Art for Art’s Sake

to the role in which they have been cast for over a century – as exponents of humane and liberal values, as revolutionaries, gadflies, the ones who see further than ordinary mortals.

What’s striking is how dated this formulation sounds. Who now, apart maybe from Arts programmers for the BBC, believes that artists see further than ordinary mortals? And why would anyone want them to? See differently, yes, I can understand that, and if artists see differently and have the skill to communicate that vision, well, that’s great. But artists as moral arbiters or seers? No thanks. There’s certainly no obvious connection between artistic greatness and moral vision: if anything it’s the other way round, and all the better for it. Perhaps one of the saddest facts about the current art world is the degree of consensus: how narrow and circumscribed it is, and how the targets for attack – bourgeois consumer society, religion, the US – are so utterly conventional.