When the anthropologist Margaret Mead worked among the Balinese, she asked whether they had anything resembling western art. After a baffled discussion, their leader shrugged and said: “No — we just do everything as well as we can.”

So it has sometimes been for us. Many everyday creations — beautiful vases, skilful movies, smart ads — have acquired, over time, the aura of art works. This is true of old photographs, carefully constructed, into which participants discharged the full force of their personalities; or of journalistic essays, by writers from Swift to Orwell, which have somehow transcended their immediate occasion.

The energy of life is a desire for expression in the appropriate form. Before the industrial age, people made their own music, pictures, ballads, plates; and some of the most gifted artisans became famous. Some, but only a few. The stone walls so thoughtfully constructed by the anonymous toil of Aran islanders, in order to clear a field for sowing, could easily be exhibited in a gallery of art. Some have been.

But with the rise of specialist industrial workforces came a rather extreme separation of art from everyday life. Poets and painters huddled into bohemian quarters, where rents were low, thought free and morals libertarian. At the same time, craftsmen who had once taken pride in a completed work found themselves hammering a rivet into a machine on an assembly line. Some artists now announced themselves as such by sneering at the banal, repetitive quality of ordinary life. Workers seemed so benumbed that they couldn’t perceive just how numb they were. But the more audacious writers tried to make them conscious of this.

The Bohemians were arrogant. They saw Soho, Montmartre and Greenwich Village as spheres of sublimation, in which ideas and feelings now denied in everyday life could alone be enjoyed. But Bohemia was really just a theatrical performance staged for timid people who, fearing a loss of their old expressive abilities, asked artists to live out an identity that they were denying in themselves. “Culture” was now a separate sphere, disconnected from everyday life.

By 1914 young people began to believe those artists who castigated their numbness. A year later, Sigmund Freud could write that life during the long years of peace had become “as shallow as an American flirtation”: but now, with thousands dying by the hour, it was “recovering its full content”. If that was piffle, many believed it. The military recruits of 1914-18 sought experiences of exaltation or abasement in the trenches as a consequence of their disillusion with everyday life. James Joyce foresaw that if you make the rejection of ordinary living a mass phenomenon rather than just a response of baffled individuals, you may end up with an autocratic politics.

Newspapers were intended to recapture the everyday for readers. In the event, most offered mere sensation, disdaining the glorious, pressure-free insignificance of the usual. In the counter-newspaper that is Ulysses, Joyce recorded a day, June 16, 1904, on which nothing much happened. “The ordinary is the proper domain of the artist,” he sniffed. “The extraordinary can safely be left to journalists.”

The Bohemians had chosen art out of the conviction that what life there is in a mass society survives only in elite artistic forms. This left them isolated, depressed and ultimately doomed. Hence Joyce’s lethal put-down of the man who wished to kiss the hand that wrote Ulysses: “No; that hand has done a lot of other things as well.”

A healthy art arises from life and always returns to it. It may offer paths of escape, but for good purposes — to heighten our appreciation of those moments when ordinary people become extraordinary, confronting states of mind and feeling they might not otherwise have known.

Ever since the Greeks, art has helped individuals to contain and control our suffering. It soothes pain by describing it so well. But it can also alert us to future possibilities or help us to imagine our lives in altered states. Problems that seem too close to cope with may be embodied at a helpful remove in an artwork, which allows us to come to terms with them.

Much art has a utopian thrust. From Leonardo to Frank Lloyd Wright, its makers have broken away from the constraints of past practices to imagine new conveyances or settings, whether flying machines or multi-purpose dwellings. Again and again our world has been transformed by a word or image, because the future often turns out to be what artists already are. Art doesn’t just reflect the current state of things. By the skill with which it contains our current realities, it begins the process of transcending them. It evokes a yearning for worlds yet to come.

Some definitions of art are, however, just too wide. To aestheticise long-dead human bodies for display in museums is a sin against the individuality of persons who never consented to such use. The Egyptian mummies, like the Danish bog people, should be returned to their intended resting places. While an old photograph can become an art object, a human body never can.

- Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Living (Faber & Faber, £14.99) by Declan Kiberd is out now

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