A Dab Hand

The artist is on a roll. There is no stopping her now. Her hand moves furiously across the paper on board. It goes dab, dab, dab, like soft fingers on soft glass. A piano sonata plays in the background - more fingers, more dab, dab, dabs - and it is a joy both to see and to hear. This is all in preparation for the visit on Wednesday from the most expensive living artist in the world. He has emailed the artist several times now, as has his assistant. No pomp. No self-importance. His last message reaffirmed that he was indeed looking forward to seeing what he called the 'pictures'.  It will be interesting for them to see each other again. Both are as committed as the other: it just so happens that one of them was rewarded with extraordinary success. But he, I suspect, knows Oscar Wilde's dictum that a cynic is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing, even if my earlier mention of him as the most expensive artist in the world today suggests I do not. Today is our tenth wedding anniversary. I sprang into the back garden, like a cat, not a particularly agile one, at seven o'clock this morning, and plucked a bright red thorny rose from the rose-bushes by our bedroom window and presented this to the artist while she lay in bed.

Where it could be worse

I had a dream last night that there was a massive financial crash, which is not impossible, and that the owners of the previous property where we lived, a rented basement flat, were flabbergasted to discover that unlike everywhere else in the crumbling economy their property had enhanced in value by virtue of the fact some nationally recognised important works of art had been done there by the artist. Arrogant, I know, but credit where you can dream it. It got me thinking about art’s ability generally to enhance the value on something other than itself. Such occurrences exist. I saw it across the ocean in the city of scraped skies where an entire area resembling Beirut was flooded with small galleries and these in turn led to a kind of landlord-happy gentrification. I saw glimpses of it this side with a famous art world figure whose life was ransacked by AIDS but whose relationship with art remained as a kind of ennobling lifeline. Elsewhere, you get instances such as what you imagine happened to sculptor and novelist Jimmy Boyle with the personal liberation you assume took place in Scotland’s Barlinnie Prison. Also, there was the reformed old man from Ireland who once said to me, 'I used to piss on trees. Now I paint them.' It is like travelling by moonlight instead of in darkness. Clearly art has an extraordinary array of redemptive powers. The luck is in finding them, or allowing them to find you. It leads us indirectly back again to previous mention here of Hitler not getting into art school and the potential century-saving salvation missed there. And an artist with a lot of money can be a creative force for the good. They tell me. No, thanks to the dream, what I can enjoy today about art's tangential influence on that which surrounds it is the idea that something is being valued here, and not - to paraphrase Oscar Wilde's better line - just priced.