#89 The Cultural Tutor - The Philosophy and Ethics of Art

- She and Quirk, welcome back to the show. - Thank you, Mr. O'Connor, it's a pleasure to be here. - What socks do you have on today? - They're not red today, I've gone for something somewhat darker. - Yeah, there were some choice comments about your decision in our last podcast. - Well, I think they're more like choice comments about the positioning of the camera that you decided to set up where it was, but the less said about that, the better. - Sure. - On the show. - Do you think there's such a thing as bad art? - Well, that's quite the question to begin with, and I hate to say it, but I think to answer that, we have to ask what is art. And I know that's a kind of question that people of your ilk philosophers like to talk about. And I think that kind of question is actually one reason why a lot of people struggle to get into art, because I try and enjoy painting, and you're here sort of wondering whether, if I spilt some wine on my white shirt, and it was sort of in the shape of a dog, whether that was a work of art or not. But anyway, I don't think we need to get into all that. So to answer the question of whether there's bad art, what is art in the first place? And there's a little sort of thought experiment I like to do, which tells us something quite important about the nature of art. So imagine if I held before you a blank piece of paper, I mean, I have one here. So I held this before you. If I set fire to this, what do you think your reaction would be? - I'd be worried for this fine building, but outside of that, I wouldn't think very much of it. - Sure, okay. And now imagine if this, on this piece of paper, there was something with a very nice pattern on it. Just something simple, some triangles and squares, but it made a pretty pattern and I burnt it. What do you think your reaction? - It would probably depend on whether this was one of a kind hand made or if it's just mass produced. But I think I still wouldn't mind. But you might be ashamed to lose something that's kind of pretty bad, you think I'm ashamed. Anyway, third question. What if I had a photograph of your mother or a drawing of your mother, that matter? And I burnt it in front of you. What would your reaction be? - Well, my reaction would probably be to laugh because I know you're just doing it to make a point, but I think if you went and did that to someone on the street, they wouldn't be very happy about it. But I wonder is that to do with the thing itself or with what you're trying to say by doing it? - Well, this is my point. So I think there we've discovered essentially two cans of art. I mean, there are only really two kinds of graphic art. When I say graphic art, I mean sort of visual art. Let's say painting for now, but it could be drawing, whatever it is. In the first case, if it's a nice pattern is essentially abstract, something that's just pleasing in and of itself. For reasons, you know, to the natural proportion and color, you know, how sort of an orange and blue go very nicely together or purple and gold and then certain shapes and certain patterns, they're very pleasing to us regardless of what they are, it doesn't matter. Now, the second kind of the photograph of your mother that I was burning, the reason it bothers you is because, well, there's a representation of your mother on there and you attach some significance to that. The point being art is essentially representational. Art is always in reference to something else. It's trying to say something. So in that case, what we're just trying to do is, is, well, portray a mother and perhaps say something about her. So I think you can essentially define art as a language, right, especially in the representational sense. It's trying to say something and it's trying to say it in a particular way. And then you can evaluate art, whether it's good or bad, based on what it is trying to say and how well it says it. And the reason I like this is because one of the biggest sort of questions that always comes up with a good art, this is a bad art. How can we judge it as well? What about fascist propaganda? What about Nazi art? We say, oh, you know, it could be very well made. It could be technically very impressive in the beautiful dressmanship or whatever it is. But it's obviously saying something bad that we think is morally wrong. And it seems quite, it's very difficult to reconcile the fact that something can be technically impressive but equally morally wrong. So when you think about art in that way, as a language, it's trying to say something, and the question is, what is it saying? And how does it say it? You can judge it on the first ground, the moral ground, and on the second ground, which is, I guess, technical. And I think that's a pretty simple way to answer the question of whether or not art is good or bad. But it just throbs some very interesting questions, I think. I mean, we're in a church right now and I think religious art is particularly interesting. When we think about the most famous religious art in the world, one of your favorite pieces of art may be your favorite. David, by my clients. Now, I'm curious if you think that is a good work of art. I mean, it's a bit of a silly question, but tell me. It's interesting. David is probably the most spectacular man-made item that I've ever seen. I think it's been my favorite sculpture since the first time I saw it in Florence before that it was Rodan's prodigal son. But the interesting thing about both of those is that there are multiple versions. With Rodan's prodigal son, if you see one in London or you see one in Paris, it's kind of the same thing. With David, because this is. I don't really know how Rodan's sculptures work, but it's some kind of cast. It gets replicated somehow, right? And so there's no original one, as you know. He liked to make them with clay with his hands, often on a smaller scale, and then his assistants, actually, his workshop, would then produce some a larger scale in bronze, or even a marble, and then the becathed several times. - Right, and so when you go and see Rodan's thinker, if you see the big one in the Rodan Museum in Paris, it kind of feels like you're seeing the real one, but there's also one in the Vatican, and there's probably one in the V&A or somewhere, and you kind of feel like you're seeing the same thing and it's pretty beautiful. David also has multiple versions, because there are copies of David. - Sure. - There's a copy of David in the V&A, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. There's a copy of David in Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas, which is a reason, one of the few life-size replicas of David, but they don't have the same effect, because there's something about picturing the block of marble, and Michelangelo releasing the sculpture from that, from that block of art, from that block of marble, which there's something about the skill, there's something about the technical proficiency, that I think is quite marvellous. So probably my favorite sculpture in the world, yes, David, I like it a lot, but it's, I don't think it's just the representation of David, because when I see the copy in Caesar's Palace in Vegas, I always find it more funny than impressive. - Sure, well, this is kind of, to my point, somewhat about what makes work of our good, what it's trying to say, and how it says it, clearly, whatever Michelangelo was trying to say, he said very, very well. I mean, I haven't seen the real thing, I must confess, I've seen the replica in the V&A, and it's simply astounding, the scale of it. I really felt like I was standing in front of a giant, he's sort of reading in the Bible, or in all of literature and literary history, folk tales from around the world, you read about giants, and I've, you know, I never knew what it meant to stand before a giant until I was there with David, and it was just a