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What Is Art Good For

Author(s): Astrid Alben Date first Published: February, 2015

Type: Provocation Paper for the Clore Leadership Programme Fellowship 2013-14

Note: The paper presents the views of the author, and these do not necessarily reflect the

views of the Clore Leadership Programme or its constituent partners. As a ‘provocation

paper’, this piece is a deliberately personal, opinionated article, aimed at stirring up debate

and/or discussion.

Published Under: Creative Commons

What Is Art Good For by Astrid Alben is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-

NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Your use of the Clore Leadership Programme

archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use of this particular License, available

under Creative Commons.

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Astrid Alben is co-founder of the Pars Foundation, an organisation which explores the link

between arts and science. Astrid is a poet and writer with a background in theatre and as a

curator. Previous roles have included co-curator of the Vedute Art Foundation and Head of

Production, Saatchi and Saatchi

This paper was written as a part of the author’s Fellowship with the Clore Leadership

Programme in 2014.

The Clore Leadership Programme is a not-for-profit initiative, aimed at developing and

strengthening leadership potential across the cultural and creative sectors in the UK. The

Programme awards its flagship Clore Fellowships on an annual basis to exceptional

individuals drawn from across the UK and beyond, and runs a choice of programmes tailored

to leadership needs of arts professionals at different stages of their career. This provocation

paper has been produced under the aegis of Clore Leadership Programme. For more

information, visit www.cloreleadership.org.

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h, but was I a good friend?”

No.

“A good companion?”

No.

“A good lover?”

No.

“A good husband?”

No.

“But was I a good liar?”

No.

“A good enemy?”

No.

A glint of triumph flashed across my ex-lover’s exasperated face:

“Ah, yes Astrid, but was I good material?”

He may have been good material or not. But he was certainly material. Material for what?

For the transformation of one thing into something else: from raw experience into poetry.

Once a poem has been formed it is in and of itself. The finished article, as Don Patterson

eloquently put it, is “just a little machine for remembering itself.” It requires no further

justification. Similarly, I would argue, the question, “what purpose does poetry serve?”, or

indeed, “what is the utility of art?”, will not explain what art is and why some of us make art.

In contrast, the current debate around art would have us believe that art is most things to all

people. That it has some intrinsic function other than itself. The basic tenor goes something

like (I quote from an online government pamphlet on the arts and culture1): “Innovative,

challenging and exciting arts and culture improve people’s lives, benefit our economy and

1 Supporting Vibrant and Sustainable Arts and Culture, https://www.gov.uk/government/policies/supporting-vibrant-and-sustainable-arts-and-culture

“A

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attract tourists from around the world. Arts and culture strengthen communities, bring people

together and remove social barriers.”

The message is clear: art is good for us. Art is educational. Art greases the wheels of

innovation. Art improves cultural awareness. Art has the power to regenerate deprived urban

areas. It even has the power to improve our health. Art is lucrative (the Centre for Economics

and Business Research calculated in 2011 that the art budget is 0.1% of public spending, yet

makes up 0.4% of GDP and 1% of direct employment). In short, there isn’t anything art can’t

fix.

If art is good for something, so the current neo-liberal climate dictates, then it must be good

for some funding. As a result the artist is fast becoming a cultural entrepreneur, flogging their

wares like snake oil, bromide and vegetable hair renewers, competing for his or her income

in the sectors of health, education, tourism and science. These days you don’t have to look far

to find operas that are staged in rehabilitation centres, plays that are wheeled into schools in

deprived inner city areas and sculptures that decipher cancer research. It’s a great good that

art has the power to connect people and can be perceived to challenge policy and ethics but it

does beg the question: does art still have the power to be, well, art?

Art might engage the public with politics (I doubt it), it might have an impact on social and

political realities (I doubt it) and it might even foster change (again, I very much doubt it).

Art might provoke a dialogue but this has very little to do with the making of art. From the

moment a sculpture leaves the studio or the moment the opening titles of a film roll off the

screen, the artist has little to no control over the impact of his or her work. And that’s just as

it should be. I don’t think artists make art because it can cure the sick, eradicate social and

economic inequality, or encourage an industrialist to think more creatively about product

design.

Yet here we are, at the backend of a financial crisis and I catch myself talking about poetry in

terms of “the economics of experience” and poetry readings as “a transactional relationship

with the audience” that can be “benchmarked” by “outcomes and outputs”. The relationship

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between artist, the public and politics has of late been poisoned by the expectation that the

artist needs to create and validate the work in terms of public benefit.

Art doesn’t solve anything. Please don’t ask it to. Because this is entirely missing the point of

what art is good for: nothing.

Art is an expression of how we experience desire, loss, fear, anger, regret, wonder,

loneliness. Art allows us to explore the maddening inconsistency of life lived in the face of

our mortality. Art is what can console us. It can even bring us joy. And let’s be honest, it is

not likely a spreadsheet will ever offer you that fleeting moment of reconciliation with what

Grayson Perry referred to in his Reith lecture earlier this year as “a finite life with incomplete

meanings.” In the words of the poet Czeslaw Milosz the purpose of art is to remind us “how

difficult it is to remain just one person.”

Isn’t that enough? Why this preoccupation with what it is artists do or why they do what they

do? The question of what the utility of art is might not be one that artists necessarily need to

answer. Let me instead ask, why do we read out a poem at the wedding of a loved one? Why

take a nephew to the Tate, or visit the theatre?

Art doesn’t make promises. It simply is. Artists need resources to make their art. We want to

get back to work. It is time to give artists back the funding that was taken from them. Art has

been around since at least the Ice Age. Isn’t it time we accept the deep-seated need to make

art and the deep-seated need to have it in our lives?