You know, we live in a culture that is changing so incredibly quickly. I was thinking about this the other day and I thought probably in a month of our lifetimes we have about the amount of change that there was in the whole of the 14th century. So we have to somehow come to terms with all of that.

None of us have the same experiences: you know you might know a lot about what’s happening in cars and you might know a lot of what’s happening in medicine and you might know something about mathematics and you might know something about fashion. None of us are at all expert on everything that’s happening. So we need ways of keeping in synch, of remaining coherent. And I think that this is what culture is doing for us and as I said, culture is the creative arts so far as I’m concerned.

So, I’m starting now to propose the idea of culture as a sort of collective ritual, or a set of collective rituals that we’re all engaged with. So this is a short explanation of why I think the arts are worth pursuing for other than GNP reasons… The most important thing is that we have been altogether – that doesn’t mean just ‘the artists’, so called, it means everyone, it means all the people actually in the community, everybody – has been generating this huge, fantastic conversation which we call culture. And which somehow keeps us coherent, keeps us together. If you will accept that that might be correct, then you might also think well, it sounds pretty important, that job.

So how does it come about, how do ideas come about? Where does art come from? Is it just out of thin air, as libertarians and laissez faire-ists tend to think? Romantics as well. They imagine that people like Beethoven walk about with symphonies in their head and they all sort of just burst out into reality by some unstoppable, divine force. I don’t think that’s how it happens.