Art is a way of preserving experiences, of which there are many transient and beautiful examples, and that we need help containing. There is an analogy to be made with the task of carrying water and the tool that helps us do it. Imagine being out in a park on a blustery April day. We look up at the clouds and feel moved by their beauty and grace. They feel delightfully separate from the day-to-day bustle of our lives. We give our minds to the clouds, and for a time we are relieved of our preoccupations
We don'tjust observe her; we get to know irbat is important about her.
2. Johannes Vcrmccr. Woman in Blue Reading a Letter. r.1663
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Art is a very complex kind of bucket.
3.John Constable. Study of Cirrus Clouds, r.1822
and placcd in a wider context that stills the incessant complaints of our egos. John Constable's cloud studies invite us to concentrate, much more than we would normally, on the distinctive textures and shapes of individual clouds, to look at their variations in colour and at the way they mass together (3). Art edits down complexity and helps us to focus, albeit briefly, on the most meaningful aspects. In making his cloud studies. Constable didn't expect us to become deeply concerned with meteorology. The precise nature of a cumulonimbus is not the issue. Rather, he wished to intensify the emotional meaning of the soundless drama that unfolds daily above our heads, making it more readily available to us and encouraging us to afford it the central position it deserves.
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Hope
The most perennially popular category of art is the cheerful, pleasant and pretty kind: meadows in spring, the shade of trees on hot summer days, pastoral landscapes, smiling children. This can be deeply troubling to people of taste and intelligence.
The love of prettiness is often deemed a low, even a 'bad' response, but because it is so dominant and widespread it deserves attention, and may hold important clues about a key function of art. At the most basic level, we enjoy pretty pictures because we like the real thing they represent. The water garden that Monet painted is itself delightful, and this kind of art is especially appealing to people who don't have what it depicts (4). It would be no surprise to find a reproduction of a painting evoking watery, open-air serenity in a noisy, urban, high-rise flat.
The worries about prettiness are twofold. Firstly, pretty pictures are alleged to feed sentimentality. Sentimentality is a symptom of insufficient engagement with complexity, by which one really means problems. The pretty picture seems to suggest that in order to make life nice, one merely has to brighten up the apartment with a depiction of some flowers. If we were to ask the picture what is wrong with the world, it might be taken as saying kyou don't have enough Japanese water gardens' - a response that appears to ignore all the more urgent problems that confront humanity (primarily economic, but also moral, political and sexual). The very innocence and simplicity of the picture seems to militate against any attempt to improve life as a whole. Secondly, there is the related fear that prettiness will numb us and leave us insufficiently critical and alert to the injustices surrounding us.
For example, a worker in a car factory in Oxford might buy a pretty postcard of nearby Blenheim Palace, the historic seat of the Dukes of Marlborough, and overlook the injustice of the undeserving aristocrat who owns it (5). The worry is that we may feel pleased and cheerful too readily - that we will take an overly optimistic view of life and the world. In short, that we will be unjustifiably hopeful.
However, these worries are generally misplaced. Far from taking too rosy and sentimental a view, most of the time we suffer from excessive gloom. We are only too aware of the problems and injustices of the world - its just that we feel debilitatingly small and weak in the face of them.
You have the postcard. Til keep the palace.
J.John Vanbrugh. Blenheim Palace. r.1724
People without much of an education in art tend to think that art should be about pretty things'. The cultural elite gets very nervous about this. Beauty has been under suspicion for a while.
4. Claude Monet, Tift Water-Lily Pond. 1899
What hope might look like.
6. Henri Matisse, Dance (It). 1909
Cheerfulness is an achievement, and hope is something to celebrate. If optimism is important, its because many outcomes are determined by how much of it we bring to the task. It is an important ingredient of success. This flies in the face of the elite view that talent is the primary requirement of a good life, but in many cases the difference between success and failure is determined by nothing more than our sense of what is possible and the energy we can muster to convincc others of our due. We might be doomed not by a lack of skill, but by an absence of hope. Today's problems are rarely created by people taking too sunny a view of things; it is because the troubles of the world are so continually brought to our attention that we need tools that can preserve our hopeful dispositions.
The dancers in iVlatisse s painting are not in denial of the troubles of this planet, but from the standpoint of our imperfect and conflicted - but ordinary - relationship with reality, we can look to their attitude for encouragement (6). They put us in touch with a blithe, carefree part of ourselves that can help us cope with inevitable rejections and humiliations. The picture does not suggest that all is well, any more than it suggests that women always take delight in each others' existence and bond together in mutually supportive networks.
If the world was a kinder place, perhaps we would be less impressed by, and in need of, pretty works of art. One of the strangest features of experiencing art is its power, occasionally, to move us to tears; not when presented with a harrowing or terrifying image, but with a work of particular grace and loveliness that can be, for a moment, heartbreaking. What is happening to us at these special times of intense responsiveness to beauty?
The most striking feature of the small ivory statuette of the Virgin - just 41 cm (16 'л in) high - is the face (7). It is a face of welcome - the kind of look we hope to receive when someone is unreservedly glad to see us. It may remind us how rarely we have met with, or bestowed, such a smile. The Madonna looks full of life, and the incipient gaiety, which looks as though it might break through at any moment, is filled with kindness. It's the sort of good humour that will include you, rather than mock you. Her beauty can give rise to mixed emotions. On the one hand, we are delighted by an awareness of how life should more often be; on the other, we are pained by an acute sense that our own life is not usually like this. Perhaps we feel an ache of tenderness for all the lost innocence of the world. Beauty can make the actual ugliness of existence all the harder to bear.