Art, change and cat-herders

The topic we keep circling around in the office in the run up to the launch of the new site on Monday is should artists be herded, cat-like, into engaging directly with the idea of climate change.

The topic we keep circling around in the office in the run up to the launch of the new site on Monday is should artists be herded, cat-like, into engaging directly with the idea of climate change.

I was talking to Ekow Eshun, and he remains sceptical that its wise, possible, or even remotely desirable, to try and set the agenda for artists in this way. All the same,on Monday we're publishing a piece by Olafur Eliasson - a brilliant essay on the idea of light, the way we fill darkness with it so indiscriminately, and the relationship between our abundance of light and the ecology. In it, he writes about whether art has a responsibility to action: "Today we cannot afford not to think about the environmental consequences of our individual actions; about the relation between the individual and the collective."

Which is a pretty stirring call to arms. Of course some people find the very idea of artists being engaged absured. Raw Art Blog has just put up an enthusiastic short essay on Fernando Botero's paintings of Abu Ghraib which are currently on view at the Casa de Las Artes in Vigo, Spain. When Botero announced that he wanted the paintings to make the deeds carried out there notorious, and to do for Abu Ghraib what Picasso's artwork had done for Guernica,  Christopher Hitchens responded with patrician verbosity in Slate:

The first of these ambitions is probably otiose: Where in the world are the images of Abu Ghraib not already notorious?... The second ambition is a bit dubious. It's also a bit stale: An article by Jonathan Steele in Britain's Guardian has already employed the Guernica comparison—this time to compare it to the U.S. Marine Corps' re-taking of Fallujah.

Hitchens, loud-mouthed in his support for the Iraq war, remains equally loud-mouthed about everything to do with it since, attempting to slice ever finer moral points to justify his good opinion of his own opinons.

The Guardian blogger David Cox was equally sniffy when he laid into Steve McQueen's Hunger last week, another film about the maltreatment of prisoners. How could this aesthete begin to understand the reality of politics in 1980s Northern Ireland? Tsk. Clearly artists should stay out well out of these serious topics and stick to making nice things.