What is art for? A brush with… publication reveals artists’ favourite things

“What do you have pinned to your studio wall? If you could live with just one work of art, what would it be? Which writers or poets do you return to? What is art for?”—these are among the 12 anchor questions on The Art Newspaper’s popular and informed podcast A brush with…which was co-conceived and launched in 2020 by Ben Luke, a contributing editor at the newspaper.

Entitled after the final question he asks every guest, the new publication What is art for? (Heni Publishing) comprises 25 of these conversations with artists such as Ragnar Kjartansson, Michael Armitage, Mark Leckey, Julie Mehretu, Cornelia Parker and Doris Salcedo.

Luke says in the introduction: “When starting A brush with… my desire was to illustrate a long-held conviction: that artists are the best of us. That they are, to use [Italian art historian] Vasari’s term… ‘impressive and marvellous’, not just in their work, but in the way they approach and respond to the world. The interviews in this book are about inspiration, in multiple senses. But I hope, too, that they provide it.” Jeremy Deller, one of the interviewees, sums up why the podcast is a must-listen, saying: “Ben’s got a knack of getting the best out of his subjects.” We asked Ben about the genesis of the publication, who moved him most and the people he’d now like to see in the hot seat.

The Art Newspaper: How did the A brush with… series come about?

Ben Luke: It emerged during lockdown. I had always enjoyed interviewing artists for The Week in Art podcast, but felt that there was scope for a longer-form interview, and it coincided with a period in which there was a thirst for new digital content as people were stuck at home or on lonely walks while social distancing. As I describe in the introduction to the book, the initial pitch to the team was pretty much exactly how the podcast turned out: to talk to artists “about their work and working life and then have several stock questions, repeated each week”. The stock questions included some from the existing Q&A called A brush with… in The Art Newspaper, alongside some new ones. And they’ve stayed the same in every episode—now 121 and counting.

What are some of the most memorable or surprising answers?

Every single interview provides such moments. I think of Doris Salcedo’s answer to “Who was the first artist whose work you loved?”: I was expecting that Francisco de Goya might come up because, as she put it, "Goya taught me... not to flinch when witnessing horrors of war, the horrors of political violence”. And that’s very present in her work. But I wasn’t expecting her to mention Cézanne in the same breath. And when I asked her if she feels that he, like Goya, had influenced her, she said: "I adore Cézanne’s neutral, contained, strange beauty. And that containment is essential to me. It is very important to my work.” In a different way, Arthur Jafa surprised me by talking about one of my favourite songs, As by Stevie Wonder, and describing it as “fucking apocalyptic”. I’d never considered it in that way before, and I returned to a cultural entity I thought I knew inside out with a completely different perspective, courtesy of Jafa. The book is full of these insights that introduce us to people, places, works, ideas, that I hope might prompt new adventures for the reader or a rethinking of things they thought they knew—as they have for me.

Which interview made you laugh the most? Did any make you cry?

Ragnar Kjartansson's is by far the funniest of the interviews; his joy is totally infectious. There are many moving moments, like when Julie Mehretu is talking about Diego Velázquez’s Juan de Pareja. It is a portrait of the painter who was an enslaved man, working in Velázquez’s studio, and Julie discusses it in relation to the question, “If you could live with just one work of art, what would it be?” She reflects on "how dehumanised somebody becomes in being somebody’s object, in being somebody’s slave”, but goes on to describe the "deep humanity with which he’s painted, in the profound breath that he’s about to take, the expression in his eyes, the touch of his mouth”. She says she “would want to always have that lesson in my life”. And among the most moving is the interview with Phyllida Barlow, which was recorded just a few days before she died—I really felt that tragic loss when re-reading the interview. She is a truly great artist and thinker about art, as I hope that conversation shows.

Can you explain how you have organised the interviews in the book?

There are 25 interviews from the series and they appear in the book in the order that they were recorded chronologically, beginning with Michael Armitage from 2020 and ending with Arthur Jafa from 2024. It’s not the full conversation from the podcast: we focus on the 12 standard questions that I ask all the artists, and the answers are largely as they are on the podcast, but lightly (yet rigorously) edited. Listeners to the podcast will know that I do an introduction for each episode that is effectively a short essay on the artist’s work, and I’ve embellished and often re-written these texts, which now include quotes from the part of the podcast that isn’t included in the edited Q&A. I’ve also written an introduction and five texts about artists who are the most frequently mentioned through these interviews, which I’ve termed Anchor Artists: Velázquez, Goya, Édouard Manet, Marcel Duchamp and Louise Bourgeois. A key element is the pictures, which are abundant and beautiful reproduced. So, for the first time, images of the artist’s work, and those of the artists and other cultural figures they reference, accompany the interviews.

Which historical artist would you have most liked to interview and why?

So many—I am constantly playing this game in my head. I was recently deeply moved again to hear an archive recording of Eva Hesse talking on the Getty’s Radical Women podcast, and it made me think how much I would have loved to talk to her. I find her work relentlessly fascinating. But I am most obsessed with Henri Matisse, so it would have to be him. I’ve just read a letter Matisse wrote to Pierre Bonnard in 1946 in which he sent him some reproductions of Giotto’s Padua frescoes, which had proved so pivotal in a radical shift away from Fauvism in Matisse's early years, and which he was revisiting. "For me Giotto is the summit of my desires,” he tells Bonnard, "but the road leading to an equivalent, in our age, is too long for one lifetime.” So, had I interviewed him in 1946, that would be his answer to: “Which historical artist do you turn to the most today?”

Who is your dream interviewee who you still haven’t managed to get on the podcast?

There are quite a few. David Hammons is one dream, but that will never happen, because he barely ever does interviews. Likewise, Jasper Johns. And then, I would love to talk to Kara Walker, Simone Leigh, Chris Ofili, Bridget Riley and Kerry James Marshall, among others.

Your final question to each artist is always, ‘What is art for?’—how would you answer that question?

I agree with so many of the artists’ answers, from Sarah Sze’s simple answer—“sustenance”—to Tacita Dean’s idea that “it makes it possible to do everything else”, and Charline von Heyl’s entirely accurate assessment that “we all would be completely fucked without it”. But because I was looking back to my student days as part of doing the book, I reconnected with a combination of words used in 1891 by Albert Aurier, the French critic, that I used as the quote we had to provide for the catalogue for the degree show at Middlesex University in 1995. Aurier’s point was about decorative versus easel painting, but he talked about art’s ability to use "thoughts, dreams, and ideas” to decorate "the banal walls of human edifices”. Decoration is only one of the things it can do, of course, but I think art is for confronting us with visual and experiential forms that present varying combinations of "thoughts, dreams and ideas” that reflect in myriad ways on our world, and very often make us think differently about it.

What is Art For? Ben Luke, Heni Publishing, 400pp, £29.99 (hb)