Barbara Sellers-Young’s “The Value of Arts in Higher Education,” presented in 2009 at the International Conference on Arts and Society in Venice, belongs to a recognizable moment in academic life: the years in which arts programs were repeatedly called upon to justify themselves in languages not originally their own. The arts were asked to explain whether they served the economy, whether they improved cognition, whether they contributed to innovation, whether they deserved institutional protection in a university increasingly attentive to measurable outcomes and market rationales. Sellers-Young does not refuse that demand. Nor does she capitulate to it. What makes this conference paper characteristic and consequential is the way it reorders the debate. It argues that the arts are not an ornamental supplement to higher education, nor merely a storehouse of civilizational prestige, nor only an engine of creative capital. They are, rather, a mode of inquiry that trains a distinctive intellectual disposition: the ability to hold “specificity with complexity,” to attend closely while thinking relationally, to move among embodied practice, historical understanding, cultural critique, and collaborative invention.
That formulation gathers many of Sellers-Young’s abiding concerns into an institutional argument. Across her work, she returns to the claim that movement and artistic practice are not secondary expressions of ideas formed elsewhere. They are themselves ways of knowing, of sensing pattern, of testing relation, of encountering the limits of one’s assumptions. In this paper, that larger philosophical position is translated into the language of higher education. The result is not a generic defense of the arts but a sophisticated attempt to show why universities misrecognize their own mission if they isolate art either in the realm of private feeling or in the realm of professional utility. What is at stake is the kind of mind a university forms, and therefore the kind of social and civic life it makes possible.
The essay begins with three epigraphs, already suggestive of its breadth. Norval Morrisseau’s “icons” focus “spiritual powers”; Anthony Gormley insists that art communicates “what it feels like to be alive”; Morris Dickstein names art as “amusement, but also contemplation,” “entertainment, but also insight.” These are not casual adornments. They frame art as mediation: between feeling and form, spiritual and social knowledge, pleasure and criticism. Sellers-Young’s argument proceeds from that premise. Art matters because it engages the whole human sensorium and because, in doing so, it activates reflection that cannot be reduced to text-bound analysis alone.
Dewey and Florida: not a choice, but a tension to be used
The paper’s central conceptual move is to place John Dewey and Richard Florida in productive relation. At first glance they represent incompatible vocabularies. Dewey’s Art as Experience provides a humanistic and democratic account of art as intensified perception, as inquiry grounded in lived experience, as the making of meaningful relation within ordinary life. Florida’s “creative class” thesis, by contrast, emerges from the late-capitalist discourse of innovation, entrepreneurship, urban revitalization, and knowledge work. Dewey belongs to a world “before the virtual age,” as Sellers-Young puts it, “when information was travelling via print media and sound via radio”; Florida to “the cyber world and related urban environment.”
Yet Sellers-Young refuses to reduce this difference to an opposition between noble humanism and compromised neoliberalism. She sees that each thinker identifies something the university cannot ignore. Dewey insists that the arts transform perception and therefore enlarge judgment, responsiveness, and democratic possibility. Florida, however problematic his framework may be, recognizes that capacities long associated with artistic practice—independent judgment, synthesis, comfort with multiplicity, invention across difference—have moved to the center of contemporary work. Creativity, in his formulation, is “an act of synthesis,” nourished by heterogeneous stimuli and by “cross-fertilization and mutual stimulation” among artistic, technological, and economic domains.
Sellers-Young’s intervention lies precisely here. She neither sacralizes the arts as immune from economic realities nor celebrates the market as the proper measure of artistic worth. Instead, she argues that universities should “unite the ideas of both Dewey and Florida.” The phrase is important. She is not merely balancing two external justifications. She is clarifying that the deepest educational value of the arts lies in capacities that are simultaneously humanistic and practical, democratic and innovative, inwardly transformative and publicly consequential. The arts train people to perceive more acutely, to recognize tacit assumptions, to negotiate ambiguity, to collaborate across differences in method and worldview, and to imagine multiple responses to problems that are at once social, technological, and cultural. Florida helps explain why such capacities have become institutionally legible; Dewey helps preserve their larger civic and experiential meaning.
In this sense, the paper is a subtle rebuttal to a false dilemma. If one defends the arts only in Deweyan language, one risks consigning them to enrichment, reflection, or “culture” in a university increasingly organized by instrumental logics. If one defends them only in Floridian language, one risks stripping them of critical force and subordinating them to market rhetorics that can praise “creativity” while narrowing the conditions of actual experimentation. Sellers-Young wants neither outcome. Her argument is not conciliatory in the weak sense. It is strategic and conceptual: the arts should be understood as the place where transformation and innovation meet.