colossal meal. It's more than five meters tall, which people don't realize. I mean, one of the reasons people don't realize that we may get into, which is either usually to see photographs of it could offer from any context. Anyway, before we get to that, when you look at David, though, when you look at David, Michelangelo's David, are you seeing the biblical King David? I'm thinking about his, him preparing to fight Goliath, or are you seeing the work of a man called Michelangelo, this wonderful Italian artist, and you're admiring his work, and you're not thinking about the biblical King. I, that's a question. I know, I know. You know what I'm driving at. We were in the V&A together, and we saw this replica of David. And I think I was saying to you, like, it's really cool, but it's got dust on it, and you should really see the real thing, 'cause it's just such a masterful sculpture, and you're saying, look at the sign news, you can see the sign news in the vein. It's so impressive that the way you sign up the muscles, and you had to go at me, because you said I was sort of worshipping the wrong thing, if you like. Well, I also have a go, you weren't wrong to do that. It is absolutely astounding, technically, which is, he said what he wanted to say very, very well, but what I don't think my mind understanding is, and certainly the fact that when I asked you what you thought of it, you gave me a litany of reasons why I loved it. Not one of them had anything to do with David and Goliath and the story that was being depicted. In which case, I think by those metrics, you can say that David may be a brilliant work of art in some sense, but I don't think it's good religious art. It's certainly not good Christian art. I don't know how many people who ever looked at that statue, the most famous statue in the world, I think, probably alongside the thinker. I don't know how many people have ever looked at that and been drawn to sort of feel a greater, but I don't know what the word would be, to understand more clearly the nature of David in his story. Surely, I mean, I know that some people have, but I think that David and some of the works like that from the Renaissance, when you really think about them, even maybe Michelangelo's ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, a lot of Raphael's, Madonna's too often we drawn to admire the technical scale of his artistic, I can't believe how realistic it is, I can't believe how beautiful this is, but the truth of the story they're trying to represent, what they're trying to tell us sort of gets left behind. And I think you can make a pretty convincing case that it's maybe it's good tentacle art, maybe it's good pagan art. David is probably the greatest leavened pagan statue that's been made, right? 'Cause essentially, what do we look at when we see it? We see man at his finest and his greatest, completely naked. It wasn't the first, I don't think, full size. Donatello, I think the first full size nude male statue since antiquity, surely before Michelangelo, but obviously Michelangelo took that. to his extreme with his David, what we see is the return of classical culture, the return of the Greco-Roman ideal, the view of man and his human kind that you get in Christian writings, I think of Thomas a campus, particularly in what he says about man being essentially worth nothing, we're just going to pass off this earth very soon. I don't get any of that from David. And I don't think anybody does to me, it's a fine pagan work. I'm not there's nothing wrong with that in particular. I'm not putting my, I'm not the setting out my stall on either side of that argument. But I think it's quite important, it's not some people usually think about when they see these famous works of art. And it doesn't how the David is so, we're so overexposed to it, it's very hard to look at it as if we've never seen it before, which I suppose is true of a lot of other works of art. That's why I like sculpture because there's something about the size of it that just isn't replicable. It's the same thing with architecture. It's why people travel to see these buildings. People travel to see paintings as well, but I don't know how other people feel, but I sometimes am a bit underwhelmed going to a gallery and seeing a famous painting. It's cool to be in its presence, but you're not enjoying the painting. You're enjoying staring at the actual bit of canvas that Da Vinci touched, which is a different experience as something John Berger went out. He's like, when you go to a museum, you're no longer enjoying the art. You're enjoying the experience. Exactly. This is something that I was going to say actually with this little thorax room with a bit of paper. Imagine if I held up a bit of paper and there's some scribbles on it, and I burnt it, that I just made right now. You'd be like, whatever man. But if I had this bit of paper in my pocket, I brought it out, it was covered in scribbles, and I burnt it, and then I said, oh, Pablo Picasso made that. You'd probably be horrified, right, that I'd burn something by Picasso. So art does also have this bonus representational side. I think this also has this, I don't, it becomes an art effect, right, which even regardless of what it is and what it's saying, the fact that it is this historical item that appears to have some sort of, I think, you know, the famously Walter Benjamin, you know, in that, the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, this like unbelievably famous art essay, even though a lot of it is really about cinema rather than rather than painting. He talks about the aura you get when you see a work of art in the pigment as it were or in the marble, and he read about how that was kind of demolished by photographic reproduction, which you touched on already. Yes, you're saying, when you go to gallery, when you go to wherever the hell it is, to Paris and you go to Louvre, you're not doing it because you really want to go and admire all the wonderful works that were in there. You're doing it so you can see, you can say, I've stood in the same room as whichever given painting it is. Yeah, it's quite often, I think if you ask somebody after going to a museum, what their favorite piece of art was, it almost feels a bit stupid and naive to say, oh, I really liked that Mona Lisa. People tend to say after seeing a gallery, oh, do you remember that one we saw of that thing because they didn't, they'd never seen it before because what they're seeing is an image for the first time, and that's what gallery is once, once words. It's difficult to, I mean, it sounds simple, but it's difficult to keep in mind and remember that not very long ago, it was impossible to see these paintings unless you went and saw them. I mean, impossible to even see a representation of them because the best you had was somebody else trying to paint it, which is obviously going to be totally different. Photographic reproduction totally changed that. I've often thought about the question like, you know, the Mona Lisa was stolen, and then it was recovered. Partly the reason it's so famous, I hear. Suppose that we discovered that this whole time we got the wrong one, and the real Mona Lisa that Da Vinci painted was somewhere else, right? Or there's another Mona Lisa in some other gallery in Spain somewhere, right? It was supposedly painted alongside it. But suppose we discovered this other Mona Lisa, which is the real one, and the one in the Louvre is a fake. Which one is the Mona Lisa? Obviously, naively, it's the one that Da Vinci painted, but which one is the iconic one? Which one is the one that's on all of the images you've ever seen? Which is the one that's famous? Which is the one that's like in all of the films, all the television programs, all the history books, all every single time you've ever seen that photo? The iconic image you've seen will have been this fake Mona Lisa. And in a way, I'd kind of rather go and see that now than the other one if what I'm going for is the novelty of experiencing this famous piece of art, rather than the bit of art itself. We'll go back to the cultural tutor in just a moment. But first, do you struggle to focus? I do. My mind can be all over the place when I'm supposed to be getting productive work done. That is why today's sponsor, Brain FM, was created. Brain FM is an app created for professionals seeking productivity boosts. 