2010 Fall Arts Preview

There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Oops. The price of homes in Southern California was not destined to rise indefinitely. Oops again, and potentially ouch. Human history is riddled with errors, major and minor, and the embarrassment and frustration we experience over them typically remains with us in one form or another, even after the original mistake has been corrected. But artists have long known something that scientists and philosophers have only begun to understand—that mistakes are essential feedback for growth and evolution, signposts on the way to higher planes of development. In the spirit of the arts movement of “mistakism” or the nascent science of “wrongology,” the arts editors of The Independent offer up this almost certainly imperfect and very definitely incomplete account of what’s in store for Santa Barbara this fall in the arts. May all your errors be happy ones, and may you be as optimistic as we are about the now-unimaginable ways in which our current misconceptions will yield to larger imaginative truths in the future.