That Damned Flower

April, 2016 

1472 Aligheri Verdelho 1 for RT

"Your city, which was planted by that one    
who was the first to turn against his Maker,
the one whose envy cost us many tears
produces and distributes the damned flower
that turns both sheep and lambs from the true course,
for of the shepherd it has made a wolf”.

- Dante Alighieri, ‘Divina Commedia’ 

Imagine if you woke up one morning, turned on the radio and there was no music: only news and sports commentaries. Imagine you walk through your home and there are no photographs, artwork or images on your walls or shelves. Your books are gone. There are no movies on your television. You go out for a meal and there are no pub bands, live jazz or funky artwork hung in cafes. Imagine there are no dance parties on the beach, no clubs or bars with poetry readings or late night stand-up comedy; nor buskers or face-painting for children on the streets. Imagine the galleries are closed down, cinemas shut, the museums empty and there are no dance companies, orchestras, or bands. These are the things of art work and art making and as writer C. S. Lewis once observed are unnecessary for art “has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival”.

I suspect if the things of art making were suctioned from our cultural spheres and a great void yawned wide, there would be a sudden flood of funding to restore such value to our survival. People would clamber to find the story-tellers, the dancers, the singers, the writers to beg for a glimpse of colour, the strain of a melody, a fragment of text to move the heart to feel. We are so used to art delighting, inspiring, challenging, comforting us that we expect it to be everywhere: to be excellent, exciting, moving, accessible, and free (or at least cheap).

And perhaps it should be! But we live in a broken world and something about our budgeting is unbalanced. Italian poet Dante Alighieri references that “damned flower” (the florin) as the cause of spiritual corruption and the demise of Italian culture in his well-known ‘Divine Comedy’. Money can still be a source of angst and that “damned flower” continues to disrupt our choices or divert our attention from things of value.

There are a lot of sad and lonely things in our world. There is hatred and anger: hurtful things made which darken the void. But art lets in the light. And the makers of art carve lines in the darkness to tear through our prejudices so we may encounter perspectives illuminated maybe only for a moment – but sometimes for a lifetime.  For every extraordinary artwork there is likely hundreds of hours of work by a person who has likely trained for hundreds of hours to create that one sound, that one dance movement, that one stroke on a canvas that might reduce you or I to tears as we encounter sheer brilliance, beauty, horror, grace . . . or any manner of things. Imagine if this was all gone.

Image credit:

Photography of Amanda Humphries’ artwork for 1472 Aligheri Verdelho by the artist, reprinted with permission.