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That was, I think it's because of some sort of varnish protective varnish I was applied in the 17th century when it was in France. They were trying to preserve it because Leonardo famously used these very sort of novel methods of painting and his paintings. All this stuff deteriorated really quickly. So whatever he had in front of him, you know, some say he never even finished it. You know, when he died, he gave it to boy, he'd already given it to King Francis, the first of France. Whatever he finally finished working on, it's not the same thing we're looking at now. It's physically deteriorated. I've also been meddled with to the point that even now it's not what it was in the past. And the best example of that I think is probably actually the last supper, one of the two or three most famous paintings in the world, again, by Leonardo. It's one of the most iconic. It's one of these iconic images from others that have entered the world of popular culture. It gets parried again and again and again. That painting is not. It's almost wrong to say it's by Leonardo himself. You know, he finished it in the 1490s. Well, where did he paint it? He was painting it in what was going to be the tomb, I think, the family tomb of Ludovico Schwarzer, who was the Duke of Milan. I know the tomb never got built and ended up getting turned into a refectory, a sort of dining room. The monk's in on the wall, obviously when it's in a kitchen, it gets covered in grime and dirt and a muck and smoke. And then it starts to deteriorate and people try and restore it. And then someone actually a few decades later decides to put a door through that wall, so hence the feet of Christ are missing from that painting. Then it gets flooded, the building. And then I think during the Napoleonic Wars, that particular church, the Santa Maria della Grazia, I think it's called, was used as a stable for cavalry. Then the Second World War, it was bombed and the whole thing was destroyed basically, but that one wall miraculously survived with the painting on it, damaged somewhat, of course. And then in the 70s, I think, 1770s and 80s, there was a major restoration of the painting. So after all these steps, after all these years and years of it being damaged and restored, and people, obviously every new generation thinks, okay, now we're going to be the ones to restore Leonardo's original vision. We know what he wanted. We're going to put it back to place, but back into the condition it should have always been in. I think we can't really look at that painting and say this is the loss of a by Leonardo himself. So what is it then? Well, it's sort of a facsimile, not a facsimile, sorry, if I may say it's a palimpsest of one generation after another. I mean, I don't think I'm trying to devalue the art. I'm just trying to try to put it in context. I think it's important to bear this in mind that art is and always must be, even in the age of photographic reproduction, still is essentially bounded by physical constraints, unlike films. Well, that's even that's not necessarily true. I guess films you get them on, you know, on literal physical film or even digital. But let's say, the thing about a painting or a statue is that it is a physical object. Even when we photograph it, the photographs change from minute to minute day to day depending, I mean, if you Google now, any famous painting or any painting whatsoever, there'll be thousands of images of it and just take them on Lisa or something, you know, remind us all since we've mentioned it. It's going to look different in every single photo, the lighting, the color grading. I mean, And I'm not a technical guy, I don't really know. how cameras work. But obviously all the different settings that you have with the camera added to that where the person is stood when they're taking it, the glare, the lighting and the time of day, that the shadows, all of that means every single photo of the Mona Lisa also looks different and then over time it deteriorates as well. And you know, it kind of touches on what you were saying about the strangeness and the importance of seeing something person. But even then when you see a painting in person it can change as well. I was at this really wonderful either there's an exhibition at the Tate recently for the expressionists and in one of the rooms they have this painting by Kandinsky and Abstract Painting. It was on its own in a single room but the lighting was on a timer and over the course of 10 minutes it slowly changed. It started out I think we were pretty intense cold white and slowly slowly descended into a much warmer, slightly dimmer yellow. And the whole point was to show how a painting literally changes before your eyes depending on how it's lit. I'm sort of going on a bit here but my point is that whatever we think of as a stationary physical fixed permanent painting, this work of art by so and so, by such and such an artist, that really isn't the case. It's this ever-living, ever-changing thing. In the case of the the last supper, it's an obvious case where I mean the thing's been bombed and it's been restored and it's been the feet of gone missing or whatever. I don't know like I'm trying to think what is it that we're that we're left with? Are we left with a bunch of later people's interpretation of Leonardo? Are we left with sort of a glimpse of Leonardo? Like what is it that we're left with? I mean do you think it's accurate to say if you were doing a tour? This is Leonardo's last supper. If we were in that building and I said oh who painted this, would you say Leonardo did? I suspect I would say, well, Leonardo painted this and several others have since made their own additions to it. I mean I don't think this is something that's too troubling. The same is true of any given building writer, take a cathedral or a church. If I said to you when was Westminster Abbey built? Or could you possibly say it's been added to generation after generation after generation? I don't think it takes away. It's different because like a piece of art is supposed to be an artist painted this piece of art and finished it and said voila. With buildings things get added on and you might sort of change the architect's original plan but it feels different to something like a restoration project. There is a body of ethics around art restoration. It seems quite straightforward. If you've discovered this old bit of art that's been a bit neglected, oh restore it. A lot of people don't really understand the science that goes behind it. I certainly don't but you think well we must have worked it out because we did it all the time. There must be some technique that we've discovered that does it accurately. Do you think that we should restore old pieces of art? I'm inclined to agree with as I often do even when I'd rather not sometimes. I'm inclined to agree John Ruskin, the great Victorian art critic and writer, one of the greatest that's ever been. He said of buildings as well as paintings. All restoration is a lie. We should never, all we can ever do is preserve. We should be grateful for what has survived. But to be so arrogant to think actually we are the ones who can restore it. Half the work of restoration is usually undoing previous restorations. That's the thing about it because technology is always improving. It's always improving. And of course more rudimentary techniques, whatever restoration gets