Art that cuts it

Art should do more than lie there and look pretty.

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8th October, 2011

In this season of bread and circuses it is tempting to see the arts as just one more glorious irrelevance – inspiring, uplifting and wonderful to have as an adornment to the good, the great and the affluent, but in the end not about very much. If you are given to deep thought and a curmudgeonly frame of mind, though, you might conclude this is a time when we need the arts to do much more than that. The complacent certainties of New Zealand life seem thinner now than they have in decades. The things we persuaded ourselves were the essence of who we are and how we do things are one by one ...

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