Understanding the power of art

One of the reasons that we need to think about the power of art, is this level of unconscious influence that images create. One of the things I’ve often been very puzzled by is how quick the zeitgeist tunes our eyes; how quickly, for example, the wrong cut of jeans is actually known to all young people. You may think that that’s a very far cry from fine art, or from art at all, but it isn’t actually. The question of how images work upon us is important here. They work upon us as ideals and as value systems. They inculcate value systems and they do it pretty much imperceptibly. We don’t really know how we’ve been affected.

In terms of the importance of renewing relationships with art, we see this in the current demonstrations and protests about the statues commemorating colonial tyrants like Rhodes or other figures from the Imperial past, the American past and the Civil War. There has to be re-engagement all the time and the living quality of art is actually a mobile quality, too, so the different values and their significance keep shifting.

I've written an essay about Paula Rego. She has made a triptych of women being trafficked. The triptych is a religious form that echoes Catholic Portugal, where she was born. The women suffering, as they’re being trafficked on boats and on carts and wagons, are figures of a form of contemporary martyrdom or contemporary victims of torture; so, there are religious connotations there. It’s a fabulous piece of draughtsmanship. She draws when she paints, as well, so it’s all very absorbing.

The extraordinary thing is that a recognition of the power of art comes most strongly from those who want to destroy it. If you think about it, the people who destroyed the churches, Catholic statues and images in the Reformation in England were acknowledging that these false idols were blasphemous and went against the Commandments. They also wished to destroy them because of the power they had.

So, there is a way in which the power of the image has to be deleted because if it is allowed to continue and linger, it will affect you. It will continue to be present. There’s a rather primitive relationship between making an image of something and invoking its reality. This is one of the active powers of images. We have a rise in iconoclasm all over the world – a tremendous rise – and it’s not adventitious that it coincides with the rise in the art market. The two are connected.

The value of works of art is very much contested by certain individuals, in the case of paintings that are defaced in museums, but also by people who object to the way in which the West preserves and reveres works of art. It’s been argued, I think very correctly, that the Bamiyan Buddhas were destroyed in 2001 after surviving for thousands of years unharmed. They were destroyed by the Taliban, who resented the fact that the Americans — and their allies, including us, were saying that the sculptures had to be preserved while they were bombing people.

The Taliban dynamited the Buddhas out of the mountain because they wanted to show that they cared more about men, women and children than they cared about art – which the corrupt West seemed to care about more. We think of iconoclasm as attacking the subjects of art. When we think of statues of Confederate generals in the Southern states of America; statues of former colonialists, like Colston, the British slave owner in Bristol, who was toppled recently and thrown into the water; of Cecil Rhodes in South Africa and the Rhodes Must Fall movement that spread from South Africa all the way to Oxford, where his statue still stands on the high street (the college has said that they will take it down) – here, the iconoclasm is directed at the subject matter, the person who is being revered. That’s one way that art has power. It tells a story and it preserves that story for eternity.

Sometimes it’s not the subject matter of the statue or the memorial, or even the history of the painting, it’s actually to do with the value that has been given to the work of art, as in the case of the Bamiyan Buddhas. You therefore get a lot of people rebelling against that imposition on them; that this thing is valued more than they would ever see in their life; that a nurse is being paid X or a street cleaner is being paid Y, and this artist for making a banana on a wall with a tape is being paid huge amounts of money.

So, that sense of the injustice, the idolatry there, is the idolatry of money falsely placed; the value has been falsely attributed. The power of art is also to spread some kind of comfort and strength; and I think in this very difficult period of the virus, that the power is to see something that has been made carefully, with skillful sensitivity.

It is possible that the cave paintings of animals were acts of propitiation against the danger that might come from the animals being slaughtered and used for human survival. They were painted or drawn on the walls of caves to invoke them, pay honour to them and placate them. That’s one function; but going back to Goya, the other function is to communicate that this shouldn’t happen ever again.

There is a way in which by freezing it into an artefact, condensing into it the passion that one feels against such things happening, that there is an attempt being made to avert it. The technical term is apotropaic. So, if you are an ancient Greek, then you make an image of Medusa. If you are a new classical architect, and you make an image of Medusa and you place it over the entrance to a building, bristling with snakes, with tongue-lolling teeth, that horror head will avert dangers, to still the possibility of further repeats of such terrors.