What's art for?
This question came up in the context of writing a cultural plan. Most people probably don’t even know what a cultural plan is, or could care less, but suffice to say most levels of government have one. *For my sins I have recently read a few of these documents from various regions around the country. One thing I couldn’t help but notice was that, even though they were to do with culture, Art tended to be somewhat marginalised. Art, or ‘the Arts’ existed as an embellishment, the aesthetic coating over the more sober activities of general life.I brought this up with a friend who straight away said, ‘as soon as art becomes commodifed it loses its force, it becomes no more than another aspect of commerce.’A statement which led us, of course, to ask what art had been before it was commodified, which proved to be by no means simple to define. Clearly ritual was in there somewhere. But we also couldn’t avoid revisiting Neanderthal man sitting around the campfire after a day hunting the woolly mammoth. It has been a successful day. The beast has been felled, there is meat in the hands of the clan. Not satisfied, however, to simply fall asleep after the meal, one of the tribal members feels obliged to get up and replay the events of the day, to mime the hunt, to dance the events out, to retell. This replaying so engages the others that they demand the performance be repeated again and again.If indeed the beginning of Art happened like that (paintings on walls both after, and before the hunt, are another example) then we would have to posit that it is this process of retelling which makes us different from the other animals; not just an awareness of our own mortality but a need to talk about it. I’m not claiming it makes us better or that it gives meaning or even makes sense of anything, only that for some reason we, as human beings, seem to need to do it and this defines us as different. In the retelling we change ourselves and our experience of the world, and there has been a lot of retelling since the last woolly mammoth was killed.The point of all this was to say that when we marginalise art, when we make it just another aspect of our commerce we lose something essential. I, like most people in history, do not know what art is for, only that when we marginalise it we, in effect, take ourselves back to some sort of base line of existence in which all we do is reproduce, consume and excrete. We stop remaking the world.