(Image: Guernica, Picasso)

Dec 2020

I was at a zoom party where a friend asked a surprising question. We had been talking about the state of the world when suddenly she asked, “People are losing their jobs, losing their health and losing their lives. Countries are divided, borders are closing, wars are raging. With so much suffering in the world right now, why does art matter?”

My response was immediate: art matters because people matter. Art gives voice to people who can’t be heard. Art shapes the way we see the world and one another. Art matters because a beautiful painting or sculpture can transform us in a way nothing else can. It’s not just that art can brighten our spirits (which it can). A good work of art can excite or incite, provoke or soothe, inspire or unsettle.

In a world of turmoil, art matters more than ever. Art can bring about positive change, economic resilience, political action, even social revolution. In 1987 Pavel Rhaman’s photographs of the painted Bangladeshi protestor Noor Houssain helped bring down a dictator. In 1852 the great American author Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin and it had a profound effect on public attitudes towards slavery, cultivating the soil of Civil War. In 1937, Picasso completed Guernica in response to the bombings of the Basque Country and stated, “Painting is not made to decorate apartments; it is an offensive and defensive instrument of war against the enemy”.

Art rages against the oppressor. Art asks the questions people don’t want to hear. Art reminds us of the things that really matter. As John F. Kennedy said in his final words to the world, “We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda: it is a form of truth.”

A painting might not be able to find a cure for the coronavirus. Neither can a sculpture administrate a vaccine. But it can inspire those who do. It can hold governments to account and keep a record of our times. It’s precisely at moments like this that art matters more than ever.

In 2014, Tate Modern gave a major retrospective of works by the early 20th-century Russian artist, Kazimir Malevich, an artist as influential as he was radical and who has cast a long shadow over the history of modern art. Malevich (1879–1935) lived and worked through one of the most turbulent periods in the twentieth century. Having come of age in Tsarist Russia, Malevich witnessed the First World War and the October Revolution first-hand. He was imprisoned for his controversial abstract works that turned a simple geometric form into a powerful work of political subversion.

Art matters because it asks the important questions. It doesn’t need to have the answer. It can engage the alternative perspective and can encourage critical thought. There will be art made during our time that will help us to remember these days for generations to come. Some of it might come from you. Some of it might even come from me. Yet all art is important because it is representing the voice of those who lived through these days or died during them. In this way, art matters because human beings matter.

[1] John F. Kennedy, October 26, 1963. 35^th president to the USA 1961-1963 (1917-1963)