There aren’t many cities willing to dedicate an entire month to art. Tacoma is one of the few, and it’s called Art at Work Month, which runs through November.

This year will mark the eighth anniversary of Art at Work, which will showcase Tacoma talent via hundreds of community-hosted arts and culture events, exhibits and workshops. The goal, in brief, is to illustrate the collective talent in Tacoma and get the public involved in the arts.

But what interests me more than the goal is the method.

This is a collective effort — a chance to see what happens when the entire arts community works together toward a common goal. It’s typical during times of scarcity to hole up, focus on our own goals, hoard resources, and view other people working in the same arena as competition rather than as potential partners. As arts funding dwindles, this sort of isolationism can become rampant, with arts and other organizations working against or in spite of each other, rather than together. Fears about scarcity are projected on reality, become a self-fulfilling prophecy, and stand in the way of all sorts of wonderful collaboration, community and collective achievement.

In economic development and planning circles, this phenomenon is called “siloing” — with people building little imaginary walls around themselves, isolating themselves from the very networks and resources that could help them.

In philosophical circles, they call it the Allegory of the Cave.

Socrates breaks it down thusly: Imagine a cave inhabited by prisoners who have been chained and held immobile since childhood. Their arms and legs held in place, their heads fixed so they are forced to stare at wall in front of them. Behind the prisoners is an enormous fire, and between the fire and the prisoners is a raised walkway, along which people walk, carrying things on their heads, including figures of men and animals made of wood, stone and other materials.  The prisoners can only watch the shadows cast by the men, and listen to the echoes of their footsteps. 

In this scenario, the prisoners have no choice but to see the shadows and echoes as reality, since they are all they had ever seen or heard.

Socrates then asks us to consider what would happen if one of the prisoners were freed and shown what had been casting the shadows. 

“Suppose further,” Socrates asks “that the man was compelled to look at the fire: wouldn’t he be struck blind and try to turn his gaze back toward the shadows, as toward what he can see clearly and hold to be real? What if someone forcibly dragged such a man upward, out of the cave: wouldn’t the man be angry at the one doing this to him?”

In short, he would miss the shadows — the only reality he had known. Despite the rich, complex, colorful new reality that he was being presented with, he would cling to the illusory world he had inhabited since birth. But eventually, according to Socrates, he would acclimate, realizing that his illusory world, no matter how safe and familiar it once seemed, was actually a prison.

In November we’ll have a chance to step outside of our caves and see what happens when Tacoma artists work together, beyond the shadows cast by our fears of scarcity and competition. I have a feeling it will be beautiful. 

For more information on Art at Work, go to artatworktacoma.com.