Sean T. Buffington
2009 Commencement Remarks
May 21, 2009

Good morning. First, I will ask the assembled faculty, trustees, alumni and guests to join me in acknowledging the Class of 2009.

Now Students—or should I say "almost graduates"—we're going to have plenty of opportunities to cheer for you this morning. So let me ask you now to join me in welcoming to UArts—and more importantly, in saying thank you- to the people who are here today to celebrate with you. They have been with you every step of the way these last four years and for many years before that! You wouldn’t be here without them.

Class of 2009, I want you to bring this house down for your parents, friends, your brothers and sisters, your grandparents—everyone who helped you to get here today.

Almost exactly one year ago, I stood here before another group of students and offered words of praise and encouragement.

I spoke of the courage required to make something new, to confront emptiness, and to fill it—with song, with movement, with paint, with words.

This year, the times seem to require a different message and tone. Those of us who are entrusted with the privilege to speak to incipient graduates—we feel the pressure to speak of economic hardship; of the challenges we all face now, of the importance of the arts and humanities in times of upheaval and scarcity.

I do believe that. And I recognize that we are living through a painful time that has severely affected all of us as individuals but also institutions and the arts and creative fields generally. But I will leave it to others to speak on these subjects.

Instead, I want to say something about you, our graduates. About what I’ve seen in you, learned about you over these last two years as your president. About what makes me so proud of you and so confident that, despite the times in which we live, you will make your mark, leave us breathless, change—fundamentally—how we see and how and think and imagine.

As I was trying to formulate what that something is, I stumbled across an interview given by Morton Feldman. Feldman was one of America’s great modernist composers—a capacious thinker and generous artist who was passionately involved in the artistic conversation of his day.

In the interview, Feldman told a story that pointed me toward what I wanted, needed to say this morning to you, members of the Class of 2009.

He said to the interviewer, “I have a very dear friend, a great painter, called me up very upset, the work wasn’t going well… he asked me to come to his studio—which I did—I looked around at the work, dozens of sketches, drawings, large pictures, and I was very close to his work, intensely involved with his work, and he asked me, ‘What’s wrong?’ And I said, ‘Simple—it’s a loss of nerve.’ And he was so relieved, he says, ‘Is that all?’

“So don’t talk to me about systems, don’t talk to me about aesthetics, don’t talk to me about life, in fact don’t even talk to me about art, and let’s end it with this thought: that it all has to do with nerve, nothing else, that’s what it’s all about.”

Nerve. I read that, and I thought, that’s it. That is that something I see in all of you. It’s what sets you apart. We—this University, your teachers and fellow students—we didn’t give it to you. You had it when you came here. Indeed, it’s what brought you here in the first place. To the degree we’ve been successful as educators, it’s because we knew how and when to stay out of the way of your nerve—and maybe taught you to do the same.

Nerve?? What do I mean by that? Why is that what makes you so special?

Nerve’s difficult to define, to get one’s arms around. It’s not the same as courage—though it has something in common with it. No, nerve is altogether less altruistic than courage.

It’s not inspiration either. Nerve is more earthbound than that, it’s scrappier, grittier.

Nerve isn’t confidence: confidence is rational—nerve often makes no sense.

Feldman takes an indirect stab at defining nerve. At the end of his story, he says that that loss of nerve is “a character problem.” That puts nerve deep in our personalities, even in our souls.

I think that gets closer to the mark. Nerve is an attitude, it’s a disposition, it is that something in our character—in your character  that I wish you will never lose—that enables you, or perhaps even compels you, to believe, to know that what you see, or hear, or feel in your head and heart, can become real and should become real.

But that’s not even quite right. Nerve is more than just that. It’s also the belief that there’s something beyond what we can visualize, beyond the sounds we can actually imagine, almost hear inside our heads. There’s something we can’t quite get our minds around but nonetheless are sure is there, is worth groping our way toward, that has got to find its way into form—into stone or clay, onto canvas or a stage or screen or into a score.

That’s nerve. And right now, nerve is what matters. It’s what sets you apart, what makes you so important now, what gives me such pride in you and such hope. Nerve matters as much right now as courage and inspiration and confidence. It matters as much as ideas, as skill, as technique.

And it matters not simply because the times are challenging and nerve is what’s needed to venture outside the safer precincts of the University, into a world that right now seems to little security or predictability.

No, nerve is what’s needed now to take up the challenges of the times we live in. Of course, it’s not just artists and designers and performers who’ve got to have nerve to face these challenges. Policymakers, community activists, institutional leaders, parents—nerve is needed all around.

But artists and creative professionals—you, members of the UArts class of 2009—have got nerve. It’s your birthright; it’s in your character, in your soul. For four years, it’s what has enabled you, compelled you, to pursue new forms and sounds and images, new solutions to problems of design, new approaches to arts education, new ways of telling stories and new stories that need telling.

You know—I know—you’ve got the nerve to act, to sing, to paint, to shoot movies. You’ve got the nerve to believe that the thing inside your head ought to take shape on a stage or a canvas. If you’ve got the nerve to confront the emptiness of a canvas, the formlessness of a lump of clay, the bare stage, the unexposed film; if you’ve got the nerve to confront all the ideas and emotions and fear and confusion that are seething inside your fertile minds, then you surely have the nerve to believe that what you see around you, the environment, the world that you inhabit, can be re-shaped into something we can’t yet quite imagine.

That is the core of what it means to be an artist, to be a creator, a maker. It’s to believe that the world can look and feel and work differently—and not just because we fill it with beautiful works of art and design and literature and performance. No, to be an artist is to believe and to be able to imagine that the world can and must not simply be more beautiful but can and must be fundamentally different.

And this means that artists have a special responsibility—always, but especially now—a responsibility to imagine, to envision, to question, to revise, to comment and sometimes to mock.  You have the capacity, the responsibility, the nerve to use your talents as makers to engage the world around you, to participate as artist-citizens, to inspire change, to transform your communities, your neighborhoods, your schools.

This is the task and the obligation of the artist. That’s what we believe, we know you can do. You’ve got the nerve—now go change the world.