A Frill on the Edge of Life...

"People think of the arts as a kind of frill on the edge of life -- that there's real life, the gritty business of earning a living, surviving wars, mating and reproducing, then you get this frill on the edge, which is to go to the opera, go to an art gallery," he says. "I think of all the arts as the quest that is in all of us to find what is most meaningful, what is most beautiful, what is most satisfying.

"In societies that are afflicted by war and so on, far from everybody saying, 'We don't care about the arts, we are too busy surviving,' it's the exact opposite. The arts become supremely significant to them," he notes.

"We don't take art seriously enough. It's got itself all muddled up with money. Paintings are routinely valued by the number of millions of dollars they'll sell for in an auction. Poets or writers are admired for their biography more than for their work."
William Nicholson