The visual arts – painting and sculpture – are the odd man out amongst the arts. In the visual arts each work is unique and essentially unreproduceable. But the thousandth copy of a book is no different from the first. A first edition may be collectable but that is another matter. Music must be performed ; likewise, plays, ballet and opera. The thousandth performance may be worse than the first or it may be better. Architecture is a half-way house, but though a building may be unique it is not, as is a painting, portable. It is difficult to collect buildings. And buildings have a use ; they are designed for a purpose so they are not just art. A building that does not work is a bad building, although it might still be mamoth « sculpture » – like the Sydney Opera House.
The combination of uniqueness and portablity makes painting collectable and similarly modest sized sculpture.  I have a small library but any number of others could have identical libraries. The Queen has a collection of paintings. No one else can have that collection - unless they steal it. Antiquarian value apart you cannot invest in books ; you can only read them. You cannot invest in music ; you can only listen to it.But you can invest in paintings and many rich people do.
The value of anything is what someone will pay for it. But value and worth – certainly artistic worth - are not the same thing, otherwise The Night Watch would artistically be « worth » vastly more than the Goldberg Variations. But if you are paying out a huge sum whether as an individual or on behalf of a museum or trust, you require something more than your own personal taste before you part with the cash. An individual needs expert reasurance ; if it is the expert making the bid he is unlikely to stray far from the established opinion –much to risky. The consequence is that the price of a picture depends as much on who painted it as on the painting itself. A painting formerly thought to be by an apprentice, now judged to be by the master, rockets in value ; the converse causes the value to bomb. A forgery can sell for large sums until the forgery is discovered, when its value is no more than that of the canvas on which it is painted. Most paintings that are sold for great sums or would command great sums if sold, are I am sure great works of art. But the size of the sum is not a measure of a painting’s artistic worth.
There is of course no certain way of measuring the worth of any work of art. The best we can do is to accept as evidence its enduring reputation and popularity. Of course experts have a disproportionate say but only in the visual arts is their opinion dominant. Books are considered great partly because they continue to be bought, music is judged to be great if it goes on filling the conert halls and the same with plays that continue to be staged. But a great painting can be put in a vault or in a private collection.  People can of course see paintings in public art galleries, but there is no easy way of knowing which painting most have come to see. And you cannot show The Night Watch  in every museum in response to public demand. In every other art form the judgement of non professionals over time is decisive ; in the visual arts there is only a very small public to pass judgement and its judgement has little impact anyway. The value of a painting would not increase because a small number of people persistently came to see it. There is of course some negative feedback with every work of art ; a work is judged to be great because it has already been considered great. But with the visual arts there is a vested monetary interest in maintaining the current assessment. In the long run books are judged by being read, music by being listened to, plays by being watched, but paintings are not judged primarily by being looked at. There is no equivalent in the other arts to the forensic analysis of a painting to see whether it is genuine..
All this is not to say that Leoardo da Vinci, Rembrandt and Monet were not great painters. It is only to point out that they have been assessed both more narrowly and on more on non-artistic grounds than Bach or Tolstoy, and that once considered « great » there are greater obstacles to down-grading.
Two examples to illustrate my argument. We had for many years a canvas under the bed. It showed a portly and self-satisfied looking 18th Century gent.  I thought the picture of no merit what-so-ever but before consigning to the tip, we sought expert advice. It turned out to be worth couple of thousand when auctioned at Southebys. A name for the subject and the artist would have doubled the price. Then there was a fellow who some years ago obtained access to The Tate’s catalogue and inserted a number of new pages. An art teacher compatriot then knocked up appropriate works using paints bought at B & Q. Because these forgeries had « provenance » they were accepted as genuine and bought as such. Most were « Mogdilianis »and eventually an expert in that artist actually looked at the paintings. But with van Megeren even when the experts looked, they failed to see. It is tempting to claim that people experience with a painting only what they expect to experience. That is certainly often the case although there is no way of knowing how often.
A comparison with music is instructive. There are few musical forgeries mainly because there is no money in it. But such forgeries and wrong attribution as there are, leave the reputation of the music unaffected. « Purcell’s » trumpet voluntary is no less popular because Jeremiah Clarke is now known to have composed it. The  « Appalachian folk song »  Black is the Color of My True Love’s Hair , is thought no less beautiful because it is now known to have been composed in 1930 or thereabouts.
You may read a book simply because it is approved of, and similarly listen to a piece of music or attend a play, but all require a degree of application. You are unlikely to undertake War and Peace lightly - I got stuck about p150. But a painting need delay you for minutes only. For someone wishing to appear cultured, painting is the soft option.
New painting is not fundamentally different from old. A new work is still unreproduceable and is still expensive, so assessment remains with the experts. Assessment is an uncertain business with an unestablished painter but the monetary reward for picking up cheap, the work of one who later becomes established, is great. So, I am told, the work of art-school students is snapped up in the hope of hitting the jack-pot. Even such speculation is out of my league. The best I can manage is a couple of watercolours, each by a competent amateur ; although pleasant enough, both are modest and conventional. Their purpose is decoration ; to put it crudely to cover an otherwise bare wall. But most pictures, even the greatest, have been intended as part of the furnishings. Walls though, are smaller than they were so even could the middle class afford great art, most would be out of place. My mother–in-law has a companion piece to our painting of the portly 18th Century gent I mentioned. It is a good 6 ft tall and is ludicrously out of place in the hall of her modest bungalow.
