Art for art's sake?

I was listening to David Shepherd on the radio today, as I took a load of garden rubbish to the tip. He had some very interesting points of view, some of which (that human beings are no more important than any other animal, so why the hell doesn’t the BBC do an ‘Environment benefit’ day, rather than concentrating so much on children’s charities, laudable though they are) are considered way too extreme by those in positions of power. I must say his arguments for this stance struck me as being very valid, boiling down to the basic fact that if Man is allowed to selfishly abuse the environment for his own ends, then there’ll be nothing for children to inherit anyway.

He was also talking about his views on art, and how traditional, representational art is scorned nowadays. His work, and that of other artists such as Beryl Cook, isn’t put on display in galleries such as the Tate Modern, even though they are modern paintings. This seems to be because they are ‘popular’ and are therefore beyond the Pale as far as the Establishment is concerned. No matter that his work sells extremely well, both as originals and also in all forms of reproduction, whether framed print or greetings card. I laughed out loud when he described the loss of Charles Saatchi’s artworks in the warehouse fire. He sympathised that CS had spent so much money and had nothing to show for it (unless he had great insurance), but exploded when he read that one of the ‘artists’ (I don’t know whether it was Damian Hirst, Tracey Emin or another) had said that it didn’t matter, they’d do another one. A work of art is surely a one-off, that cannot be ‘done again’.

Oh, and we’ve discovered that digital radio is slower than analogue! We turned on both radios in the kitchen, hoping for a stereo effect, and the old analogue is about half a second faster than the new one! Great for some music – dreadful for talk!