Great Uncle Fred? Our local hospital has just put up a statue and no one knows what it is. It looks like a bowl of fruit. It`s rubbish but even if it was really really good, wouldn`t the money be better spent on making people feel well? Art is just a waste of time and money, don`t you think? (Alex, Summer 2008)

No. Well, yes. Art is useless. It just sits there, doesn`t it? A complete waste of time and money. You can`t eat it and while you`re looking at it, reading it, listening to it, you`re not working. You can`t sit on it, let alone drive it. It might teach you a little but not much. Yes, in many ways, art is quite unnecessary. Something similar might be said about food. A much greater level of efficiency could be reached if we did away with meals altogether and we all got our nourishment from little white pills, or injections - perfectly achievable. Chocolate and roast beef and rhubarb crumble - all quite unnecessary. Clothes as well: unnecessary amounts of difference and colour and style - why don`t we all wear boiler suits?Sport: entirely unnecessary. Christmas: what`s the point? All we really need are politicians, lawyers, doctors and people to make the little white pills and the boiler suits. Everything else is unnecessary. Obviously, there is quite a lot to be said for what is unnecessary and some unnecessary things are so hungered for that they verge on being, actually, needed. Art is needed. It has been around for as long as humans have, and is perhaps the best way we have to distinguish ourselves from the other animals. Those who create must do so. There is a basic instinct for the expression of balance, rhythm, harmony and think what a wasteland we would inhabit if no one were to let that instinct speak. Think how important drawing and painting and stories and music are to children. Our situation is mysterious and must be explored. Science is one way, looking for the answers; art is the other way, knowing that there are no final answers. The imagination, perhaps our finest attribute, so often disrespected, must express itself: art is the imagination`s official arena. We must communicate with one another, we must entertain one another, we must challenge the norm, be subversive. Art is the best means for all of these. And art heals. (I know at least five people whose broken lives have been put back together thanks to art.) Think of a World without art. Aargh! A nightmare World. For the sculpture of the bowl of fruit is not the beginning and end of it. You might not like that particular piece of art but it is related to all the pieces that you do like. Art provides the alternative, and if it is any good, it is always on the side of the angels. Its purpose you might say is to cheer up the down-trodden and to terrify the bully. It represents the triumph over chaos. It makes the World habitable. It looks the facts, including death, in the face and is therefore wholeheartedly on the side of life. Only gardening is as concerned with beauty. Oh me oh my. A World without art! Nightmare. Please think again about the well-meaning souls who placed that bowl of fruit outside your hospital. One day, when all the doctors are dead, that sculpture might yet be loved and still cheering up some, if not all, of the sick. Art endures. It is what we are proud of as nations. Who is thought of as your greatest countryman? William Shakespeare. Who is mine? Robert Burns. These are the people we want the rest of the World to know us by. Artists. So is art a waste of time and money? Well yes, but what would we ever do without it?

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