There’s an American aesthetician called Morse Peckham who I was very interested in. He wrote a book called Man’s Rage For Chaos: Biology, Behaviour And The Arts. And he says in it, ‘Art is the exposure to the tensions and problems of a false world in order that man may endure the tensions and problems of the real world.’ So I’d actually go a bit further than Peckham – probably even as far as Bromley or Lewisham – and say it’s also the exposure to the joys and freedoms of a false world in order that we might recognise those and locate them in the real world.
So, I like this idea of art having a serious function in our lives and I think this might be one of them. I don’t think it’s the only one, by the way, but I’ve only got 40 minutes…
When you go into a gallery, you might see a most shocking picture. But actually you can leave the gallery. When you listen to a terrifying radio play you can switch the radio off. So one of the things about art is, it offers a safe place for you to have quite extreme and rather dangerous feelings. And the reason you can do that is because you know you can switch it off. So art has a kind of role there as a simulator. It offers you these simulated worlds – a little bit like a plane simulator, you know – the reason you have simulators for learning to fly a 747 is so that you don’t crash too many 747s – you can have a crash and get out and laugh. Well it’s true of art as well.
There’s a book by an American historian called William McNeil. It’s a very, very nice book called Keeping Together in Time. And its subtitle is ‘Dance And Drill In Human History’. And in that book he talks about the intense pleasure humans feel in muscular coordination: in dancing, in marching together, in carnivals, in all the things where a lot of people synchronise themselves…