Tyler Green, this week’s community spotlight, an award-winning Vatican City Email List historian, critic, author and host of The Modern Art Notes Podcast, a weekly (CC licensed!) program featuring discussions with artists, historians, authors and curators. Green recently released a new book, Emerson’s Nature and the Artists: Idea as Landscape, Landscape as Idea, which explores the ways the written work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, a 19th century U.S. author, poet and philosopher, was deeply influenced by “American Art” and the natural landscape in the United States. He argues Emerson’s famous text Nature was a game changer in our modern day understanding of the commons and .
Open Access, and that, as a scholar, Green needed access to both visual and textual resources to make his case.“…the greatest obstacle to understanding art’s role in the American project, in the idea of the American nation …is that it costs scholars serious money to publish our works. That makes it harder for scholars to know what’s out there, but it also makes it harder to make arguments. If you can’t publish the visual part of your argument with the textual part of your argument, why work hard to have an argument that is both visual and textual. And so open access is, at the risk of sounding grandiose, open access is the answer, right? Open access makes that possible.”Green encourages his audience to consider how greater access to a range of historical resources, visual and written, might strengthen our ability to understand our collective past and imagine a better and brighter future.Learn more about .