From genre hierarchy to global imagination
The paper’s historical middle section broadens the argument beyond policy language. Sellers-Young sketches a shift from older classifications of art—“classic,” “ethnic,” “folk,” “popular”—to a more unstable, mediated, and globally interconnected field. Here the essay draws on Joann Kealiinohomoku’s famous insistence that ballet itself can be understood as “a form of Ethnic Dance,” a formulation that unsettles the presumed neutrality of European high art by revealing its own classed and culturally specific history. This is more than a familiar corrective. Within Sellers-Young’s argument, it serves to undo the notion that art forms are naturally bounded or hierarchically ordered. The categories through which universities have often organized artistic knowledge are themselves historical products.
This point matters because the paper is trying to describe the conditions under which contemporary arts education must operate. In Dewey’s period, Sellers-Young suggests, art was more readily aligned with stable traditions and social identities. In the present, such stability is under pressure from global flows of people, media, capital, and ideas. Appadurai’s account of “the imagination as a social practice” gives her a way to describe this new environment. The image, the imagined, the imaginary are no longer marginal to social life; they are central to how people understand places, peoples, values, and possibilities. The arts therefore cannot be treated solely as local inheritances or disciplinary specializations. They participate in transnational circuits of representation and exchange; they are implicated in what Appadurai terms ethnoscapes, technoscapes, financescapes, mediascapes, and ideoscapes.
For Sellers-Young, this does not mean abandoning specificity in favor of global fluidity. On the contrary, it makes specificity more necessary. If imagination now circulates through mediated and often stereotyped images, the arts become one of the few places where those images can be slowed down, embodied, tested, translated, and challenged. Here one sees the continuity with her wider scholarship on intercultural performance and Orientalism. Again and again, she is concerned with what happens when forms cross borders and are received through habits of projection. This paper recasts that concern as a pedagogical imperative. The arts in higher education matter because they provide disciplined environments in which students can confront the difference between image and lived complexity.
The university as a site of making and thinking
Sellers-Young’s account of the university is shaped by a dissatisfaction with inherited divisions between creation and analysis. She notes that the “fine arts like other academic units provide subjects for learning and ways to learn.” That sentence condenses the paper’s institutional intervention. The arts are not merely objects of scholarship, nor merely studios of expression. They are bodies of knowledge and methods of inquiry. Their value lies partly in the way they combine technical process, historical stewardship, and critical reflection.
This is why her description of arts education is notably dense. Students do not simply acquire skills; they learn “the technique and historical context of diverse creative processes.” They are asked to evaluate “not only their personal creative process but the practice of art in society.” Technique, history, theory, and social interpretation are “complex[ly] interweav[en].” The phrase matters because Sellers-Young has long resisted the idea that technique is neutral or detachable from consciousness. In this paper, that conviction appears institutionally: arts education is valuable because it trains ways of perceiving and judging that are inseparable from forms, traditions, and contexts.
Her citation of Eric Jensen is consistent with this broader understanding. Even where “brain-based learning” claims can become reductive, Sellers-Young uses Jensen to insist that the arts engage integrated “sensory, attentional, cognitive, emotional, and motor capacities.” This is very much in keeping with her anti-Cartesian orientation. Learning is not merely verbal or abstract; thought is supported by patterned relations among sensation, movement, emotion, attention, and interpretation. The arts do not merely adorn cognition. They exercise the conditions of cognition.
The Shakespeare example—art illuminating “the history and cultural politics of 16th into 17th century England”—is modest, almost conventional, but strategically placed. It shows that the arts illuminate other fields not because they are instruments for those fields, but because artistic forms condense historical and social knowledge in ways that require interpretation. Sellers-Young’s deeper claim is that the traffic goes both ways: the arts can inform historical, political, and scientific understanding, while collaboration with other fields can deepen artistic inquiry.
Against the split between practitioner and scholar
This paper’s most pointed institutional diagnosis comes through its engagement with Shannon Jackson and Jill Dolan. Jackson’s history of performance in the academy reveals a persistent tension between doing performance and studying it, sharpened by the institutional separation of MFA training from scholarly work. Dolan, writing against the “corporate university,” worries that when market logics dominate institutional reasoning, risk and experimentation are subtly constrained. Administrators may praise innovation in the abstract while funding only what is legible, profitable, or safe.