done, ends up leaving things which people in the future, whatever we do now, 100 years from now, who knows what AI will do for our restoration. And no doubt people 50 years from now think actually the way that was restored wasn't quite right. I think we should be so lucky to have these things that have miraculously survived down the centuries despite all the decades of paintings that have nearly been lost is wonderful. So keep them as they are and hope to find in them the ghost of whatever is original artist. When dilapidation occurs over a long period of time, it does feel a bit weird to undo that. It feels like we might be trespassing on the sacred. For example, the statue of liberty. If we were to just make it bronze again, it was originally bronze and it's iconic green colour. It's iconic green colour in other words. It's not how it was intended. I think that if we were to clean the statue of liberty so it wasn't green anymore, it would be seen as a bit of a disgrace. People would be very, very upset about it. And yet if some vandal when the statue of liberty was first unveiled, went up to it and painted it green, I think people would have thought we should undo that. And so when the violence is inflicted by the hand of God, we sort of think it a crime to undo it. When if it's done intentionally by a human, it's the human that's committed the crime. The suffragettes slashed paintings. I can't remember which ones, but they went into galleries and they took a like a meat cleave and then slashed open this painting. They recently happened at some college in Cambridge as well. I think as students protested, slashed open the painting. And I don't think you'd look at that and say, well, let's just leave it as it is and be grateful that we still have any of it left because we can just stitch it back together again. And yet when there's less immediacy, it's like John Ruskin says, don't even bother, don't go near it because you're ruining it. I mean, how long does it have to take before it becomes wrong? Sure. I don't think we need to start just sort of splitting hairs over this. I mean, obviously, if someone goes or rips something in half, sowing it back together, I don't think is what exactly he meant by restoration, what he meant is when something has survived this long, as it is, preservation is the order of the day. Preservation can obviously mean making sure it doesn't get any further damage or no further degradation happens. But no, I don't think that's something we need to worry about too much. Why is it that people think we should restore art in the first place? Well, when we have an old bit of art that's got some rhyme and stuff on it, like the Sistine Chapel ceiling was restored. When was it restored in the 20th century? In the 80s. And so there are some photographs of the old ceiling, but they're not great photographs, but you can see how it was significantly dark. I think that didn't Picasso go to the Sistine Chapel and just think it was crap. I think that there have been famous artists who've gone to the Sistine Chapel and been like, somebody famously said something like he's a good sketch artist, but not a very good painter because it just looked sepia, essentially. And so there's this massive restoration effort and part of the grandeur of the Sistine Chapel ceiling is its vibrancy, it's the color, right? And so it seems pretty straightforward, but we should spell it out. Why is it that people think, faced with this grimy ceiling, that we should restore it? Well, I think the reason we kind of mentioned it earlier, I think, fun enough. It's because people want to see the vision of the original painter, the original artist, restored to life. We have this tendency, understandably perhaps, to sort of worship these great painters, these great artists, and it's their vision that we want to have. We want to see what Michelangelo wanted himself to create, not what he created in a subsequently degraded or being metal with. I mean, the funny thing is in the Sistine Chapel, on the wall, you've got the last judgment, which he painted about, you know, I think 30 or 40 years later, very, very, very different work of art compared to the ceiling. Anyway, after Michelangelo's death and it was very controversial the painting because, you know, everyone was naked, basically, and some of it was pretty lured as well. And there's a few, sort of, in jokes. Is that like the skin of… Well, you've got Saint Bartholomew, who, you know, in his co-corning to legend, was flayed alive. And he's always portrayed in art, you know, holding his flayed skin beside himself. Michelangelo supposedly put his own face into the face of Bartholomew's skin. And there's also some other little bits, I think, Midas, who is portrayed in the bottom right hand corner in the underworld. Michelangelo, for the face of Midas painted, I can't remember who it was, I think it was the people secretaries, some people secretaries. Remown how long it was taking. So Michelangelo puts his face onto Midas and there's a serpent clutching his place where you're not wish to be clutched by a male member. Yes, indeed. And, well, this is a kind of a separate point now, but I love the fact that in this work of art, we go in there, some sort of creature, we go in there and we think, wow, we're in the presence of this beautifully sacred eye. You know, isn't this this deeply a pious, Christian place? And then you've got Michelangelo, basically, making jokes on the wall behind you and poking fun at people he didn't like. That's going to have a separate story. More to one of the restoration because they were naked, it was considered incredibly inappropriate. A painter several years later was asked to paint over these nude figures. So he painted lawing cloths around them to obscure their nudity. And I think, I'm not sure, but I think they've mainly since been removed and it may have even been in that 80s restoration when they actually removed some of these cloths. I'm not sure about that. That may have made a fact check me out, but they have been removed. And they said there's an interesting question there as well because they were added. And then they were there for a long time. And it just kind of, but anyway. So the point is fairly straightforward. Well, we know what the artist intended for it to look like. And so we can quite easily scrape away at this stone and do so in such a way that gives us an image of what the artist intended. Arthur C. Danto, who I think is a historian or scholar of art, asks the question, why we have unfinished Michelangelo sculptures? Why don't we just finish them off? That would seem disgraceful. I think if you took these wonderful moments of sculpture, you can even see it beginning to emerge from the stone. And we say, well, we know what the artist intended for it to look like. So why don't we finish it off for him? That would be seen as a disgrace. And I don't think just because, oh, you wouldn't do it quite as well as Michelangelo. I mean, if you get a robot to do, we can train an AI on every single Michelangelo sculpture and get it to do it more perfectly than he could have done so himself. It's something to do with the fact that like, that just is now the piece of art. Oh, there's something beautiful about seeing it halfway done. There's something artistic in that. There's something that, although it was once intended to be a fully finished sculpture, the piece of art now just is this unfinished sculpture. If we're willing to say it in that direction, why not the other? Why is it that restoring something backward is an obvious thing that we should do? But restoring something forward is defacing a piece of art. Well, I think there's a problem with the question. I think there's different things, basically, is the reason why I mean, restoring forwards is not restoring as it is, it's completing. You are going the opposite direction. I don't think that's too complicated. There's