e166 david maggs - the art of being

• What you do as an artist is crucial. Do not abandon that for a desire to serve a kind of utilitarian purpose of ‘I'm gonna make sure people know more’. The faith in knowing more is the siren song of our society that constantly sees us leaping off of the vessel that can carry us through this, with this belief that we can suddenly transform society because we can provide information. Decorating climate policy with the arts is not transformative. What you know how to do as an artist is so fundamentally important.

David Maggs defines his work as an attempt to integrate the core capacities of the arts with larger social challenges, sustainability, health, social justice, community development, etc. 

David grew up in Corner Brook, Newfoundland and spent much of his developmental years as a classical pianist. In 2002, he founded Gros Morne Summer Music (now Camber Arts) and continues to be active in cultural production and cultural theory. 

My first conversation with David was e30 maggs – art and the world after this recorded during an outdoors COVID era walk on March 25, 2021 in Vancouver. We talked about artistic capacity, sustainability, value propositions, disruption and recovery, including his Art and the World After This paper for Metcalf Foundation.

Since then David has become Metcalf Fellow on Arts and Society, where he nurtures and supports the desire in Canada’s arts sector to both move with, and shape ongoing patterns of transformative societal change. 

David and I were co-founders of SCALE along with Anjali Appadurai. Anthony Garoufalis-Auger, Kendra Fanconi, Judi Pearl and Robin Sokoloski in 2021 and have been corresponding ever since, including my March 16, 2024 posting on a calm presence david maggs’ art and the climate crisis.

Our second conversation focused on being and transformation. For example :

• My argument is that we are intuiting the ability of art to work at the level of being, to engage with transformative change. But what happens is we live in a culture that is so structured around problem solving at the level of information and knowledge that as soon as we think, OK, yes. course art has something really important to do with this, then, immediately, instead of allowing the arts to pull climate discourse into the realm of being, climate discourse pulls art into the realm of knowing. And it becomes a tool for knowing rather than something that allows us to start to engage with ourselves at the level of being.

David also talks about the cultural gap in the climate crisis which he defines as ‘the difference between the imperative of transformation at the level of being and a particular society's capacity to do so. Ours is really low.’

David’s recommended reading is the work of Richard Powers and Don McKay’s Vis à vis. 

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Hey conscient listeners, 

I’ve been producing the conscient podcast as a learning and unlearning journey since May 2020 on un-ceded Anishinaabe Algonquin territory (Ottawa). 

It’s my way to give back.

In parallel with the production of the conscient podcast and its francophone counterpart, balado conscient, I I publish free ‘a calm presence' Substack see https://acalmpresence.substack.com.

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I am grateful and accountable to the earth and the human labour that provided me with the privilege of producing this podcast, including the toxic materials and extractive processes behind the computers, recorders, transportation systems and infrastructure that made this production possible. 

Claude Schryer

Latest update on July 8, 2025