Sellers-Young does not dismiss these concerns. She says plainly that Jackson and Dolan “have valid concerns.” But she also declines the temptation to turn those critiques into a defense of disciplinary purity or anti-institutional nostalgia. Her solution is “performance as research.” The phrase, now widely circulated, is used here not as a slogan but as a practical epistemology. It names a mode in which “the act of creation becomes the initial point of reference.” Knowledge emerges through embodied making; inquiry takes place “at the intersections of text and the body.” This formulation is quintessentially Sellers-Young. It joins somatic and analytical modes without collapsing one into the other.
The significance of “performance as research” in this essay is double. First, it addresses the Jackson problem by refusing the strict separation between scholarship and practice. Performance-making can itself be analytical; academic inquiry can be generated through embodied experimentation, rehearsal, translation, staging, and reflection. Second, it addresses the Dolan problem by providing a language in which artistic work can claim intellectual legitimacy without being justified solely by profitability or audience metrics. If performance is research, then experimental creation is not an expendable luxury. It is one of the university’s ways of producing knowledge.
Yet Sellers-Young’s version of performance-as-research is not merely inward-looking studio work. It is decisively relational. It unfolds in contact zones: between cultures, between disciplines, between bodies and texts, between technologies and movement vocabularies. In this respect, the paper translates many of her broader concerns—intercultural misunderstanding, embodied cognition, the social life of technique—into a model of higher education.
The Plastic Rose Project: translation as embodied inquiry
The first of the essay’s two major examples, the Plastic Rose Project, gives concrete form to this argument. A 1995 collaboration between UC Davis and Kinki University in Osaka, it brought students and faculty together around two productions of Shogo Ohta’s Shi No Bara (Rose of Death), each mounted with a shared set design but different directorial and performative choices. The structure of the project is telling: translation, design, rehearsal, performance, seminar discussion, and informal social exchange were all treated as part of the inquiry. The project linked theatre practice to language and literature curricula, especially around “issues of translation, both as a performance and as a text.”
This phrase is decisive. Translation, in Sellers-Young’s account, is not a textual transfer completed on the page. It is embodied, temporal, theatrical, and culturally embedded. Her emblematic example is the word “interval.” In Japanese theatrical usage, it signified a moment of stillness within the action; for the British-trained director Peter Lichtenfels, it meant an intermission. His decision to insert an intermission into the English-language production, though he and the cast were “never entirely comfortable,” was an attempt to remain faithful to the translated script. The awkwardness is the point. The incident demonstrates that even apparently simple linguistic choices are saturated with divergent assumptions about structure, timing, and theatrical convention.
The same is true of acting method. Both groups, students discovered, worked under the broad sign of Stanislavski’s realism, but what that realism meant differed sharply. For the Japanese actors, realism was grounded in “physical action derived from the positioning of the character within the culture”; for the American actors, action was “psychological based on the motivation of the moment.” Sellers-Young is drawn to precisely this kind of asymmetry. A shared term conceals heterogeneous histories of embodiment. Method is not universal; it is culturally inflected even when it appears common.
What the project teaches, then, is not merely intercultural tolerance. It teaches students to discover the assumptions built into their own practices. They learn that media images are partial and often false—Japanese women do not “daily wear kimonos”; UC Davis students are not Hollywood caricatures; Japanese theatre is not exhausted by Noh or Kabuki. But more profoundly, they learn that artistic process itself is a site where cultural presuppositions become visible. Sellers-Young emphasizes that students left with a heightened awareness that translation “is a complex negotiation of a text and a performance style” requiring “an indepth knowledge of the country of origin and the country in which the production will be performed.” The phrase “complex negotiation” is crucial. Knowledge here is not possession of facts about another culture. It is a disciplined encounter with incommensurabilities of language, habit, embodiment, and representation.
This example resonates strongly with Sellers-Young’s larger intercultural work. She has often argued that misunderstanding is not a failure incidental to intercultural exchange but one of its primary materials. The Plastic Rose Project is an early and institutionalized form of that insight. Its educational value lies not in producing seamless global understanding, but in making students aware of how their readings, methods, and expectations are culturally formed. In other words, performance becomes a research practice because it places students inside the friction of translation, where they must attend to detail while rethinking the conceptual frames through which they work.
The Creativity Project: interdisciplinarity without flattening difference
If the Plastic Rose Project explores the local and global through intercultural theatre, the Creativity Project explores the relation of art and science. Developed at the Mondavi Center after a visit by Richard Florida, it was explicitly designed to test a broad, campus-wide notion of creativity. Sellers-Young’s choice of Merce Cunningham as a central figure is revealing. She describes him as “a human bridge, a living connection between modernism and postmodernism, art and science, intellectualism and spirituality.” That characterization is less biographical than methodological. Cunningham stands for an artistic practice that remains rigorously formal while opening itself to chance procedures, Zen, cognition, motion capture, and computing. He exemplifies creativity as synthesis without dissolving the specificity of media.
