"What is the value of art?" That was the question Tom Morris asked his audience at a talk he gave last Saturday as part of the London international mime festival. It is a question which he has been mulling over for many years, and in order to answer it, he asked all of us to close our eyes and focus on one piece of artwork that had had a significant impact on us.
As we each remembered a particular sculpture, song or play, Morris asked a series of further questions: "was it simple or complicated? Did it feel private or public? Did it change you?" And so on.
After this he asked us to feedback on what we had discovered about those works of art that made them feel special. For some, art had provided them with a moment of "transcendence" or of "emotional purity". For others, the work had articulated perfectly a feeling or an idea they already had: as Alexander Pope put it, "what oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed".
All of these responses make sense and are good reasons for valuing art. But for me, the answer to this question lies elsewhere. When I closed my eyes, the thing that immediately popped into my head was the National Theatre of Scotland's Black Watch. Given the enormous success the show enjoyed, this was hardly an original idea. But what surprised me, as I listened to Morris's questions and thought about the show, was that I realised it had affected me in a way I had not noticed before.
When I was a child, my parents would take me, every year, to see the Royal Tournament – a large military tattoo held at Earls Court in London. I have vivid recollections of these militaristic jamborees, and I realised that Black Watch, which itself takes the form of a tattoo, is now, in my mind, intimately linked to and subversive of these memories. So, for me, the experience of watching the show was both public and communal, but also private and individual.
And it is this capacity to be two contradictory things at once that I think gives great art its real value. So much of what I have seen that has really affected me has revelled in the pleasure of paradox. For instance, the very space that Morris was speaking in at the ICA was the same theatre where I had first seen Forced Entertainment perform when I was a sixth former back in 1997. Their show, Pleasure, had a formative impact on me. As a performance, it was slow – agonizingly, stupefyingly, slow – the show seemed to rejoice in its capacity to be boring. And yet it was because it was so "boring" that I ended up finding it so thoroughly absorbing and interesting.
To take another example, the only time I have ever been truly overwhelmed emotionally by a piece of visual art was when I saw Michelangelo's David for the first time. I was astonished by the sculpture's beauty – a perfect depiction of the perfect male form. But the more I looked at it the more I realised it was ludicrously out of proportion, with hands and feet that were far too large for the body. It was an image that was both true and false at the same time. And surely this paradox is inherent in any work of art – after all, we know that the characters on stage are merely actors and that David is just a lump of marble.
Perhaps the artistic importance of these contradictions is why I, like Anthony Nielson, feel so suspicious whenever I hear someone claim that a play should have a "thesis" or an argument. Polemic works well on the two dimensions of the newspaper page, but in the three dimensional world of the stage it can end up feeling hollow. And if paradox is the lifeblood of the theatre, then perhaps we can answer the question "to be or not to be?" with the statement "to be and not to be".
