Jeanette winterson why art matters

Art can offer no obvious return. Its rate of exchange is energy for energy, intensity for intensity. The time you spend on art is the time it spends with you; there are no shortcuts, no crash courses, no fast tracks.

Only the experience. Art can't change your life; it is not a diet programme or the latest guru - it offers no quick fixes. What art can do is prompt in us authentic desire. By that I mean it can waken us to truths about ourselves and our lives; truths that normally lie suffocated under the pressure of the hour emergency zone called real life. Art can bring us back to consciousness, sometimes quietly, sometimes dramatically, but the responsibility to act on what we find is ours.

I know of a man, a Quaker, who volunteered as an ambulance driver in the second world war. While other men had pictures of their sweethearts in their breast pockets, he carried a photo of a Queen Anne chair. In his despair at where human folly had brought him and millions of others, he needed to remember the glory of the human spirit, as well as its loss. Like Barbara Hepworth, he believed that art affirms and sustains life at its highest level. He became an antique dealer because he wanted to be surrounded by what the Jews call "real presences".

A real presence is one where spirit and body, or spirit and object, have never been separated. It doesn't matter whether we are talking a chair, a picture, a book or a human being; what makes us feel alive is the living quality lodged there.

This quality is abundant in art. It is the reason why art is timeless. It is the reason why art does not date. We don't go to Shakespeare to find out about life in Elizabethan England; we go to Shakespeare to find out about ourselves now. The scale is different, the sensibility has changed, but the spirit is the same. Mass production is about cloned objects. Art is about individual vision. Individuals can work together, as they must in theatre or opera, or where assistants work under a master, or they can work alone.

However it happens, art is never a factory or a production line. Even Duchamp's Readymades were a way of forcing us to concentrate on the thing in itself as it really is. Capitalism doesn't want you to concentrate - you might notice that much is amiss. A blurred, out-of-focus consuming is what suits the marketplace best. Somebody has to buy all that overproduction of useless dead objects.

In contrast, all art is live theatre. The dialogue continues between object, maker, owner, viewer, listener, reader. Roger Warner is 89 and he still talks to his furniture. His daughter Deborah Warner makes the stage talk to us. Art is a continuum, passed down from hand to hand, lost, rediscovered, found in objects as proof of a living spirit that defies the orthodoxy of materialism.

Yes, art becomes a collector's item, or a rich man's trophy. Art is pushing at the boundaries we thought were fixed.

How much can we imagine? The artist is an imaginer. The artist imagines the forbidden because to her it is not forbidden. If she is freer than other people it is the freedom of her single allegiance to her work. Most of us have divided loyalties, most of us have sold ourselves. The artist is not divided and she is not for sale. Posted on January 04, in art , Books , pioneer Permalink. Digg This Save to del. Posted by:.

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This prevents automated programs from posting comments. Having trouble reading this image? Look at the choices that we make — all of these things are choices all of the time. Think of much money every year people spend on crisps, how much money we spend on perfume, how much money we spend on advertising. You guys are going to have a plebiscite costing a hundred and sixty million to see if gay people can get married.

You could do a lot of arts funding with a hundred and sixty million. What we shouldn't do is have false questions and false choices. We're caught in binaries which are nearly always false — I don't know why we have to have them. It's just not true. This is our money and we should have more say in how it is spent and I believe that people really want the arts in their lives. You go to the theatre: it's real. You read a book: it's real. You go into the art gallery: it's real.

Because it speaks to your soul and you don't have to believe in God to know that you've got a soul. This is an edited transcript of Jeanette Winterson's response to an audience question at her Wheeler Centre event , which took place this week at the Athenaeum Theatre.