BEING INVOLVED in art doesn’t necessarily lead to a better life; but it helps ...

“I beg your pardon ...?” Any objections to this are already grating on my ears.
“Is art now going to be transmuted into miracle water? A ticket to salvation on earth? Really, I beg you ...”

But I am the one who is begging. Not for a momentary pause for artistic effect, but to stop for a while to consider the role of art in our frantic everyday lives – to dwell on the role of art in the public arena.

A man once sneered with indignation during a discussion about art in the streets and pedestrian areas. “Why on earth should I have to put up with all sorts of artistic doodah on my way to the local supermarket to buy potatoes!?”

The answer is simple, yet complex: precisely because we are saddled with art, we are enriched by it.

PERHAPS I should just come clean about the background to this: In my opinion, we are living, to put it slightly crudely, in a life-light society, with a pulsating zapper beat and superficiality as the mantras of our time.

In the midst of this unbearable lightness of being, art serves as an oasis of gravity and slowness – like a foreign body that shakes and twists and affects our view of the world, a view to which we had otherwise conveniently become attached.

It has been said that the nature of art is to “... give us experiences that force us to lose our sense of place, our assuredness and our overview, and to lose faith in that which we believed was the only truth.”

This is correct. Art should be deadly for habitual thinking, a thunderbolt at the predictable, a bombardment against an individual’s unsuspecting senses. Thus, art straddles our habitual notions of life; it shatters our ideas and puts them back together in otherwise unforeseen ways. In so doing, new assertions about the world form. Without being too pompous, one could say that art opens our eyes to the fact that there is more to reality than we might otherwise have believed.

By saddling us with its otherness, art enriches us with an expanded view of the world.

Now, that really is something ...

JUST IMAGINE being able to encounter such a “horizon enhancer” on your way to the supermarket for a bag of potatoes!? What is it that is useless, but definitely not valueless or meaningless: Art.

“It’s like a Trojan horse: it smuggles happiness, poetry, visions and awareness into a world of power and finance.” The words of the artist Bjørn Nørgaard, describing monumental art in the public arena.

Power and finance... Nørgaard refers to the alluring and multifarious advertising signs in contemporary society, a mess of conflicting tastes and aesthetic din which excites modern man’s well-stimulated shopping gene. The mantra of business is fashionable taste; art on the other hand extends beyond the horizon, rooted as it is in tradition, context, history, our common baggage.

While keywords in our contemporary, lightweight society are understandable and immediate, art tends towards the opposite, towards the unfathomable and the broader perspective.

With qualified art sited in the streets and pedestrian areas we thus get both: the immediate and the broader perspective; the accessible and the unfathomable.

As is usually the case with urban art, all the works have been carefully assessed before they have been allowed to take

their place in what is at the same time a no man’s land and an every man’s land. There are arguments both for and against these exhibits – mostly for.

ON THE WAY HOME from the local supermarket, each of us can decide whether the works we encounter satisfy the most important requirements for good art in the communal arena: that the work of art simultaneously challenges and unites the place it occupies. And that it challenges the passer-by.

While we are peeling the potatoes, we can then consider whether there might in fact be anything in the claim that “Being involved with art doesn’t necessarily lead to a better life; but it helps ...”