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The Dartmouth
June 22, 2025 | Latest Issue
The Dartmouth

Sellars discusses art's social purpose in Montgomery lecture

Peter Sellars explained art's potential to temper the financial crisis in his Montgomery Fellow lecture on Tuesday.
Peter Sellars explained art's potential to temper the financial crisis in his Montgomery Fellow lecture on Tuesday.

Sellars, currently a professor of world arts and cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles, has staged over 100 productions worldwide and is renowned for his modern, and sometimes controversial, interpretations of classic stories. For instance, Sellars once set Mozart's "Don Giovanni" in Spanish Harlem. He has also produced several original, historical operas including composer John Adams's "Doctor Atomic" and "Nixon in China."

"Every show I do, no matter how beautiful and ravishingly beautiful it is, is greeted as something controversial, this ridiculous sense of controversy," he said in an interview with The Dartmouth. "I suppose that is a gift that somehow I am able to go back to that nerve again and again, but it strikes me as odd because it's not the environment I work in."

Vivacious and disarming, physically embracing everyone he meets, Sellars has a look that is as distinctive as his personality. At Tuesday's event, "New Crowned Hope: The Arts in the Age of Obama," Sellars sported his usual long, spiky hair and one of his signature shirts -- made of lavender polyester and printed with images of an Indian goddess -- which he said he buys in bulk from a secondhand store in Cambridge, Mass.

In his speech, Sellars addressed the need for artists to respond to the current economic recession, and praised the Works Progress Administration for commissioning public art during the Great Depression. Artists have the task of preparing society for the future, Sellars said.

"We have to think about what it means to fulfill the mission of this country culturally," he said. "How do we open the space of the imagination and shift the border to make what is unthinkable and make it thinkable? We are creating heat, a different climate and atmosphere that makes it possible."

During his speech, Sellars displayed images of murals painted in Texas post offices during the Depression that depict farmers picking cotton and cowboys herding cattle. This was the first time art emphasized the dignity of the working class, Sellars said, pacing to and fro in the audience. The WPA also sponsored symphonies and promoted swing music so that citizens would not feel "depressed and victimized," he said.

"The reality for artists is, 'How do we recover when people are in free fall?'" Sellars said. "How do we create worth and value when everything and everyone is in the process of being devalued?"

To mitigate the country's financial woes, Sellars proposed that the United States end its war on drugs, which Sellars described as a failure, likening it to Prohibition. Decriminalizing drug use would lead to an influx of capital into the national economy, as the illicit drug trade is the second largest market in the world, Sellars said. He suggested that the money could be redirected to support and build the impoverished communities where drug use is considered a problem.

Sellars said he titled his lecture "New Crowned Hope" after the month-long arts festival -- for which he served as artistic director -- held in Vienna in celebration of Mozart's 250th birthday in 2006. The city likely hired him because of his numerous stagings of Mozart's operas, Sellars said, although he explained that he only agreed to take the position if not a single note of Mozart's music was played.

Sellars hoped to honor the composer by commissioning works that continue the themes Mozart addressed in his final 35th year, he said.

Sellars said he used the phrase "New Crowned Hope" in 2006 because it was especially applicable during "the coldest, darkest Bush years." Sellars said that, as an American, he wanted to bring Thomas Jefferson's vision of equality and democracy back to Europe and the art world. Composers like Mozart and Hadyn understood this vision and popularized the string quartet, in which all members were equal, according to Sellars.

"What we did in our generation was have people look at Mozart differently, and now the most conservative Mozart productions and people acknowledge that these operas have so much more in them than people had imagined a generation ago," he said. "If you're rehearsing Mozart next to a shelter for battered women and a food kitchen, you get that people are searching in their lives. This music is there to feed it."

Sellars said he has since expanded "New Crowned Hope" into a worldwide initiative. One of his goals is to investigate art's function in other cultures. Sellars stated.

In Africa, for example, film is often used by individuals to connect to their ancestors, Sellars said on Monday in a discussion with the Dartmouth Film Society. Tearing up, Sellars described one of his favorite films, "Allah Tantou," which translates to "God's will." The film was created by David Achkar as a means of reconnecting with his father, the former Guinean ambassador to the United Nations, who was captured as a political prisoner, and then tortured to death.

The "New Crowned Hope" initiative also focuses on reconnecting culture and agriculture, Sellars said.

Sellars emphasized in an interview with The Dartmouth that society needs to find "a moral and cultural energy that connects to what people eat, how they grow it and take care of the land." He said that while agriculture is celebrated in many cultures, modern civilization has made farming impossible, and that 16,000 farmers in India committed suicide this year.

Sellars said these new phases of his initiative are responses to modern art, which he described as having a "bitter Puritanical streak." Works like Norman Rockwell's image of a Thanksgiving dinner not only shame the poor, but also carry a destructiveness found in Soviet and Maoist art from the same time period, he said.

"The damage done by bad art is very serious," Sellars said in the interview. "Everyone is expecting instant stardom and not getting that this world is about your life work. You're going to spend an entire lifetime on these questions."


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