two different words, but aren't they essentially doing the same thing? No, no, you're not. At one point, something was once complete and you want to restore it to that state of completion. In the other circumstances, something was never completed. This sculpture was finished in the mind of the artist. No, it was left unfinished, right? But it was finished in the mind of the artist. The piece of art, as intended, as it was, is this thing that exists as a concept. And don't get me wrong, by the way, I obviously get what you're saying. But I'm trying to think about this as trying to break down this assumption and see if it holds. Because, of course, yeah, okay, the painting once existed. I mean, the thing about the future and the past, the thing that they've got in common, unless you're a B-theorist of time, is that both of them don't exist. What you have as a piece of art that does not exist, that only exists in either the mind of the artist or the mind of the people who saw it or knew what it was supposed to look like. That's the only place it exists. It's not there. And okay, it feels more natural to go back in time rather than forward in time. But I'm asking, is there actually a principle distinction? You can say, well, one's called restoration and one's called completion, but why is one of those more legitimate than the other? Why can't I say that the cysteine chapel ceiling with all of its grime is now just a piece of art in itself? 'Cause look at the beauty of how time exhibits its will upon even the most beautiful of art and blah, blah, blah and how beautiful that is. But people will say, sure, but I wanna see what Michelangelo wanted it to look like. And I could say, but look at this wonderful, unfinished sculpture and how magical it is, it's sure, but I wanna know what Michelangelo wanted it to look like. I don't think there is a difference. I mean, I'm inclined to view that even restoration is something we should be so, so, so, so cautious about. As I said, because it's an classic example of every succeed in generation believing, and I'm not doubting the skill and the brilliance of the people who do this work and often the work they do is genuinely worthwhile, the work of cleaning for example. But we should be so, so, so cautious. For much, I mean, perhaps for the very reason that you're pointing out, meddling with it, I think, well, for me, it's a question of risk or whatever we do have. - Yeah, the risk of damaging it further is, it's going backwards thing, like the pyramids of Giza. If we were to just like restore them, like part of the beauty is how old it is. - Okay, yes, exactly. Time, time works wonders on these. But why, I guess what I'm asking is like, as people probably know that the pyramids of Giza were once these, these perfect, and covered in polished bubble and there's a small golden pyramidion on the top as well. If we decided to sort of rebuild that, and bear in mind, this is architecture, like you were saying with Westminster Abbey and everything, like it's different from art, like it's not like defacing a great artist's work, it's architecture, it's a building. But is the restoration of the Sistine Chapel, or let's say is the, is the grime accumulating on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, more akin to the dilapidation of the pyramids of Giza, or to dust falling upon a sculpture that every day someone comes and cleans off to try. - I think it's a really good example. The first one, for sure. The first example of the dilapidation over time of any historical building. - Well, the funny thing is, in the past, people were much more comfortable without a restoration. The Victorians themselves, of course, were when rampant around Britain, a tearing apart medieval churches and rebuilding them and restoring them as they saw fit. - Well, there was less sentimentality about preserving the original. - I don't think sentimentality, I think it's almost the wrong word. I think there's been a significant cultural shift. We live in much more of a, we live in the era of museumification, I think. You know, now, obviously, when we have some historical building, we expect ropes around it and plaques and offence and visiting hours and tall guides and glass to stop the world. - And glass of deterring. - For most of history, I don't see favorite. - Exactly, precisely. For a painting about it, I also talk about buildings, as well here, though that's how we think about how to make historical side or historical building or any historical object of any value should be preserved. For most of history, the opposite was the case. It was simply there. And if you like, we're just part of the fabric of daily life. You know, the amount of stories of all these sort of famous writers in the 18th century, traveling around Europe, they were just able to clamber up these ancient Roman buildings and hack a piece off and take it home with them. I'm not saying that's a good thing. You see, my point is that I think in the past, we didn't have this compartmentalization of, this is the present, and here are all the historical things I'm gonna put them in boxes. There's history. And now we can go and sort of look at it. Oh, that's very interesting, learn about it. And then go back to all their life. In the past, it was just one continuous spectrum. You know, it all flowed together. And I think this weirdly enough is kind of relevant to what we're saying about art. And I think this is something I've written about a couple of times and some people liked it. Some people found it a little, didn't like it so much. It's about the trouble with galleries. And essentially the way, I mean, even if we put aside all this stuff about photographic reproduction and being able to see sort of a thousand different photos of the Mona Lisa, I think there's a bit of a problem with galleries. Now, as you said earlier, they're a pretty novel thing. Most galleries started as the collections of aristocrats and wealthy people going back a few centuries who had a mass art and collected. And in some sense, they had a private gallery and then these were originally opened to the public or donated to the public. You know, they didn't really, galleries weren't particularly common, we certainly wouldn't have all been flocking to them, you know, until a couple of hundred years ago. I mean, this year is 200 years, of course, since the London's National Gallery, which the government bought off a private collector after he died, yes, exactly. But anyway, the point being, the obvious first issue with galleries, I think people know this, but sometimes hard to bear in mind, is that they're a very, very artificial way to see art. Most art you find in there wasn't painted to be put in a gallery, you know, the obvious example, so I should give them a setting, something like an altarpiece. I mean, how could you go into a gallery and before you've got an altarpiece or a Madonna, a piece of religious art, and where it was painted, literally painted specifically for the chapel, where you've got the candlelight and the incense and the singing and the shadows and the prayer and all the other context to, well, not to be worshiped, but to aid worshipers in the act of worship. To take that in place in sort of a brightly lit air-conditioned gallery with tourists, tip-tone along, and whispering while I'm saying it wasn't that pretty, that I think immediately makes it very, very difficult to ever really grasp and understand what that painting was for and why it was made, and how people felt about it. In the past, I think of the Statue of Liberty, you mentioned, imagine if you put the Statue of Liberty in some sort of colossal gallery, you know, imagine some future civilization and comes along, finds this buried beneath the sea, and then they put in a big gallery, people go and look at it, wow, this is that famous Statue of Liberty. And the feeling they get seeing in the gallery would be