Some of us will go to an art gallery this weekend. Maybe it will help us reflect or inspire us. Isn’t that part of a life well lived? And if you don’t go to a gallery, maybe you’ll find yourself lingering on a picture at home, reading a novel, going to the theatre or listening to music. But what if you didn’t? What if there were no galleries, theatres, publishers or concert halls? What if we got rid of art?
The impulse seems philistine at best, authoritarian at worst, yet a remarkable number of modern artists were seduced by it. André Breton, the leader of the surrealists, repeatedly called for the end of literature. Theo van Doesburg, the founder of the De Stijl movement, proclaimed that “art has poisoned our life”, while his friend and compatriot, Piet Mondrian, believed that if we did abolish art, no one would miss it. In December 1914, as the first world war entered its first winter, the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky declared that art was already dead. “It found itself in the backwater of life,” he wrote. “It was soft and could not defend itself.”
