In the previous article it was suggested that art is a form of research – a way of knowing rather than a decorative practice. If this is true then treating it as an “intervention” – as so much contemporary government policy does – is not just inadequate, it is an appalling conceptual error and here’s why.
An intervention assumes a system into which something external is inserted. The very use of the word “intervention” implies that the real work is happening elsewhere, and that art arrives later: to soften, translate, humanise, or communicate outcomes already determined. This framing might be administratively convenient, but it fundamentally misunderstands what art does.
Ways of knowing are not optional extras. They are foundational to the operation of any system.
We do not add mathematics to engineering as an intervention. We do not treat language as an add-on to law. We recognise these as bedrocks: foundations without which the system itself cannot function. If art is a way of knowing – embodied, affective, relational, symbolic – then it occupies the same foundational position. It shapes how meaning is made, how value is recognised, how experience is processed and understood.
Health is a particularly stark example. What could be more cultural than how we are born, how we care for one another, how illness is narrated, how pain is legitimised, how death is ritualised and remembered? These are not marginal concerns sitting alongside “real” clinical work. They are the conditions through which health is lived, understood and enacted.
When artists work in health contexts, they are not providing enrichment. They are engaging – we could say struggling – with the cultural substrate of health itself: the stories patients are allowed to tell, the hierarchies of expertise, the emotional economies of care, the tacit rules governing vulnerability and authority. This is not an intervention into health; it is inquiry into what health is.
To position art as additional rather than foundational is therefore to misunderstand both art and the systems it enters. It suggests that culture is a surface layer — something applied after the fact — rather than the medium through which systems operate and become self aware.
This misrecognition is not incidental. It tracks closely with a broader collapse of shared structures of meaning, and with a long-term reduction of artists from shapers of public thought to entertainers, from public intellectuals to purveyors of mood.
As institutional confidence in meaning-making has eroded, art has increasingly been instrumentalised as a balm: something to soothe, distract, cheer up, engage. Artists are asked to lift spirits, increase participation, improve wellbeing scores – worthy goals to be sure (as Captain Jack Sparrow would say) but all profoundly limited. In this framing, art becomes a service industry for emotional regulation, rather than a site of political, philosophical, moral critique, synthesis or discovery.
What is lost in this shift is the recognition of artists as thinkers.
It can be argued that historically artists have been central to how societies metabolise change. They have sensed ruptures before they are named, given form to emerging realities, challenged dominant narratives, and expanded the imaginable. They have both reflected society and helped constitute it. This is the work of public intellectuals, even when it does not arrive in essay form.
The contemporary policy tendency to measure art primarily through outcomes accelerates this diminishing of art. Outcomes privilege clarity, speed and attribution – qualities rarely aligned with deep cultural learning. They reward the legible and the immediate, and they devalue ambiguity, discomfort and delay. In doing so, they push art away from its research function and toward entertainment or therapy.
But complex social systems do not collapse because they lack cheerfulness. They collapse because their ways of knowing become impoverished.
In moments of structural strain – in health systems under pressure, in democracies facing fragmentation, in societies grappling with climate breakdown – the question surely is not how to add art in, but how to restore multiple ways of knowing as legitimate, necessary and interdependent.
Seen this way, artists are not decorating systems or intervening at the margins. They are working at the level of epistemology: expanding what counts as knowledge, whose experience matters, and how understanding is generated and shared.
If we continue to treat art as an addition in policy, we will continue to misunderstand its value. If, however, policy can recognise it as foundational, we are forced to confront a more challenging truth: that learning, care and governance all depend on cultural intelligence — and that artists have been doing this work all along.
Art is not an extra.
It is evidence that the system is still capable of thinking.
Consultant - Arts, Culture and Creative Industries 