nothing like seeing it where it stands. I mean, you've been to New York and you've seen the Statue of Liberty, right? I mean, this sort of symbol of, it is the ultimate symbol of the United States, and it's the entry point. - It's the entry point, it's what you see as you arrive. - You're going there in search of a better life, from, let's say, you know, the old world, and it's all playground, disease, and horrible, you can just, you know, what you believe to a great, big, beautiful future, and there's that Statue welcoming you in. And it's still there today, still doing that, the sheer weight and its meaning and its purpose is evident, right? You put that in a gallery. Yeah, um, you know, maybe a little plaque describing it. It was. poem, there's the poem that's inscribed on, I think, the inside of the Statue of Liberty, which describes her as Mother of Exiles, it's the poetry of what she's supposed to represent. I mean, she's the statue of Liberty, right? It's so much tied up in where she is. Indeed. Exactly. And the point is, I think, for most of history, that is what art was like. I mean, rather than being sort of compartmentalized into galleries as a place where you go in and sort of do art, let's go and do some art this afternoon. That's how it feels, I think, when you're going to gallery and you're looking at paintings, and I think that's why people sometimes struggle to get into it, because they feel the sort of pressure about art. There's so much nonsense that surrounds it, so much art, speaks so much gibberish. And you know, before you can even look at a painting, you've got things telling you about all these isms and ists and all these movements and historical contexts. And you think, "Lady Aina, I need to do a PhD before I can bloody look at this thing and enjoy it." For most of history, art was just diffused throughout society wherever you went. David itself was originally supposed to be placed on the Dwaromone Florence. It was too heavy to lift up there, so they put it instead. So it was supposed to be on the roof, right? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. They have the cathedral. Indeed. So instead, they put it outside, but it was too heavy, couldn't put it up there. So instead, they put it outside the town hall. So David wasn't made to be in a gallery. It was made to be a public work of art, simply to adorn the streets of the city. And that's a hell of a difference between something that you go and see, to say, "I'm going to look at David." It is simply there. They still have a replica there. They do know I'm a web. They're not where David was originally supposed to go, but that second place. There is a replica. Another lifestyle is replica. I remember that's the first one I saw when I was in Florence. I see the replica and I was almost disappointed that I'd seen it because I thought, "Oh, that's a shame. It sort of spoiled a bit for me." It actually hadn't at all, though, still just as blown away, but it was a different experience. And I think if you'd have sought them over, I'm not sure that I would have known. The difference, right? But it would have felt different. But exactly. So in the feeling of seeing such like David, rather than being sort of sequestered into this place, as I say, with ropes and plaques and mirrors and all that, it's just simply a part of the streetscape. I think art, viewed like that, is you don't get that from a gallery. The trouble is that that's what art has always been. And this chair was sitting in. Very, very nice chair. This is, in some sense, a work of art. It's a work of the decorative arts. The definition of art that I quite like is the human hand, heart and mind united in the act of creation. What do you mean by that? Well, it's the unity of skill and intellect and feeling towards the creation of an object, which could range from anything, the fine arts, something like David or any painting, all the way down to it, to a simple spoon, although maybe on your case. But the chair, certainly, that can be a work of art as well. So art was diffused throughout society. You didn't have to think about it as art per se. It was just there. You went to the church. There were the paintings you along the street. The refresh goes along the street. A home you have at you have a chair or a chest of drawers has been hand carved. And since some, just a dainty, fine or interesting way, playfully, art is all around you. It's everywhere. You don't need to think about it as art. And that's a trip with galleries. I mean, they look at beautiful things. I mean, what a blessing that the public can, people from all over the world, can enjoy these brilliant works of art. And for free in many cases. Even if you have to pay at least, you can go and see them, surely better there than in the home of some private collector. Well, that's what I was going to say. So exactly what's the alternative? How should we sure how's art? I mean, there's something is not just about how great it is that you can put them together and you can go and see Monet and Van Gogh in the same room as an altarpiece. There's also something to be said for the accessibility of it. Even not just talking about private collections, even if we said all art is public. If you have a beautiful thing, you are required by law to allow people to come and see it. You would still have to like get on an airplane and go to a different country and go and see this piece of art. There's something beautiful about the fact that galleries often share art. They travel. They do exhibitions. And so just by living in or in proximity to a city with a big gallery, you can see all of this art. And there's something wonderful about that which can't be done outside of a museum, surely. No, no, I think you're right. I mean, there are exceptions to the religious art, for example, religious art from all over the world could be returned to places or at least put in places where it would serve its original purpose. You go to the V&A and it's stuffed full of fantastic works of art. I mean, a lot of them are essentially ordinary objects from daily life of the past, which I always find so sort of not amusing, but it's certainly I think very revealing when you go there and you think how beautiful and it's sort of just it's a vase or it's an incense burner or some cutlery or some carpet. You wonder if a big biro will ever make its way into a museum of the future. Well, it certainly will. I've known that and maybe people of the future will have the same reaction. So I'm not trying to argue for some alternative situation where we sort of auction off all art or hand it out by lot, you know, you put your name in the hat and you might get a van golf and you can have it at home for you to enjoy. Maybe that would be a good idea, I don't know. It's more something I think that people should be aware of. Keep in mind. I think my concern is with art. Art is so much to it and there are millions of people who do love that, but I know a lot of people can be put off because it seems that this pretentious high-faluting sort of a patrician field of expertise, right? And it's the way to show off at dinner parties or it's all just nonsense. This couldn't be less true. Art is, in many ways, the whole point of living, everything else we do seems to tend towards either the creation or the enjoyment of art. You know, what we do in our spare time when we're not working, if our job doesn't involve it, usually we're either consuming to use that word a piece of art, but that's a film or a video game or a book or some YouTube videos. Some of your YouTube videos might be described as works of art. Actually, these ones are pretty artistic. These ones, certainly. Think of it when you watch a film, right? You don't go and think, "Okay, I'm doing cinema." And you don't start thinking about me's on set and montage and film theory. You just go and you enjoy the film. I was bloody good. I think art is