139. Attr. Leon Battista Alberti. The Ideal City, c.1475
it points us; that we don't know how to get better at having permanent relationships. People powerfully impressed by art traditionally become its scholars. But it is the marriage counsellor who puts into action the values that Poussin merely painted, however tenderly and nobly. The impulse behind his work, surely, was to help strengthen relationships, and he did this by getting us to contemplate the moment when a couple make formal vows to one another. This is only the start, not the conclusion of the project, however. Despite the conventional decor of his or her office, a marriage counsellor may well be more loyal to Poussin's values than the students in the art history class. A confusion about the value of art will lead some sophisticated people to shudder at the comparison. The irony, to put the point gently, is that disdain for the comparison does not arise because they love Poussin so much, but because they trivialize the work and aspirations of the artist they only think they admire.
The ultimate ambition of our engagement with art is that we should find ways to enact the values of art in the world. This might not involve 'making art' in the traditional sense of the term. Consider one of the most celebrated portrayals of city architecture. The Ideal City, traditionally ascribed to Picro della Francesca, imagines a perfect urban space: a sequence of noble but fairly restrained buildings, which probably have administrative and commercial roles as well as providing domestic accommodation (139). They are grouped around a circular, temple-like structure, which is a focus for civic life. There is a great sense of harmony and dignity here, but there is variation in the details of individual buildings. Some have open arcades, others have widely protruding eaves; some have balconies, and the delicate colouring of the materials moderates the rigour of the composition. It does not fear formality, but knows how to make it humane and charming.
If we are impressed by this work of art, what should we do? Perhaps we should get worried about who actually painted it? Is this really by Piero? Such concerns have been taken seriously. Following extensive X-ray investigations it turns out that the picture is probably not by Piero at all, but by the architect and theorist Leon Battista Alberti. This kind of investigation has cachet. However, there is another reaction, which is perhaps more important but less explored: to want to know how the fine urban qualities that the artist, whoever he was, cared about could be made more widespread in the minds of property developers and legislative bodies. To pursue this aim. we do not need to take the picture to the X-ray laboratory. We need, metaphorically speaking, to take it to establishments such as Eland House in Bressenden Place, London, the home of the UK government's Department for Communities and Local Government, where key decisions arc made about the country's housing policy and the design of its cities (140).
Where beauty and ugliness are decided upon.
140. I he Department for Communities and I.oca I Govern mcnc. IУ98
A true act of reverence for art isn't necessarily to study it without end; it is to bring the goodness powerfully displayed in a work into active circulation. Fascination with art has often led people to become artists or academic researchers, when instead they might more fairly go into business, recruitment and career advisory services, government, dating agencies, advertising or couples psychotherapy. These are not careers in which you must climb down from the higher ideal of understanding art. They are, in fact, the places where the values that have traditionally been explored and developed in art can, in theory, be taken seriously and made real. Good relationships, elegant cities, work that is honourable and emotionally satisfying, as well as financially rewarding, are the true works of art, to which the objects we call art are only pointers and partial guides.
How do we get to be a bit more like this?
Hi. Henry Moore. Family Group. 1948-9 (сам 1950)
Art is a picture of a destination - it indicates where we should go. However, it may give few clues about how to get there. We too often treat it as a magical object, which will in itself cure alienation, disease, confusion and hardness of heart. It is moving, for example, to encounter a copy of Henry Moore's evocation of an ordinary, close, co-operative family in the Botanical Garden in Brooklyn, because we know how often families are not like that, and that the garden has witnessed plenty of bitter frustration, heartbreaking conflict, sullen cruelty and mutual incomprehension (141). Moore was astonishingly adept at shaping bronze, but the specialist programmes in adolescent education held nearby at City University, New York, are more precisely devoted to making real the hopes that the artist alludes to.
Proper appreciation of the benefits of art must involve an awareness of when to put art aside. At a certain point, we should leave the museum, or the sculpture in the park, to pursue the true purpose of art, the reform of life; not because we are ungrateful or unappreciative, but because we have found much that is genuinely precious in art, and that we need to make more real. Over the course of this book we have been looking at the benefits of art: how it can enhance our capacities in relationships, improve our ideas about money, help us cope with our natural selves and shape our ambitions in politics. This already represents a marked departure from the way most of the art establishment has hitherto invited us to consider art. We should go further. The true purpose of art is to create a world where art is less necessary, and less exceptional; a world where the values currently found, celebrated and fetishized in concentrated doses in the cloistered halls of museums are scattered more promiscuously across the earth. It should not be incongruous to say both that we can be lovers of art and that we may hope that society will one day make less of a fuss about art.
The true aspiration of art should be to reduce the need for it. It is not that we should one day lose our devotion to the things that art addresses: beauty, depth of meaning, good relationships, the appreciation of nature, recognition of the shortness of life, empathy, compassion, and so on. Rather, having imbibed the ideals that art displays, we should fight to attain in reality the things art merely symbolizes, however graciously and intently. The ultimate goal of the art lover should be to build a world where works of art have become a little less necessary.
A Hypothetical Commissioning Strategy
For most of human history, artists were expected to make works of art, but not to decide what those works would be about. In the West, the agenda of art was to glorify the Christian message. All artists were given the same pre-prepared themes and invited to do their best. There was still room for individual greatness, but it was held in check (or sometimes even enhanced) by a set of shared parameters.
Appendix: An Agenda for Art
By contrast, our age believes in originality - a sometimes dangerous presumption, for it can lead to novelty being mistaken for artistic greatness. Many excellent artists are better at making art than settling on its purpose. In this book, we argue that we should reclaim the idea of defining an artistic agenda. Rather than any supernatural purpose, this would focus on strictly human ends. Artists would be invited to follow an unapologetically didactic mission: to assist mankind in its search for self-understanding, empathy, consolation, hope, self- acceptance and fulfilment. No longer would the questions 'What is art about?' or 'What is art for?' be opaque. There would still, of course, be greater and lesser artists, but what they were up to would be obvious - and their benefit to society would be easier to grasp and to defend.
the virtues of love