Art Reboot

11 a century earlier, including Tracey Emin’s famously unmade bed and Damien Hirst’s shark in formaldehyde. These once-controversial icons have been discussed so often that they have become clichés. We have convinced ourselves that we have somehow ‘dealt’ with all that; today, anyone reasonably conversant with art accepts that its definition no longer rests solely in the physical object, as so vividly shown by Banksy’s shredder stunt. Yet there remains a muttered chorus of doubt and general bewilderment, even among art critics, making consensus on the nature, function and meaning of art all but impossible. My purpose in this book is to convince you that art means a great deal. I also hope to persuade you that it really does matter , in ways that are not always immediately obvious. Few people ‘get’ art immediately, sometimes even at its surface levels. To delve deeper into its meaning and importance we need something more than mere arguments about what may or may not be art; we need an actual theory, which I offer here. One key aspect of this theory is that art is at least as important as our other prin- cipal evolutionary vehicles and mainstays of civilisation: science, religion and philosophy. All are deeply embedded aspects of the human experience, but I submit that art is the only one that can subsume the others, as I’ll explain in due course. I also contend that a theory of art is not just possible but absolutely necessary to our understanding of human evolution and civilisation. Should you be tempted to doubt art’s role in these domains and see it as no more than decoration, entertain- ment or propaganda, try this experiment: spend a few minutes trying to imagine civilisation without its arts, and without the