Arts, Culture and the Sustainability Imaginary

Artistic practices that intentionally or unintentionally express sustainability notions, information and/or feelings are greatly increasing. This is to be expected since sustainability transition requires cultural transformation – although the Sustainable Development Goals underplay the role of culture. This chapter’s central question is how arts and culture turn sustainability accessible as a theme. Thus, it addresses the arts that inspire sustainability either in form or content, i.e. as an act of contestation of the state of things or purely by evoking the beauty of sustainability imaginary. There are many attempts to name or classify artistic types, styles or movements even in relation to sustainability. While listing some of them, the chapter has no taxonomic aspiration and, instead, examines two broad approaches to sustainability in the arts by providing information and stirring imagination. Although they consist of different strategies and styles, the chapter brings several cases in which these are mixed. However, it concludes with the notion that if the sustainability imaginary is not evoked by the work of art, inner transformations that result in social action that target sustainability are less likely to occur.