But where ought it to be and what might one derive from looking at it ? I assume that both pictures were commissioned to demonstrate the status of the prosperous burger and his wife ; they would have hung in what would by our standards be a large and lofty space. In this they were no different from many great paintings. But I suspect that all, great and not so great, became part of the furniture, and rarely got more than a passing glance.
More than any other art form, paintings need to be in the right setting. William Randolph Hearst’s San Simeon shows what happens when great works are torn out of context and jumbled together – a farce. A religious painting intended for a church is right in a church but nowhere else. A domestic painting is right in a house. The nearest I have to a work of merit is a Piper lithograph of Huish Episcopy. It is part of the furnishings – it fits – but also I really look at it quite often. I used to go often to the Australian National Gallery just to see Monet’s Haystacks. That would have gone well in the sejour too, better than in the National Gallery I feel. How long did I look at it ? Certainly no more than a few minutes at a time.
There in lies a problem. We, the general public, can see a great painting only if it is in an art gallery. But is a public art gallery the ideal place for any painting ? Few paintings were intended for such public display. An art gallery has many paintings and usually many people. The public tour, stopping occasionally before one painting before moving on to the next. I need to look at a painting often and alone. The Tate is a  public place and one that I cannot visit to look at my favourite Turners just when I feel like it. Exhibitions draw the crowds and those who go enjoy the experience. But what is the experience that they enjoy ? The occasion or the paintings? If I am right about the requirements to appreciate a painting, more the former than the latter.
What, to return to the matter of forgery, did those who enthused over the van Megereens experience ? If their experience was genuine either it could have had nothing to do with the merits of the painting- any acceptable daub that was deemed to be great would have done - or van Megereen is the equal of Vermeer ; I assume it is not the latter. Of course that is not to say that every experience arising from a painting is self-induced. But some are and there is no easy way to tell which. The same is not so with the other arts.
Many great artists have run something approaching a painting factory. Apprentices did the basic filling-in and the master finished off. Dickens could not have employed hacks to fill in the basics of the story leaving the master to add the Dickens touch- I was tempted to say « play the Dickens with it ». Beethoven could not have left a competent junior to rough out the Choral Symphony. This does not mean that the factory system has not produced great art, but once again there is the risk of reputation differing from merit.
Most painting is recognisably a painting of something, in the same way as a novel describes something, but not everything seems to me, amenable  to being depicted on canvas. Dramatic events –actions - do not work well. I assume the aim is to give us a vacarious experience of suffering, despair, anguish, horror, relief and the like. That requires realism and there photography, film, theatre and books do a much better job.
Painting is static and not well suited to subjects that require movement. Artists try to get round the problem by squeezing action over a period into a single frame. So with a battle scene one soldier is bayoneting another while an enemy comes up behind with drawn sword, a charger rears in the air, another bears down with the ferocious moustacheoed rider sticking his lance into a defenceless foot soldier and so. But battles never were like that ; there is far too much going on. In Gericault’s Medusa, of the shipwrecked survivors on a raft, one has spotted succour and is waving dramatically, another is telling his fellows, a third is indifferent being far gone in despair, four are prostrate and two are reaching out towards the unseen source of hope, everyone is doing and registering something. It simply does not ring true. It is like a silent film with everyone madly overacting. Medusa may well a fine painting, cunningly balanced and cleverly executed, but as a moving depiction of the event it is ludicrous. Nor are abstracts the answer. Guernica is essentially no different from Shostakovitch’s Leningrad symphony. Horrific events may have inspired both but that would be hard to conclude just from looking at the one or listening to the other, and certainly impossible to tie to the particular case. Guernica may none-the-less be a great painting, and the Leningrad a fine and moving symphony.
I have left out conceptual art and indeed modern art in general. That is a large and controversial subject, and is bound up with trends in the other arts. Time was when the arts were supposed to reflect, enlighten and entertain. Their field was the human predicament and the individual response. There might be political or philosphical or religious implications but if so they were played out through the human situation. Bach’s St Matthew Passion is not a theological treatise, not even a theological statement. It is an afirmation of personal belief.  I can share, to some degree, Bach’s state of mind without accepting the theology that underpins it.
Artists now see themselves as philosophers and seers, economists and politicians, and above all the conscience of society. It is a grandiose claim. I expect any day to hear of the Global Warming symphony. But the times are uncertain and confused. To portray the banal, what better than banal art ? To show choas, what more appropriate than a chaotic picture ?  To demonstrate triviality, how about an unmade bed ? To show the pointlessness of music, why not four and a half minutes silence ? Something by the way, I « composed » long before Cage. To illustrate the problem of choice, why not a book that divides into two at the critical point? Expect that the world does not work that way.
I believe much of the arts has lost its way. The arts has certainly lost an audience but that unfortunately no longer seems to matter.
July 2007