The project involved faculty from music, theatre, dance, visual art, English, history, geology, physics, and computer science. On one level, this realizes Florida’s ideal of cross-fertilization. But Sellers-Young is careful not to present interdisciplinarity as a mere administrative virtue. Its value lies in the way different methods press against one another, generating new perspectives on shared problems. Her preferred example, Della Davidson’s Collapse (suddenly falling down), is illuminating because it is not an arts-science collaboration organized around optimism or novelty. It stages fragility, breakdown, ecological crisis, and the unstable relation of humans to environment and technology.
The work draws on Jared Diamond’s Collapse and incorporates LIDAR imaging developed by geologists and visualization scientists. These “3D, moving images of natural collapses” become part of the choreographic environment rather than didactic illustration. The performance is structured around three interacting elements: shifting earth images, a Beckett-like narrative of Easter Island’s final inhabitants arguing over the last tree, and dances embodying different dimensions of collapse. Sellers-Young’s description attends carefully to how multiple registers of instability are made to coexist. The island platforms split and rotate; the narrative opens onto questions of “language, globalization, genocide and survival”; dancers render collapse literally and metaphorically, through falling, imbalance, rebuilding, melancholy, hysteria, and determination.
What emerges from her account is not a fusion of art and science into one seamless discourse. It is a choreography of epistemological difference. LIDAR offers one mode of seeing complexity: multiple viewpoints, geological process, the visible modeling of terrain in motion. Performance offers another: gravity felt in the body, social upheaval embodied as gesture, environmental fragility rendered as unstable stage relation. In post-performance discussion, Davidson remarks that collaboration with scientists deepened her sense of “the complexity of the human-enviornment dimension” as revealed through such technology. Sellers-Young’s interest lies exactly in this mutual alteration of perspective. Technology gives artists new perceptual tools; artistic embodiment gives scientific data experiential and affective force.
This is a characteristic Sellers-Young move. Technology is neither fetishized nor opposed to the body. It changes the conditions of perception and collaboration, but it does not replace bodily knowing. Indeed, the project dramatizes her recurring conviction that the human body remains the site where complexity becomes livable. Scientific imaging can model collapse; dance can make it felt as weight, impact, persistence, and precarious rebuilding. The educational value of such a project lies in exposing students and audiences to multiple analytical styles while preserving the distinctiveness of each.
The project’s afterlife also matters. Sellers-Young notes that subsequent collaborations developed around Cunningham’s software Life Forms, linking choreography and animation. Here again, the paper anticipates later concerns in her work about mediation and technology. Tools alter creative process; they enable new strategies; but their significance depends on how they are integrated into embodied practice and critical reflection.
Specificity with complexity
The phrase that organizes the essay from its opening—“a conceptual framework that unites specificity with complexity”—deserves to be heard not as general educational piety but as a concise account of what arts training does. Specificity is the cultivated attention to detail: to the exact meaning of “interval,” to the tacit bodily assumptions inside “realism,” to the formal properties of choreography, to the historical context of a genre, to the texture of scientific imaging, to the practical demands of collaboration. Complexity is the capacity to relate these details to larger systems: globalization, media stereotypes, disciplinary difference, environmental crisis, technological mediation, institutional structure.
Many educational discourses value one at the expense of the other. Technical training can produce specificity without relation; broad theory can produce complexity without tact or groundedness. Sellers-Young’s defense of the arts insists that artistic practice, at its best, binds them together. One cannot stage a play across cultures or build a dance-science collaboration without precise attention and systemic thinking at once. In that sense, the paper is entirely continuous with her long-standing view that technique forms consciousness. Arts education matters not because it adds creativity to an otherwise complete education, but because it trains a mode of perception in which the precise and the relational are mutually enabling.
This is why the concluding emphasis falls on tolerance for ambiguity. Sellers-Young writes that such projects help students “see what they look at, hear what they listen to, and feel what they touch,” stretching “minds and bodies beyond the boundaries of the printed text or the rules of what is provable.” The sentence encapsulates her embodied epistemology. Seeing, hearing, and feeling are not raw sensory acts; they are educable. The arts cultivate them into reflective capacities. And because the world’s most urgent problems are not neatly disciplinary—because they are “social and technological problems that are often closely related to each other”—students must be able to think without “rigid certainty,” to imagine “multiple solutions.”
One can hear in this formulation an important caution. Ambiguity is not being celebrated as vagueness or relativism. It is being treated as a condition of serious inquiry in a world where information is partial, perspectives are situated, and meanings emerge through negotiation. In Sellers-Young’s vocabulary, the arts make ambiguity productive. They train students to inhabit complexity without paralysis.
