The Pitmen Painters

(Cambridge Arts Theatre, 16 May 2011)

An artist captures private moments of beauty. An entertainer delivers whatever beauty pleases his public. A missionary seeks to impose his notion of beauty on others.

Commercial art expresses beauty that is easy to communicate. It is not the quest for money that turns an artist into an entertainer, but the withdrawal from life that money affords.

Art often attracts individuals eager to communicate but unable to do so by conventional means. That inability makes them ill-equipped to form a political force. Nor do successful artists need one.