In one of my favourite passages from the book, you write, “Art challenges orthodoxy… Without art, our ability to think, to see freshly and to renew our world would wither and die.” In Britain today it feels that art is under attack. It’s seen as a kind of luxury.
Yeah, it is. I remember back in my dim and distant past in advertising, there was a campaign on behalf of a glass manufacturer, of which the slogan was “Imagine life without glass”, and it showed photographs of environments from which all the glass had been removed – buildings with no windows, tables with nothing to drink out of, etc. And I say the same thing: imagine life without art. Imagine a world with no music, with no visual art, no street art, no graffiti, no films, etc. No TV. What kind of a life would that be? And when you start thinking like that, you can see how it’s actually essential to our daily lives, whether it’s a political cartoon or a billboard with a picture on it, or a work of great transcendent genius in music. We all need it every day, and to think of it as some kind of frippery is to misunderstand the nature of human society.
~ Salman Rushdie: “The world has abandoned realism”
Image: Beppe Giacobbe
