Music, poetry and books - all these held me in my younger years and particularly through the difficult periods of life and (let’s not forget) during those strange COVID-19 pandemic years. They continue to do so.
I have long felt the value of artistic expression. Art has brought me a certain gladness, many smiles and a sense of connection to something far greater than myself.
There are many who share my feelings. Yet are those feelings proof of Art’s value? And are artists themselves sufficiently respected and valued for the work they do?
In a capitalist world, where productivity is so often the measure of worth, there remains an underlying question about whether good art - however “good” is defined - is worth very much at all. Unless, of course, the market decides that it is. In 2020, Banksy’s Show Me the Monet sold at Sotheby’s in London for £7.6 million. Ironic it may be, given Banksy with their hidden identity symbolises the rebel, the outsider of the “art scene” and critical of the consumerist society.
Sometimes function is the measure of value. We are prepared to pay a great deal for products that make our lives more efficient, convenient or comfortable.
But if Art is not validated by a high price, is it still worthy? Is its worth found in what it produces, in the function it performs, or in something else entirely?
Perhaps the difficulty is that Art resists our insistence that everything must justify its existence. We ask what it does, what problem it solves and what measurable outcome it produces. Yet perhaps Art’s value lies partly in its refusal to be reduced to a function. It does not always offer answers. Sometimes it unsettles the questions.
So what good is Art? Is its function - or its usefulness - to feed the soul: to heal, inspire and motivate?
During the pandemic, I came across this anonymous quote:
“If you think artists are useless, try to spend your quarantine without music, books, poems, movies, paintings and games.”
Looking back, perhaps the pandemic gave us a collective experience of how Art sees us through. When the world contracted and our physical lives became smaller, stories, music and images carried us elsewhere. They helped us build connections - to tell stories in different forms and create a common bond.
And yet Art did more than help us escape. It gave form to experiences for which we did not yet have language: fear, loneliness, uncertainty, grief and hope. It enabled us to recognise something of ourselves in the imagination of another. In that recognition, we were perhaps a little less alone.
Art has also long been a vehicle for critique, shining a light on the hypocrisy and inequalities of contemporary society. What does Show Me the Monet say to you about the world in which we live?
Banksy’s altered landscape interrupts the tranquillity of Monet’s garden with discarded shopping trolleys and a traffic cone. Beauty remains, but it is no longer innocent. We are asked to look again and notice what consumption, neglect and human interference have placed within the frame.
This, too, may be part of what Art does. It disrupts what has become familiar. It invites us to see what we may have learned not to see and to imagine that the world might be otherwise.
Art gives voice to those who might otherwise not be heard. Every one of us needs witnesses to our lived experience and to the stories we tell. Artists, in turn, create a space in which our hearts may dwell.
There is something profoundly human in this exchange. The artist offers a fragment of an inner world - a melody, an image, a sentence - and another person receives it, sometimes across cultures, generations and centuries. A private act of creation becomes a meeting place for connection.
Our hearts, not only our minds, need a prominent place in this turbulent world.
Art reminds us that being human is more than being useful or productive. It returns us more fully to life - to its beauty and brutality, its contradictions and possibilities.
Perhaps this is what Art is good for.
In the messiness, we keep becoming.