“Mr Heaney,” McLaverty would continue, “when you look at the photograph of a rugby team in the newspaper, don’t you always know immediately from the look of the players’ faces which ones of them have studied poetry?” Unfailingly, Heaney would reply that he did.
The whole thing was, he recalls, a comic masquerade. Yet, as he acknowledges, McLaverty’s trust in the humanising power of art was not some personal idiocy but in line with western aesthetic and educational theory. In believing the study of poetry would lead Heaney’s pupils to virtue, he was simply repeating an orthodox cultural assumption. In reality, Heaney tells us, many of the boys in his class ended up as active members of the Provisional IRA, so whatever effect poetry had on them, it was not the one he hoped for.
People in the West have been saying extravagant things about the arts for two and a half centuries. The arts, it is claimed, are “sacred”, they “unite us with the Supreme Being”, they are “the visible appearance of God’s kingdom on earth”, they “breathe spiritual dispositions” into us, they “inspire love in the highest part of the soul”, they have “a higher reality and more veritable existence” than ordinary life, they express the “eternal” and “infinite”, and they “reveal the innermost nature of the world”.
This random clutch of tributes reflects the views of authorities ranging chronologically from the German idealist philosopher Georg Wilhelm Hegel to the contemporary American critic Geoffrey Hartman, and they could be multiplied ad infinitum. Even those who would hesitate to classify the arts as holy often feel that they form a kind of sanctified enclave from which certain contaminating influences should be excluded — notably money and sex. The Australian critic Robert Hughes voices a general disquiet when he says that the idea of a Van Gogh landscape, the anguished testament of an artist maddened by inequality and social injustice, hanging in a millionaire’s drawing room is difficult to contemplate without nausea.
The arts have traditionally excluded certain kinds of people as well as certain kinds of experience. Writers on the arts have emphasised that their spiritual benefits, though highly desirable, are not available to everyone. For some art enthusiasts, indeed, it is this very exclusiveness that makes the arts attractive. “Equality is slavery,” writes the French novelist Gustave Flaubert. “That is why I love art.”
It is often said (by art-lovers) that art-lovers have more “refined sensibilities” than others. But this is a difficult thing to measure. Whereas there are tests for assessing intelligence, no objective computation of refinement is available, and partly for that reason, claims and counterclaims in this area arouse passionate indignation.
The sacred aura that surrounds art objects makes imputations about superior or inferior artistic refinement particularly hurtful and disconcerting. The situation has been aggravated by the eclipse of painting in the 1960s and its replacement by various kinds of conceptual art, performance art, body art, installations, happenings, videos and computer programmes. These arouse fury in many because they seem to be deliberate insults to people of conventional taste (as, indeed, they often are).
By implication, such artworks categorise those who fail to appreciate them as a lesser kind of human being, lacking the special faculties that art requires and fosters in its adherents. In retaliation, those who dislike the new art forms denounce them not just as inauthentic but dishonest, false claimants seeking to enter the sacred portals of true art.
This prompts a simple question: what is a work of art?
IF IT is a simple question, nobody has yet found an answer to it. However, it is what I shall try to do.
You may say the answer is as simple as the question. A work of art is the Primavera and Hamlet and Beethoven’s Fifth, and things of that kind. But the problem, rather, is: what is not a work of art? For unless we know what art is not, we cannot draw a boundary around what it is.
Again, you may reply, that’s easy. There are plenty of things that are not works of art — for example, human excrement. That would be an unfortunate choice. The Italian artist Piero Manzoni, who died in 1963, published an edition of tin cans each containing 30 grammes of his own excrement. One of them was bought by the Tate Gallery and is still in its collection. Very well, you may concede, excrement was a bad choice, but what about space, what about absolute emptiness? That obviously can’t be a work of art, because it’s nothing. However, that too seems questionable. Yves Klein, one of the forerunners of conceptual art, once held an exhibition in Paris consisting of an entirely empty gallery. So space can be art.
I am sure I do not need to go on. My purpose is not a harangue against the enormities of modern art, of the kind the tabloids indulge in each year when the Turner prize shortlist is announced. In fact, the opposite is true. In reply to anyone who splutters that this or that recently unveiled installation is certainly not a work of art, my instinct is to ask: “How can you possibly tell? What are your criteria? Where do you derive your convictions from?”()
Consider Aaron Barschak, the so-called comedy terrorist who gate-crashed Prince William’s 21st birthday party. In October 2003, he appeared in court on a charge of criminal damage. Barschak had interrupted a talk by Jake and Dinos Chapman at the Modern Art Oxford gallery. The Chapman brothers were discussing their exhibit The Rape of Creativity, which features cartoon heads superimposed on a series of etchings by Goya. Barschak had splashed red paint on one of the artworks, and on Jake Chapman, shouting: “Viva Goya!” He claimed he was creating his own artwork, made out of another’s art just as the Chapmans had adapted Goya, and that he intended to enter his work for the Turner prize. Finding him guilty, district judge Brian Loosley said: “This is a serious offence of wanton destruction of a work of art . . . Even by modern standards and even stretching the imagination to incredulity, this was not the creation of a work of art.”
