To celebrate its 25th anniversary, friends of The Art Newspaper and the art world’s great and good came together at the British Museum last night (28 October) for a four-part investigation, supported by Volkswagen, hosted by the museum's director Neil MacGregor and moderated by the distinguished lawyer Baroness Helena Kennedy QC. The subject of the investigation? The greatest question of all: what is art for?
We were thrilled to have four very different, but equally eloquent guest speakers deliberately chosen from outside the art world, who brought their own extraordinary intellect and experience to bear: the cosmologist and professor of mathematics at Cambridge, John Barrow; the writer on comparative religion, Karen Armstrong; the Booker prize novelist, Ben Okri; and former colonel in the Saudi Army and conceptual artist, Abdulnasser Gharem. MacGregor played the role of the judge in his summing up.
MacGregor said: “What’s emerged from this wonderful four-part view on the purpose of art has, I think, been extraordinarily coherent despite coming from such different positions—the scientific, the poetic, the religious and the military. But all of it seems to me to come to very similar conclusions.
John Barrow said that what art prepares us to do is understand diversity and enlarge the human imagination, preparing us for the unexpected.
Karen argued that art exists in order for us to find new ways of being human, that its awe and wonder allow us to enter the mind of 'the other'. She made a point, very much the same point as all the witnesses have made, that it’s that capacity to enter the mind of 'the other' that is essential to human survival today.
And then Ben Okri led us on that wonderful poetic journey that kept bringing us back to one point: that the activity of the individual artist allows a whole society to be changed. His great phrase, that it allows us to "discover the splendour of our inner architecture", was one to cherish, and it’s what every one of our witnesses has said. It allows us to become co-creators of the world, to become God-like in imagining others and wondering at ourselves.
The notion that art can help us make and imagine a new world, as we heard from Abdulnasser Gharem, is of course precisely why it is so threatening to an orthodoxy that knows that there is a fixed order that cannot be disturbed, because if it is disturbed then the balance of power is threatened. It was a very remarkable journey that Abdulnasser took us on, including his great phrase, that the artist 'gives us access to the unconscious mind of the nation'.
The artist can open dark corners of the head that nobody else can reach—an imagined world that we have not fully yet grasped or conceived. Art is to enable us to make the world differently, and in that process to make ourselves differently," MacGregor concluded.