Liberal education, activated mind, embodied intellect
The final movement of the paper invokes Henry Giroux and Martha Nussbaum, both of whom help Sellers-Young specify the broader educational ideal at stake. Giroux’s interdisciplinarity is valued because it forms “disciplined yet creative habits of mind” not “reducible to the material circumstances of one’s life.” Nussbaum’s “activated mind” is “flexible,” “self-examining,” capable of responding “quickly and sensitively to a changing world.” These are not borrowed authorities appended late to shore up the argument. They sharpen what Sellers-Young has been demonstrating through her examples: arts-centered inquiry is indispensable to any education that seeks more than adaptation.
Yet Sellers-Young subtly revises liberal education from within. The “mind” she wants activated is never purely cerebral. It is trained through embodied and collaborative processes, through rehearsal and translation, through watching and making, through technological mediation and intercultural encounter. In this respect the paper stands as a bridge within her own intellectual development. It does not yet foreground somatics in the explicit way of some later writings, but its assumptions are already somatic throughout. The arts matter because they develop integrated sensory, motor, emotional, and analytical capacities; because knowledge emerges at “the intersections of text and the body”; because creative process can become the “initial point of reference” for inquiry. The paper’s language of higher education is thus underwritten by a much broader philosophy of embodiment.
That continuity is especially important in light of Sellers-Young’s later insistence that universities too often privilege a narrow, disembodied form of cognition. “The Value of Arts in Higher Education” offers one answer to that problem before naming it in fully somatic terms. It proposes that artistic practice is not ancillary to thought but one of the university’s most powerful means of producing reflective, adaptive, socially responsive intelligence.
The paper’s place in Sellers-Young’s career
Within Sellers-Young’s career, this presentation occupies a significant middle position. It comes after her early ritual ethnographies and intercultural performance work, and alongside a period in which she was increasingly articulating arts pedagogy, contemplative learning, and the institutional stakes of embodied inquiry. One can see several strands converging.
From her intercultural theatre research comes the Plastic Rose example and the conviction that the most valuable educational encounters are those in which misunderstanding reveals one’s own habits of reading. From her somatic and performer-training work comes the insistence that creation itself can be a form of knowledge, that process is as important as product, and that technique, embodiment, and reflective consciousness are inseparable. From her later sustainability and arts-community work one can already glimpse the enlarged horizon of the Creativity Project, where environmental crisis, technology, and collaborative art-making are brought into one frame. And from her broader philosophy comes the refusal of a merely decorative account of art. Art is not supplement; it is a social and perceptual technology.
At the same time, the paper also shows Sellers-Young negotiating her era’s institutional pressures. Florida is used with a clear sense of both his explanatory power and his limits. The paper acknowledges the university’s need to articulate the arts’ relevance in a climate of economic justification, but it resists turning creativity into market rhetoric alone. That tension remains live throughout her work: the need to make embodied, critical, exploratory practices legible within institutions that often prefer measurable utility. “Performance as research” is one of her key answers to that problem.
Why the essay still matters
What gives this relatively concise conference paper its lasting value is that it identifies with unusual clarity a persistent misunderstanding about the arts in higher education. The misunderstanding is not simply that the arts are undervalued. It is that their value is too often conceived in secondary terms: as entertainment, therapy, prestige, heritage, or transferable skill. Sellers-Young argues from inside artistic and educational practice that the arts belong at the center of the university because they are one of the principal places where perception becomes inquiry and inquiry becomes collaborative, embodied, and socially responsive thought.
Her examples are especially persuasive because they are not abstractions. In the Plastic Rose Project, students discover that language, theatrical convention, realism, and media image are all culturally mediated; they learn this not by reading about it alone but by staging, translating, and encountering one another. In the Creativity Project, artists and scientists jointly explore collapse through image, narrative, and movement; they learn that environmental crisis cannot be understood adequately through a single mode of analysis. These projects model a university in which the arts do not merely coexist with other forms of knowledge but actively mediate among them.
The essay’s final claim is therefore larger than a defense of arts programming. The arts, Sellers-Young suggests, help produce the kind of intelligence that contemporary life demands: attentive without being narrow, imaginative without being ungrounded, critical without being disembodied, collaborative without erasing difference. Dewey’s transformation and Florida’s innovation converge not because they mean the same thing, but because both point toward a world in which creative engagement is central to “perceiving and making sense of the world in which we live.” Sellers-Young’s contribution is to insist that universities should treat that convergence not as a branding opportunity, but as an educational obligation.
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