best enjoyed that way. You look at painting, you're not worrying about all these movements and all that. You just look at it and say, "What am I looking at? What does it say to me? How is it saying it? What do I think about this? What do I feel?" You just happen as you're enjoying it. And without, as the way it was throughout history, I think that's essentially how it was. And now we live in this age, as I say, of a museumification. Surely a good thing, surely a good thing because it means things get preserved and they're spread out more widely, but we have lost something. I think we've clearly lost something by putting art into this box, and literally into the box of the gallery. Again, just something to bear in mind, really. Yeah, it's worth remembering when you walk around a gallery that's not the natural habitat. It's a very artificial habitat. At least for older art. And also that other stuff, I think, can come later. It's like you say, if you look at the description of a piece of art, if you look at the plaque next to the art, usually it tells you when it was painted, who it was painted by what gallery it was bought from, or all of this kind of stuff. It doesn't really tell you as much a lot of the time about the image and what it represents. So I like a gallery where it really tells you what's happening in the story. But I think if you just go and it's a bit, it's a bit like music, right? Like, again, you don't read, I think people do, they think about doing music. Yeah, let's put some music on in the car kind of thing. But the way you just say, you don't think I'm doing music. People are interested in music. They like music. But there isn't this barrier to entry in the same way. And the funny thing is, a lot of people will be able to tell you the difference between 90s hip hop. Sure. And classical. And jungle. Traffin roll and D&B. And yeah. Chalga. For people from the Balkans. Exactly. You took the words out of my mouth. Yeah, but the thing is, I don't think anybody started with that. And thought, I'd better learn about the history of music. What happened was when you were a kid, your dad played the Rolling Stones and used to kind of like it. And then you noticed that some bands are kind of like other ones. And it's only later that you start grouping it into, oh, that's that classic rock. That's that classic 70s vibe. Or I really like the 90s west coast hip hop, right? That comes later. And the same thing could be true of art. If you walk into a gallery and just think, like, what looks pretty? What do I like? I really like that one. And then you walk around the corner. You start to notice they've got something kind of in common. Oh, they both have this particular kind of lighting or I can kind of just tell you start to learn. And then after a year or two of doing that, you read a book that describes the difference between Renaissance art and impressionism and whatever the hell else there is. And it's no longer something you have to remember when you go to a gallery. It's something that you can just imprint on to what you've already experienced. There's no, there's no barrier to entry with music. You hear about the music you like it or you don't. For some reason art feels like it has that barrier when it of right probably shouldn't do. And that might have something to do with the fact that music is still just dispersed everywhere. You hear the street artist playing a song that stops you in your tracks because their version of it is so beautiful. And you don't think, oh, it's fake or it's a copy or it's a cover, it's just a beautiful bit of music. So what if it's somebody else's song, you hear it in a car, you hear it wherever, I think we hear it too much. I wrote an article about that recently. Very good article. But if we were to sort of take all of that music and put it into a room and you walked into a room and there are just like a bunch of boxes with headphones and you go one by one and you put the headphones on and it gives you a description of, you know, the particular kind of art style and the movement that it's upon, I think it would kind of ruin it. It would really kind of ruin it, but unfortunately, that's not something you can really fix with art. Unless, of course, we realize that like the thing that's in the museum is the sort of novel, you know, there's the real canvas that the art effect, you can still disperse. Well, I think that has been happening. In fact, I think it's sort of sorry to jump in there, you would like to finish the thought or not at all. Well, I'd been sort of thinking in the same way and that's something I've tried to point with my work. If I can call that online, it is not trying to explain not too much in terms of isms and movements, but simply to put it out there so people can fall in love with it. You know, Paul Valerie wrote a wonderful article about him. I think he would be equity of art. He was talking about the same thing, a mastery of production as are your photographic reproduction and he was speaking many about sound recording and that the prevalence of music, his article wasn't so dissimilar to his essay, it wasn't so dissimilar to what you wrote, actually. And he said, we haven't yet quite got to the point where anybody can enjoy a T-Shine anywhere in the world or whatever. We're now at that point. And although it's easy to sort of think about that in terms, you know, is this the real work of art or not? Is it? I don't know. Where's the original object? Put all that aside. We are in this beautiful age where you can see art by accident or, or, supposedly, when you most need it, you know, sort of when you're feeling full of despair, you know, and it's hard at that point to say, okay, I need to go to a, you know, I need to go to the National Gallery. It's going to look at that painting that I really like. Now, if you have it, you can, maybe it sounds silly, I'd know, but you can get it out on your phone. And that painting that seems to capture something of where you are in that moment is there at hand. And this is the beauty of internet. And what it has done for art is to use that somewhat abused word, democratize it. And this is probably much of the better. So maybe this museum of vacation about could be beginning to shift somewhat. And that's what I've tried to do. I love art. I think we all stand to benefit from loving learning about it. And I've tried to, tried to spread it for that reason. Do you think then we started with the question of is there such a thing as bad art and so there's a corollary question is whether there's such a thing as good art. Do you think that the way that a piece of art is housed by future generations can affect whether it's good or bad art because is it, I mean, in other words, if somebody intent, you said it's got a lot to do with what story something's trying to tell and how effectively it does it. I mean, the story that an altarpiece is trying to tell is one of reference, is one of focus, is one of directing the attention towards the altar. It's stripped from its rightful place and moved into a museum. Is it now like a bad piece of art? Is it a good piece of art in a bad setting or is it like bad art because it's not doing what the artist is supposed to do anymore? I think it's fair to say it's probably a good piece of art in a bad setting. It just makes it harder to see what's good about it, perhaps. I don't think we need to go much further than that. Did you think that's a fair answer? When I asked you what makes a bit of art good or bad, what is it you said? You said something about. Well, the question is, what I'm sort of lusical and representational art, what I mean is rather than sort of something abstract, which is purely decorative. I'm saying something which is, as I said, a picture of you, or your mother, whatever it is. What is it trying to say and how well does it say it? I think you can evaluate it. By the way, it's hard to know those