THE GREAT English essayist and critic, William Hazlitt, once wrote that "the arts do not furnish us with food or raiment, it is true; but they please the eye, they haunt the imagination, they solace the heart".
In a more contemporary, perhaps a more pragmatic, take on that view, the American actor Kevin Spacey recently said that arts and culture were not luxury items, rather they are a "necessary component of our lives".
Notions of what constitutes art are various and diverse and a topic of endless and contentious debate, particularly when it comes to discussion of what differentiates "high art" from popular culture. Nonetheless, few would gainsay the fact that artistic creation - those great and lasting acts of the imagination in painting, literature, drama, music and dance - has given us some of the finer moments in the history of human accomplishment.
The role and value of the arts in Ireland today, the subject of the series currently running in this newspaper, is - or should be - beyond question. Good art, in whatever shape it is presented to us - including its mass-appeal forms like cinema and popular music - can enrich our emotional and intellectual lives, inform and stimulate our thinking, challenge our perceptions. The work of artists can, and should, push boundaries and open frontiers, their expressive power presenting to us visions that we might not otherwise dare to imagine and which, as cultural commentator John Tusa suggests, can be an alternative to " the prevailing one of material gratification".
The author of this series, Sara Keating, states that "art has lost its primacy in daily discourse"; perhaps that is because art itself is becoming lost in the noise of the buzz words now circulating around it - access, inclusion, outreach. The image of an elitist activity for an elitist audience is, of course, hard to dispel but yet the arts today are all-pervasive: they are spoken of in conjunction with the economy and tourism, healthcare, public policy and education, though the latter is a saga of missed opportunity.
In order to justify public subsidy, which has replaced the private patronage of the past, there is now a danger that the language and values of the market place could in future take precedence in any discussion of the arts. Arguments for and against the economic, or social, role of the arts have their place in the ongoing debate, but the British theatre director, Richard Eyre, came closest to the truth of the matter when he declared that "the only argument for art is art itself".