What do you value about art?

One visitor's response to this year's Turner Prize at Baltic

Last week Sir John Tusa published an article arguing we need to get better at making the case for the arts. That we are not very good at expressing the ‘intrinsic’ value of the arts is no revelation – it’s been a constant refrain in UK cultural policy for at least 7-8 years. I’m interested in why it seems so difficult? Why do a group of otherwise highly intelligent, self-aware and articulate people struggle to say why it is what they do?

I wonder if one the reasons we find it so hard to talk about why the arts matter because it can be so personal (i.e. about who we are and our lives) and hence we know that’s subjective?

Talking to Learning professionals in the arts, they talk in terms of art having the potential to create emotional, social and intellectual responses and changes in people. I think this is a helpful framework in which to think about the effects of encounters with the arts and so applied this model to thinking about my own experiences:

Across my cultural ‘diet’ (mainly visual arts, film, literature and popular music – I don’t ‘do’ much theatre, opera, dance or classical music) I have all three types of response – emotional, intellectual and social.

Music is – for me – emotional: escapist, celebratory, consoling, uplifting and distracting (when I’m bored). I revisit artists and songs that I love and don’t particularly want to expand my ‘canon’. Poetry fulfills a very similar role for me. Familiar friends. It’s not transformational – but it’s very emotional and important to me. ‘La vie en rose’ is forever the song inscribed inside my wedding band. Pulp wrote my anthems about growing up a bit ‘different’ in Sheffield in the 1980s (taking on the relay from The Smiths but locating it on my manor).

Literature, on the other hand, is escapist – my window on other worlds. I like to read about other lives, other people, places and periods of time – and lots of international writers to learn about them. Anything I’ve ever learnt about history and other cultures is through poetry, novels and films (and the occasional holiday). Partly then my response to literature is intellectual (it’s about learning things and seeing the world in new ways) but also its social in that what I’m seeking to learn about is people: human nature and relationships. And there’s nothing I like more than chewing over what I’ve read and seen with others. Judging by the success of book clubs I guess I’m not alone.

The visual arts is the sector in which I’ve worked for 15 years and I’m mainly interested in art from an intellectual perspective and hence I prefer art that engages with those issues (e.g. conceptual). I’m fascinated by what art is and can be and how it can challenge my thinking. Maybe that’s because of I trained as an art historian and have hard-wired myself into thinking about art rather than feeling about it.

Sculpture – in particular – also evokes quite a strong physical and emotional response in me –I can’t keep my hands of it in the way great music makes me want to dance. Equivalent VIII by Carl Andre (which you may know as ‘the Tate bricks’) the sculpture that whetted by interest in contemporary art. Three Forms by Barbara Hepworth now represents to me a mother’s startling realization about the difference and independence of her newborn children: when I first encountered it I saw it purely in formal terms as an innovation in abstract sculpture.

I do wonder if I don’t particularly ‘do’ much opera and dance because they seem – to me – to lend themselves best to emotional responses and I tend to be a head rather than a heart person – but that’s just a theory. I know others respond very differently to literature and art and value different types of response more than I do – so I suspect ‘value’, like beauty’ is very much in the eye of the beholder.

So why does this matter?

I believe art changes us at an individual level – incrementally and perhaps quite often imperceptibly. I remember working for the British Council and being expected to account for our funder’s (Foreign and Commonwealth Office) outcomes in my work. They seemed a million miles away from my day job of promoting cultural dialogue between France and the UK – in fact I stuck them on my kitchen cupboard for a laugh as the idea that we could realistically ‘avoid war and conflict’ by promoting a book tour for a British writer was risible.

But is it? Only if you are looking for short-term and simple, measureable, outcomes. How else do we understand ourselves, the world around us and one another if not through our culture in its broadest sense? There’s no simple cause and effect between one book and one action or outcome. Art is more subtle and cumulative than that and we each make our own meanings from and with it.

My enjoyment and engagement with the arts is very subjective and personal (embarrassingly so at times). I’d find it hard to extrapolate from this personal perspective a wider ‘value’ that applies to other people’s enjoyment. Of course there are ‘social benefit indicators’ we could use to group such as personal development, community cohesion, individual or community empowerment, identity development. Some clever people in the USA have even created some intrinsic value indicators – but they don’t excite me either. Somehow generic terms don’t capture the power and passion of my experiences with art, music and books: it’s a very personal passion.

Perhaps we all need to share more what we personally value in the arts – and more importantly, ask audiences what they value and experience through their arts experiences. We don’t do that nearly enough – we’re so fixated on who they are in terms of the age, ethnicity, etc we rarely take the time to ask why they came and what they took away? Perhaps if we asked more of these questions to our audiences we’d discover whilst experiences are often highly personal and subjective, there is plenty of common ground and common themes. If we could ‘prove’ that, then perhaps we’d be more confident and competent about how we can talk about this common ground.