have been investigating the idea of the “science ecosystem” and how all the actors within it create a meshed web of constraints and networks that are making change increasingly difficult.

I’ve found that the metaphor of the ecosystem can explain not just obvious outputs like delivering technology, but also the beauty of mathematical frameworks and the pleasure in understanding black holes. Such concepts correspond to “ecosystem services,” which are the non-tangible benefits freely emerging from a properly-functioning ecosystem. As a simple example, take a forest which gives us both trees for building houses (“ecosystem goods”) but also places to walk in peace and serenity (an “ecosystem service”). This perspective makes sense of important parts of the science ecosystem that have been harder to defend from a purely economic perspective.

Understanding ecosystem effects in science makes it easier to make sense of some conundrums. For example, it seems like globalization should be a good thing for science. It ought to lead to sharing information around the planet, pushing diverse teams to collaborate, and ensuring science spending is efficiently distributed to where it is done best. But that’s not exactly what has happened.

In the science ecosystem, powerful competitors rule, so organizations ranging from topical conferences to magazines never-endingly compete to maximize their impact and evolve. This pressure has unforeseen consequences.

Globalization has now racked up the competition among scientists, among disciplines, among funders, among universities, among research journals, and among every other species in this landscape. As scientists bring up increasing numbers of their intellectual children who want to find their own niches, the esteem that each gains from their research results necessarily declines. They all strive to publish more research papers, to be noticed in the crowd, making it more difficult to discern intellectual wheat from chaff and ever harder to keep up with what is being done.

Furthermore, doubling the number of scientists (which currently happens every 20 years) does not double the number of new research fields. Researchers instead concentrate where the trendy, most-publicized ideas are emerging. These bandwagon areas become so deluged that scientists lose track of competitors’ work, and research gets duplicated, ignored, or muddled. At present, this kind of frenzy surrounds areas ranging from the stacking of atom-thick materials, to finding uses for quantum effects in IT, and other topics. This explains why dropping extra money into a hot research field is no recipe for breakthroughs.

A second unforeseen consequence of globalization is how copying “best practices” in organizing science reduces the ecosystem’s diversity, ensuring the selection of similar projects everywhere. Applying for research funding involves a panel of scientists ranking proposals sent in to them based on scores returned by a set of external reviewers fed criteria about “utility for society” and “excellence.” More and more, they choose the same things.

I have become more and more convinced of the need for continual creative anarchy, for developing new ways of encouraging science, scientists, and ideas, and for new types of institutions and research centers. One current idea is to fund a new type of scientist, more akin to curators of the web of knowledge, who trawl and correlate existing studies to identify chasms in understanding and new opportunities. Future grants requests might have to have approval from such curator teams, aided by deep AI-based reviews of our current tree of knowledge to support claims for funding. Diversity is a crucial part of a healthy ecosystem, and the resilience of science depends on finding ways to encourage it.

When I started this project, my aim was simply to map what I found. But whenever I chatted with other scientists about it, apart from their fascination at their own lack of knowledge, they demanded suggestions for changes, directions for where we should go next. But we can’t instantly solve these global systemic problems. There remains the question of who is even free enough of the constraints on the ecosystem to help drive the necessary changes, let alone what those changes should be. But finding a way to understand the system as a whole—to comprehend where we stand at present—is a good first step.

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Outterbridge was born in 1933 in Greenville, North Carolina, where he saw and felt the effects of segregation and took in from his mother the need to “press on” despite racist oppression. He arrived in Los Angeles in 1963, two years before the Watts Riots. Anne Ellegood, senior curator at the Hammer Museum, explained recently how assemblage was part of that moment. For African-American artists, a practice that made profound meaning from what society had cast off was part of a general demand for recognition of under-served communities and unrecognized histories. Assemblage has a varied history—back to Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, at least, and including Robert Rauschenberg’s combines, Joseph Cornell’s boxes, and Edward Kienholz’s installations. Outterbridge is part of a prominent group of black artists—including Noah Purifoy, Betye Saar, John Riddle and Senga Nengudi—who nurtured their careers in Los Angeles and remained inter-connected as they rose to prominence. They brought a modernist genre into conversation with African-American heritage, which Angelenos were reminded of in “Now Dig This!” a group show of L.A. black artists active in the 1960s and ‘70s presented at the Hammer and part of 2012’s “Pacific Standard Time,” a multi-venue exploration of Los Angeles’ art scene.

Like several in that set, Outterbridge took his creative practice into arts education and organization as well as art-making. Centering these efforts in the South Los Angeles region, he cofounded the Compton Communicative Arts Academy in 1969. He was later director of the Watts Towers Art Center, housed next to Simon Rodia’s iconic Watts Towers—a mosaiced monument meticulously embellished with salvaged shells, tile and glass—and co-founded by Purifoy after the Watts Riots. Outterbridge worked there for 17 years. He lived the belief, as Ellegood put it, that “art has a social role and can actually change society.” Outterbridge’s assemblage is uniquely suited to this kind of change—since it is open to and valuing all. “Wherever I was,” he said, “anything was available and anything could be used and was used.”

It was a lesson that connected the evolving conditions of L.A. with Outterbridge’s earliest experiences. He learned as a boy the beauty of folk art and the aesthetic wisdom of everyday practices. “The rags that hung out to dry blew in the wind like colorful tapestries,” he remembered, “and I was touched by the perfect order that those rags had.” He treasured ad-hoc assemblage in his neighborhood like “the glass bottles in the trees that made music for me and my siblings.” Outterbridge’s father worked as a so-called “junk man” who would collect and resell discarded objects, so “John really grew up with that kind of ethos,” Ellegood said. “Things could always be re-used.”

The current show—called “Rag Man”—emphasizes how Outterbridge’s recent work, especially, looks back to these childhood lessons. A series called “Rag and Bag Idiom” reuses bits of textiles discarded by L.A. manufacturers—in brightly painted, abstract sculptures that seem more organic the more one looks. Other works are drawn from a series using dolls and reflecting on the way different cultural and religious traditions employ such objects. Curated by Ellegood and Jamillah James, the exhibition opened first at Art + Practice in Los Angeles and is on view this month at the Aspen Art Museum. While it’s not a retrospective, it demonstrates the continuities of Outterbridge’s long, steady career.

Assemblage makes that longevity an especial asset. Recollections are so many bits of material, too. “I put memories … away in pockets and places,” Outterbridge said. “I wrap things up and save them for a time they might be useful. That’s the nature and the practice and the process of assemblage.”

But that’s also, he added later, “what life is. We take it all in and we push it right back out in some other form.” For Outterbridge, his art is a creativity, a philosophy, a politics, an education—and “a celebration.” It’s “an affirmation of life.”

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