This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Reith Lectures.

This lecture in the series The Arts Without Mystery, given by Dennis Donahoo, was originally broadcast in 1982.

The painter Jasper Johns once remarked,

I can imagine a society without any art at all, and it is not a bad society.

I wonder what he meant, that the ways of art are

intolerably oblique, and that for much of the time we want to live directly, we want to act as

if immediacy were possible in violence, revolution, or anarchy, or that art gets in the way

of other things, perhaps higher causes.

It's entirely possible not only to relegate art to a secondary position,

but to think that art may be a nuisance.

Johns may not have had anything very specific in mind.

He may just have been appalled for the moment by the difficulty

of art or by the arbitrariness of the whole activity. He may just have meant that it would be

splendid if art weren't a separate thing to be cultivated by those who are interested in it.

Wouldn't it be better if the artistic impulse were fulfilled rather than humiliated in the ordinary run of daily life

if our social arrangements were to take into account not only justice but beauty

the philosopher john dewey once imagined a time when the collective life that was manifested in war, worship and the forum

knew no division between what was characteristic of these places and operations

and the arts that brought colour, grace and dignity into them.

According to such a vision, the arts didn't exist as separate interests, the spoils of power, money and leisure, but as enhancements, indistinguishable from the ordinary life they adorned.

But I hope John's meant something different, that he would prefer art not to exist at all than that it should exist as a commodity among commodities, its mystery removed.

I want to talk about the arts in relation to the mystery that surrounds them,

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