Radio 3 on Saturday had interesting, if over-long programmes about the effect of music on the mind. In one of them, people were discussing musical education. All the panellists agreed with the proposition that ‘everyone is musical’. Later in the day, I attended an exhibition opening at the De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill, at which Peter Bazalgette, the chairman of the Arts Council, spoke. ‘Everyone is an artist,’ he said. Two things struck me about these propositions. The first is that they are now the orthodoxy in the arts: no teacher in the state system or anyone working in the subsidised arts could publicly deny them and expect to get promotion. The second is that they are not quite true. Some people are extremely unmusical and/or unartistic, just as some are bad at sport, mathematics or acting. If people refuse to accept this, they will waste a lot of time. They will also tend to deprecate high art/music, and high individual achievement in art/music, on the grounds that art/music is what everyone can do. Quality gets equated with ‘elitism’, from which it is not much of a step to filling the National Gallery with kiddy pictures.
What is true, however, is that almost everyone can benefit from art and music. Almost everyone can learn some techniques — drawing, piano — to some extent. Just as even very unpromising pupils can usually learn to read and write, so they can learn to draw a recognisable picture of a cow or play a simple tune. In doing so, they will learn something to their advantage as appreciative and expressive human beings. More interesting, from the point of view of everyone else, some without formal qualification may produce something that makes us think or feel. The show Peter Bazalgette was opening was a case in point. Called ‘In the Realm of Others’, it was produced by the brilliant Project Art Works, which helps people with severe neurological impairments. I was there because two of my nephews, George and Sam Smith, both autistic, were participants. It was fascinating to see how each exhibitor has a distinct character as an artist, as in life. Accompanying videos showed the authors at work. Sam attacked the canvas boldly and sometimes noisily, squirting the paint out of tubes to produce striking effects not unlike those of Gerhard Richter. George, the more verbal and outwardly sensitive of the two, was more delicate and his work more etiolated. With theirs and most of the other works in the show, one could see neuro-untypical minds producing challenging perceptions which differ from those of ‘normal’ people.
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