Editor’s note: Besides tracking technological advancements and innovations, our author is a Juilliard-trained musical composer. Listen to “Arts Administration,” an original improvisation by Howard Lieberman, composed for this column.
Most people assume that culture simply exists. It is treated as an atmospheric condition rather than a human creation. Yet culture is not the weather. It is made by real people who must navigate the nonlinear forces of life and turn them into some kind of meaning. The difficulty is that culture is a qualitative process while our economic system is almost entirely quantitative. This mismatch makes earning a living as a cultural creator very difficult and often discouraging. It raises an urgent question. What would a truly sustainable culture model look like, especially in a place like the Berkshires where creative people gather but are not always supported.
Culture, nonlinearity, meaning and individuality
Life arrives in nonlinear waves. A conversation, a memory, a moment of grief, a flash of insight, or a small, unexpected joy can change our inner landscape instantly. None of this is predictable. None of it is tidy. We are carried along by emotional currents that move in arcs and spirals rather than straight lines. We respond to this nonlinear experience by trying to assign meaning to it. It is how we interpret the signals that enter our lives. Meaning is always qualitative. It cannot be graphed or counted. It is felt, sensed, explored, and shared in ways that speak more to the heart than to the ledger.
Culture is the human system that evolved to handle nonlinearity. When we sing, paint, cook, write, sculpt, dance, or improvise, we are metabolizing experience. We are converting the raw turbulence of life into expressions that help us understand what we are living through. Creative outliers often experience the world with more intensity and sensitivity than most others. For them, expression is essential because individuality itself is nonlinear. Each person has a unique response to the universe, and culture provides a way to make that response visible.
What makes culture valuable is precisely what makes it difficult to support. The work is qualitative, nonlinear, and personal. Yet the society around it is built on quantitative measures. When the nonlinear meets the linear and the qualitative meets the quantitative, culture creators often find themselves pushed to the margins. A sustainable culture model must therefore begin by recognizing that meaning can never be reduced to numbers and that individuality is a cultural asset rather than an inconvenience.
Status, power, fame and wealth
Status, power, fame, and wealth all share a common feature. They are measurable. They exist in the quantitative world where numbers create rankings and comparisons. These markers can be useful and even necessary in certain situations, but they do not create meaning. They offer external validation but do not nourish the internal spark that keeps a creator going. Many artists discover that these external rewards, when they come at all, do not satisfy the deeper need that drives them to create in the first place.
Creative work is not born from any of these quantitative markers. It arises from curiosity, sensitivity, imagination, and the need to respond to life. These sources are qualitative and nonlinear. They cannot be forced into straight lines or converted into predictable metrics. When creative people feel pressured to chase status or conform to quantitative expectations, the work often shifts away from authenticity. It becomes an attempt to satisfy an external system that does not understand the internal one.
This is the fundamental difficulty of being a culture creator in a society that counts almost everything except meaning. It is not that status, power, fame, or wealth are wrong, they belong to a different domain. A sustainable culture model must respect creative people inhabiting a qualitative world. If society wants the benefits of originality, then it must create environments where meaning is supported rather than sidelined.
Berkshires Culture Expression Salon
This brings me to the Berkshires Culture Expression Salon. Since September of 2022, a group of creative outliers has been meeting weekly in Great Barrington. We gather to share expression, explore ideas, and support one another in the practice of making culture. These gatherings have been an ongoing experiment in what a qualitative and nonlinear cultural community can look like. Now, entering our fourth year, we are ready for the next phase. In two weeks, we will begin monthly public gatherings at Dewey Hall. These gatherings will take place at 7:00 pm on the last Sunday of each month, beginning on November 30. The hope is that this experiment can evolve into a prototype for a sustainable cultural model rooted in local people rather than imported performances.
The Salon is based on a simple principle: Culture grows from the people who already live in a place. It does not need to be flown in from elsewhere. The Berkshires are a cultural mecca and have been for generations. Artists, musicians, writers, actors, dancers, and thinkers have settled here because the region supports reflection and imagination. The creative density is unusually high. The challenge is not to attract creative people, but to create structures that help them support one another and share their work in a way that builds community rather than competition.
The Salon uses three approaches to accomplish this. The first is geographic proximity. Instead of focusing on imported culture, we begin with the people who are already here. Their creative lives form a cultural ecosystem waiting to be noticed and supported. The second is ideational proximity. People from different disciplines often discover that they share similar internal impulses. A sculptor and a jazz musician may find common ground in the way they approach form and improvisation. A poet and an engineer may discover that they share a fascination with pattern. These connections create fertile ground for shared expression.
The third approach is expression as participation. Traditional cultural events divide a room into performers and audience. The Salon removes this division. Everyone participates. A person can read a poem, play a fragment of a new composition, share a sketch, describe an idea, or simply reflect on what they are exploring. The focus is not on polished performance but on genuine expression. Culture becomes something made together rather than consumed at a distance.
This is still an experiment, but the move to Dewey Hall marks the beginning of its evolution into a prototype. If the community can generate its own cultural momentum, rooted in everyday creative lives, then the Berkshires can model a sustainable cultural approach for other regions. It will not solve every problem that culture creators face, but it can provide belonging, validation, and meaning. And that matters, because meaning is qualitative and nonlinear, and human beings need it to feel alive. A healthy culture is not a luxury. It is a living system that grows from shared expression. If we want creative people to thrive, then we must support the world they inhabit, the qualitative world of meaning and individuality. Dewey Hall is our next step in doing exactly that.
