As dean of a major art school, Carol Becker speaks with unique authority and competence against a completely studio-based art education that only trains artists to become professionals within the confines of a circumscribed art world, rather than to see themselves as culural leaders and transformers, able to take on serious issues. This book belongs in the library of anyone who believes that art has a crucial and important role to play in the shaping of today's global society.

Suzi Gablik, author of The Reenchantment of Art and Conversations Before the End of Time

This important collection by a leading public intellectual offers innumerable opportunities to think our way out of the paper bag so many Americans live in. With startling prescience, Carol Becker covers many issues that cultural workers need to confront, integrating familiar concepts into the larger picture. This compelling book is also the story of one woman's strength-and success-in the world of ideas. Read it, and think, then act.

Lucy R. Lippard, author of On the Beaten Track: Tourism, Art and Place

In this passionate and fiercely engaged book, Carol Becker makes the case that without the ability of artists to speak the unspeakable and find form for the invisible, this country has no chance to resist the infantilizing seductiveness of spectacle and realize the radical potential of freedom.

Michael Brenson, author, Visionaries and Outcasts: The NEA, Congress, and the Place of the Visual Arts in America of the Visual Artist in Americ