Climate change art

Climate change art is art inspired by climate change and global warming, generally intended to overcome humans' hardwired tendency to value personal experience over data and to disengage from data-based representations by making the data "vivid and accessible". One of the goal of climate change art is to "raise awareness of the crisis", as well as engage viewers politically and environmentally. Climate change art is becoming a form of community involvement with the environment, as exemplified by Olafur Eliasson's famous "Ice Watch" piece. Modern climate change artists express their socio-political concerns through their various artistic tools, such as paintings, photography, musical and films. These works are intended to encourage viewers to reflect on their daily actions "in a socially responsible manner to preserve and protect the planet". Climate change art is created both by scientists and by non-scientist artists. The field overlaps with data art. The Guardian said that in response to a backlash in the 1990s against fossil fuels and nuclear plants, major energy companies stepped up their philanthropic giving, including to arts organizations, "to a point where many major national institutions were on the payroll of the fossil fuel giants," effectively silencing many environmentally-focused artists. In 2005 Bill McKibben wrote an article, What the Warming World Needs Now Is Art, Sweet Art that argued that "An intellectual understanding of the scientific facts was not enough – if we wanted to move forward and effect meaningful change, we needed to engage the other side of our brains. We needed to approach the problem with our imagination. And the people best suited to help us do that, he believed, were the artists." According to climate change in the arts organization The Arctic Cycle, "It took some time for artists to heed the call." In 2009 The Guardian said the art world was "waking up to climate-change art.