Can artists save the planet?

Extracts from:
Can artists save the planet?
Mark Glazebrook, The Spectator, 19.05.07

Given his interest in the merging of blue with green, David Cameron would presumably feel at home in the United Arab Emirates while Sharjah’s 8th Biennial is on. The Biennial’s title and theme is Still Life: Art, Ecology and the Politics of Change. I imagine that the first two words refer not only to the historic painting genre — a genre which reminds us of our mortality on the occasions when it includes the depiction of a human skull. The two words may also suggest sentences such as ‘Despite man’s destructive tendencies there’s still life on planet earth but we can’t take it for granted.’

Whether or not there is a double meaning here, the Sharjah theme is serious, responsible, apt and perfectly timed. Sharjah Biennial is billed as the largest art event in the Gulf. That’s now saying something considering the recent ambitions of other Emirates to partner the Louvre and stage art fairs, not to mention a rival Biennial even.

Can artists save the planet? Can Biennales save the planet? The answer that emerges from Sharjah’s highly stimulating series of commissions and other displays is that the imaginative creativity of both does indeed have a special part to play, alongside the talents of scientists, economists, politicians, industrialists, businessmen, farmers, fishermen, consumers — all of us, in fact. Of course, man will find it hard to beat fate or nature in the production of disasters such as meteors, volcanoes, earthquakes, pandemics and the tsunami that wiped out Minoan civilisation. The fact remains that polluting our natural surroundings and failing to conserve resources such as water is wrong in itself, whether or not our descendants will be forced to emigrate to another planet. The moral dimension that Oscar Wilde tried to subtract from art is inescapable in this context. Ethics becomes inseparable from aesthetics.

It would take a book to do justice to all the artists in this Biennale.

The Sharjah Biennial catalogue will remain a useful source of reference. The sumptuous catalogue of the last Biennial weighed in at a rain forest-destroying, backbreaking seven and a half pounds. This year’s catalogue carries an appropriately smaller ecological footprint by weighing less — under two pounds.

Another perspective

The world is richer and healthier

Fewer people in the world today are suffering from poverty, hunger or disease than ever before. However we measure human well-being – life expectancy food availability, infant mortality or whatever – the world is a better place for most of us to live in than ever before.

To say this is probably not politically correct or fashionable today, but it is the central thesis of American economist Indur Goklany’s new book, The Improving State of the World. He has been accused of naivety, but he does not deny that war, disease and suffering still occur in the world. The condition of millions in sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, he regards as shameful but he says this should not detract from our progress towards making life better for many millions more.

He has a mass of statistical evidence to back up his claims. Daily food intake has gone up by 38% in poor countries since the 1960s, at a time when their populations have soared by 83%. Improved agricultural productivity has driven down food prices over the past 50 years. Life expectancy has obviously improved in developed countries but it has improved even faster in poorer countries. We are living longer and we are living healthier lives, in poor as well as in rich countries.

The outlook for mankind is thus not gloomy. Where people live in distress it is because of political mismanagement and/or a rejection of capitalism and globalization. When countries become richer, they also become cleaner, healthier and more environmentally conscious. Capitalism and technology are the liberating forces that have made life better for billions of people around the world.