What's the point of art? Everything and nothing

Click to follow
The Evening Standard
Art: what's it good for? When these kinds of titles are thought up for debates there are a lot of short cuts taken with the meanings of words.

Usually it's a way of singling out the visual arts of today for attack, or more broadly the state-subsidised arts.

After all, who would ask what Radiohead are good for? Or what is Michelangelo good for? A wise sage once said: "A man climbs a mountain because it is there. A man makes a work of art because it is not there."

Art just is. People make it or look at it because it gives them happiness, and happiness is good.

But let's assume this question is about the controversial side of art. Do museums get too much money?

Is art so good that it deserves to be funded to the extent it is by the state, and with all those tax breaks and special concessions? This is what the question is getting at.

So the short answer is: art is really good for lots of things but it's not as good as some people think it is.

Over the past five or six years of the credit and commodity boom, art has been very good for money laundering, white-washing and reducing your tax bill.

Art has also been good for covering up an absence of democracy and civil rights - instead of elections or honest markets, sheikhs and oligarchs have given their countries biennales.

Art has been used to justify the suppression of free speech. I was banned from filming at Frieze art fair this year and last - only TV crews making reports about Frieze itself, ie advertising it, are allowed.

And last year I was banned from filming the Damien Hirst skulls exhibited in the publicly funded British Museum because I was a known critic of Hirst's work.

Art has also been good for getting attention for anything. But not everything put in a gallery - or on a plinth - is art. Gormley's fourth plinth, for example, is not art - it is a combination of self-promotion and politicial protest in an art location.

As a result, there's been far too much art bought and sold, for far too high prices. Art is good but it should not be a "special case".

In future, art must be treated like other highly crafted commodities, like cheese and chocolate. The unregulated art market must be regulated.

But there are things that art is really, really good at. In a super-fast broadband culture, art is really good for delivering messages at speed.

A movie takes an hour to watch - you can understand a Warhol in seconds. We use art today to talk about complex philosophical issues - space, time, chance, etc - in a way we don't often use novels or films.

The best art has an ambiguity and an ability to combine contradictions - just think of the satirical critiques/celebrations of pornography and commerce in the Tate's Pop Life show - that no other art form can rival.

That open-endedness stimulates debate and discussion across our society - and that is just what we need today.

Art: What's It Good For? is debated tonight at Kings Place, N1, by art historian Professor Evelyn Welch, Julia Peyton Jones, director of the Serpentine Gallery, Larry Elliott, economics editor of the Guardian, and Nasser Azam, former banker turned contemporary artist.