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Originally printed in BC Local News (Gulf Islands Driftwood).

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Amazing how the morning newspaper can set the mind abuzz. Here is an item from the Times Colonist a few days ago:

“The tent city that is part of the Occupy Vancouver protest outside the Vancouver Art Gallery is a danger to millions of dollars of art held in a vault beneath the plaza.”

It seems the ceiling of the vault containing the permanent collection of the VAG, though protected by a waterproof membrane, is only a foot beneath the grass of the plaza. Who would have thought? It seems there are worries that if a protester whacks a particularly long tent peg into the ground it could puncture the membrane and cause a leak.

Never mind the strange arrangement of storing art under the lawn, or the bizarre thought of campers setting up tents with foot-long spikes, what really rankles in the story is the writer’s description of the supposed danger being to “millions of dollars of art.”

Why must we automatically identify the value of art with its monetary value?

Tell us that what is in danger is a collection of wonderful paintings by some of the best artists in Canada gathered over many years by thoughtful and discerning curators and representing our cultural heritage, and we will have good cause for alarm.

But if we stress only what the stuff is worth as a commodity, surely we become just as guilty as the Wall Street bankers and speculators and an apparently evil capitalist system that places money above human concerns.

If art has value at all, it does so because it speaks to us about those aspects of our lives that have nothing to do with money — our joy in the visible world, our longing for order wrought from chaos, our desire for transcendence of the merely material. Things of that nature which music, dance, painting and language offer us to help articulate our common humanity.

Money doesn’t come into it.

Or shouldn’t.

The fact that it often does — the fact that we all sometimes make the assumption that an expensive painting must be better than a cheap one, or that a book that won a $30,000 prize must be more worth reading than one whose author is unknown — speaks only to our discomfort in trusting our own taste and judgement.

In an ideal world we would all look at so many paintings, read so many books, listen to so much music that we’d be comfortable in our aesthetic reactions, and we’d be confident in our capacity to be moved, challenged and enlightened by art when it is good.

Interestingly, such an ideal world bears some resemblance to the other ideal world the Occupy movement seems to long for in which people prosper or not according to their merits, diligence and imagination rather than being beset by financial injustices beyond their control.

A few years ago at the BC Festival of the Arts in Prince George, poet Tom Wayman  commented that “art is older than money.” If he’s right, as he surely is, it may well be that increasing the centrality of art in our lives is at least as useful a tactic in addressing the woes of our times as pitching tents in public places, spikes or no spikes.