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One of the great things about pictures is that they make no demands on you. You can look as long as you like and walk away at any time. There's a freedom in the arrangement that's different from going to the movies, concerts or the theater. Occasionally, people always say they feel intimidated by art. On the one hand, I get it. Some in the art world, wanting to establish their authority, fall back on abstractions to create a zone of exclusion. It can be insufferable. But on the other hand, what field doesn't see a version of this phenomenon? Have you tried understanding cellular biology? Contract law? In my experience, there is less of this complex talk around art than around most other fields.

Art is a wide field. It's deep. It's diverse. You can come at the subject from countless angles. People seem to have been making art since the beginning, so the subject is an inseparable part of the whole history of humanity. So yes, things can get complicated. But, in the end, we're talking about pictures and sculptures. How hard is it to look at a painting? How difficult is it to walk around a sculpture? Children get it immediately. They know there's no right or wrong when it comes to looking at art. There are just things to notice, to test against our imperfect sense of the truth, and to fold into our various conceptions of beauty. Things we notice may cause feelings. They may lead to ideas. They might equally provide a release from ideas-a release into wonder, and into new kinds of awareness connected to your body, your senses, and your general state of existential confusion. What I notice will be different from what you notice. That's how it goes with art.

More than the political or economic conditions of any given era, it is art that later generations most want to remember. We remember Picasso and Matisse with more love than General Francisco Franco or Marshall Petain. And we remember the Beatles and Francis Bacon over the chief ministers of Britain in the 1960s. That's because the arts-and I define the term as broadly as possible-reveal the best of us. It's because they combine the most intelligent and the most feeling of us. They testify, most fundamentally, to the fact that we're alive, that people lived before us, that as a species we're capable of making the most extraordinary things, and that human consciousness and the world beyond it are nothing short of astonishing.

Again and again, art expresses that astonishment-that mixture of wonder and disappointment, knowing and unknowing, pleasure and pain, joy and fear.