Key Indicators

I'd love to say that I traveled to Australia and interviewed Cate Blanchette, an actress who I admire, but alas that is not the case.  Instead I read an excerpt of a speech she gave recently in Australia about the inherent worth of the arts to the larger society.  Here's part of what she had to say:

We know that countries with strong cultural identities demonstrate greater social cohesion . . . We must remember the arts do more than just that. We process experience and make experience available and understandable. We change people's lives, at the risk of our own. We change countries, governments, history, gravity. After gravity, culture is the thing that holds humanity in place, in an otherwise constantly shifting and, let's face it, tiny outcrop in the middle of an infinity of nowhere.

Read the full article here.