criteria. So when you want to finish the thought? No. You go ahead. When you take that altarpiece, it interrupts how well it's. Exactly. It's almost like you've made it a bad piece of art, which maybe you kind of have, because you've made it decorative. Sure. I mean, why is an altarpiece in a gallery somewhere? It's decorative. Maybe it's wrong to say that it's decorating the gallery, but it's decorating our lives. It's decorating the city centre. Sure, but. Although given everything I've just said, I don't think it's impossible to understand, let's say, religious feelings, and then to understand what you're looking at in a gallery. I'm pretty sure all the pieces in galleries can still be felt that way. But yes, no, no. You're not wrong. It is essentially destructive to the quality of the art to remove it from its context. You know, we're in a church now on this beautiful stained glass window there. It's right above the altar. You know, and looking at that there, if I imagine that now, in this sort of a plain room, and as I said, you've got people, you can hear footsteps, you're shuffling, and there's some in their sketching, a school trip, maybe, it's a pack, holding a podcast, somewhere there. One day, perhaps. It's impact is, yeah, it's clearly interrupted, yeah, so we make art bad by putting it in galleries. Now, there's one other thought. Do you think there's such a thing as fake art? No, I don't think there's such a thing as fake art. The David in Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas, fake is Caesar's Palace. Yeah, because fake. I don't think, because I don't think you can have, it's not, it's fake in the sense that it's not the one by Michael Angelo. I think in our work of art could be fake in the sense when it's purporting to be something that it isn't, in the sense of forgery. I mean, this is a wonderfully fascinating question that people are talking about, you know, is a forgery a work of art. There's some bloody good forges, and there are bloody good painters who have made very convincing replicas of other paintings, or indeed made up their own painting and claimed it to have been by somebody else. I think it's only fake in as much as it's telling a lie about what it is. But if something is there, it doesn't make any sense. You can't have a fake work of art anymore than I think you can have a fake building or for fake architecture. Yeah, there can be a certain artificiality in the sense that it's imitative. You know, the world is full of it. I mean, you've just been to Vegas, right? Is the Eiffel Tower in Las Vegas fake? No, it's not fake. It's not really there. It's really there. Which sound, maybe I'm sounding a little bit thick by saying that, but I mean it. It's clearly not the Eiffel Tower, but the fact that there's a replica doesn't in any way make it fake. I don't think so. And I think that sort of, I mean, it's easy to see what people think. I mean, it's fake in some sense, but I don't know why we shouldn't enjoy it for what it is for that reason, as long as we're not pretending that it's anything else. Yeah, I found it very difficult to gather my thoughts in Vegas as one does. But specifically regarding the buildings because, well, there's like a fake Venice, and there's a fake Paris, and there's a fake everything. And the thing about Caesar's palace, for example, is I don't think he's actually trying to replicate anything in particular. He's just a general sort of riff on, like classical architecture, and the thing is, it kind of is classical architecture. But it's fake. But it's not because there is a question. The question is, is it good or is it not? That's the question. Regardless of what it's trying to reference, do you think it is in and of itself an interesting or beautiful building? Maybe the fact that the reason you were so unsettled is that it was actually not particularly well-built or designed. I was there for a slightly unsettling building. No. Though that could have been what it was. I suspect. Yeah. It's hard to know, but you're working definition of about the, what was it? The hand. The hand, heart, and mind, soul. Just the hand. Let's say just the hand, heart, and mind united in the act of creation. So, the skill, emotion, and intellect, and I think that definition covers most of what we usually mean by art, and also other things as well, as I say, like this chair, for example, could be, we wouldn't usually necessarily include that, but art is both the fine arts, painting, sculpture, cinema, if you like, video games, if you like, and then the decorative arts, what they were traditionally called, which is our spoons and our pens and our teacups, maybe even on microphones, maybe even our phones and works of decorative arts. You said before, messy scoring a goal, it seems to sort of fit that definition in many ways. And people would describe it as like, that was art, that was artistic, but I think they're being like hyperbolic there intentionally. I don't know. Do you think it's rightful to say that that is art? Look, I don't like to get into games of definition, like, I'm an Erasmian through and through. I think all this, there's the theologian, scholastic stuff is usually a waste of time. But I think it's interesting. I think we can learn a lot from why people want to say that. People say the same about food, for example. And that might make more sense, I think, because there can be something graphic and visual to it, but I think the reason people want to say messy scoring a goal could be a work of art, as I said, you've got the skill, his tentacle ability as a footballer, his intellect in deciding what to do with that skill. Then something about the way it all came together, the moment of the match, what it meant, the significance, the fans, the beauty, there's an extra bit of texture, which I've decided to call emotion or heart, you could call it spirit or soul. That additional element is what seems to transform it in people's minds into a work of art. And that's pretty easily applied to objects. But I'm not saying that, and I don't really care whether or not we can specifically define That is a work of art, but I think we learned something from the fact that people want to say that about, as I say, a meal, or some sport, or even the conversation. Sometimes you see someone approach somebody and talk to them and say, "Wow, there's something there." The art of conversation. - Yeah. - Hope people say that. - It's a fine art, the artist. - Well, I think that's also partly because artists. Yes, but this is partly, I mean, what's the etymology of the word art? It is from the Latin, and the word originally, I think essentially just means skill or technique, right? It says, "It didn't have this association we have now," which is confusing because we say, "Art, you think you mean painting, actually you just mean art in general, you mean the fine arts, you mean all this stuff." It's one of those general words that we need to be careful when we're using. Well, she and Quirk, the cultural tutor. Thank you for your time. I should have mentioned at the beginning you have a Twitter account, an ex account. People will likely, unless it's in our previous episode, know who you are without know who you are. They might already be following you on X. They might think, "Oh, this is a great guy. I'll go and see what he's up to and find that they're already following you because your account is huge." But I appreciate you taking the time to put a face to the statue that usually adorns your work and sharing with us the meaning of art. Well, I appreciate you rolling out the red carpet for me in these surroundings, and that's my stash. Where did you get the idea to grow it? I don't want to talk about it. It's nothing to do with you. In fact, you're kind of putting me off the idea, so I might go and go and shave and we'll see. At any rate, I hope we can do this again, and thanks for coming on. Good night, God bless.