Intelligence Squared

http://www.iq2if.com Phaidon's Amanda Renshaw introduces us to the Art Museum: 10 years in the making; open 365 days a year, 7 days a week and 24 hours a day; it houses 3,000 exhibitions, 650 collections from 60 countries; and is 992 pages long... Take a tour through Phaidon's latest creation.

The inaugural If Conference, from debate forum Intelligence Squared, took place on November 25-26th November in London. More than 30 celebrated scientists, award winning architects, farsighted futurologists and other brilliant minds shed light on the excitements and the dangers of tomorrow's world. Visit http://www.iq2if.com for video and picture highlights and to sign up for information about If Conference 2012.

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Picasso's Nude, Green Leaves and Bust became the world's most expensive painting last year when it sold for £65 million. A stupendous price, but one that reflects Picasso's status as one of the giants – if not the overriding genius – of 20th-century art. But do the high prices fetched at auction always indicate artistic merit? Aren't they often the result of a fraught bidding war between two super-rich collectors? Doesn't the $25 million stumped up for Jeff Koons' giant balloon model say more about the power of hype than the merit of the work itself? What's more, the market itself can easily be rigged. When Damien Hirst's diamond encrusted skull was purportedly sold for £50 million in 2007, rumour had it that Hirst himself was part of the consortium that bought it in order to drum up publicity and raise the market value of his other work.

So does the art market tell us only about fads and fashion and the egos of multimillionaires? Or should we overlook the hype and remember that in the long run the market rights itself and reflects the consensus on what great art really is?

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Museums are our new churches, as is commonly agreed. Millions of people flock to them to be uplifted, inspired, or distracted from everyday cares for an hour or two by encountering magnificent art. But while churches know exactly how to present art in order to foster faith and remind us of the Christian virtues, couldn't our museums do a better job at displaying art in a way that fully engages our emotions? Aren’t all those academic categories – “the 19th century”, “the Northern Italian School” – dry and dull? Aren't museums just places where great art goes to die? Why can't museums organize their collections in such a way as to convey art’s life-enhancing possibilities and even inspire us to become better people?

But isn't that taking the "art as religion" line a bit too seriously? It implies that museums have a social function, even a didactic role to play. Do we want to visit museums in order to be told by invisible curators to think and feel in a certain way? And while it may be the case that religious art was created to instruct the minds and improve the souls of the congregation, can that be said of modern art whose purpose is to challenge, question or shock the viewer? And don’t ever soaring visitor numbers prove that our museums are already doing a brilliant job?

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Since the 1990s, New York galleries have witnessed an unprecedented 78% increase in exhibitions of Asian art, the bulk of it contemporary. Precipitated by the circumstances of their rapidly expanding economies, daily life for many in the East is undergoing something of a revolution. Contemporary art is part of this revolution. It realises the East’s rapidly evolving tastes, aspirations, and categories of consciousness, whilst articulating the accompanying anxieties about loss of identity and cultural specificity. Contemporary Art from the East both grapples with, and typifies, the problems of globalised modernity. Should we see this new cultural outpouring as the spoils or the victim of rapid globalisation?

Speakers for the motion - Alexandra Munroe and Iain Robertson

Speakers against the motion - Matthew Collings and Richard Wentworth

Chaired by Tim Marlow

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The great Henri Cartier-Bresson, a man who captured a thousand moments, once said that “photographers are the hunters, not the cooks.” But does that make photography a lesser medium? Are the likes of Robert Capa, Robert Frank and Cartier-Bresson himself always going to be inferior artists to Michelangelo and Monet?

In this Intelligence Squared debate, AA Gill concedes that photography “revolutionised the nature of art,” but interprets the motion as implying otherwise. Was it not, Gill asked, fundamentally about the exclusivity, about “who is allowed into the club and who is merely a snapper?”

Stephen Bayley disagrees. He opened his argument by saying that, “questioning photography would be like questioning sight, but the motion is about the medium, not what is art.” As such, paint is more subtle, wider in “scope and variety…far more susceptible to human interference and therefore allows for a better message.” In contrast, photography is “powerful but limited in expressive range,” as it depends most of all of on technology and equipment: “photographers are ‘dominated by their medium, not masters of it.” The photographer, Bayley concluded, is “more passive, less creative. He has to wait for his great moments; he cannot create them.

Speakers for the motion - Stephen Bayley, José María Cano and Michael Mack.

Speakers against the motion - A A Gill, Chris Steele-Perkins

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Toy Story 3 has been a huge box office hit. It has already grossed almost $400m world wide, and made £40m in its first fortnight on screens in the UK, making it very likely that it will become the biggest grossing animated film ever in Britain. Several reviewers – male as well as female – have admitted to finding themselves weeping at its ending.

But some feminists have accused it of being sexist for its low ratio of female toy characters, and for the fact that they display stereotypical feminine behaviour. The comments provoked outrage from many who had enjoyed the film. Do they hold water?

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Dressing decoratively is as old as human civilisation, and archaeologists regularly discover beads and ornaments among artifacts left by even the most basic societies. But disapproval is equally ancient - the Roman writer Seneca took exception to men who wore togas that were slightly transparent or too loose. Today, fashion is a trillion-dollar industry, followed avidly by catwalk-watchers, magazine-readers and, of course, shoppers. Some consider it a sort of communal art which we can all get involved in, and others value it as an outward sign of identity and group allegiance, allowing people to present themselves as goths or skaters, slackers or business-people. But many also criticise it, claiming that it puts pressure on women to aspire to unrealistic ideals of beauty and thinness, and that developing-world garment manufacturers are paid pitiful wages. But what the world be like if we cast off concerns with fashionability? Would it be puritan and bland, with millions of people in poor countries out of work? Or would it be greener and happier, allowing us all to concentrate on the things that really matter, rather than this season's colour-scheme or hemline?

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Edward Tufte has been described by the New York Times as the “da Vinci of data” and by Business Week as the “Galileo of graphics.” He has written, designed, and self-published four books on visual thinking and analytical design: “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information” (1983, 2001), “Envisioning Information” (1990), “Visual Explanations”(1997), and “Beautiful Evidence” (2006). These books have received 40 awards for content and design and have 1.8 million copies in print.

Tufte has had solo shows of sculptures and prints at Artists Space in New York and the Architecture and Design Museum in Los Angeles, and in 2009 - 2010 a major sculpture show at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum. Since 1999, he has completed 50 large-scale outdoor pieces, 150 table pieces, and many steel engravings and digital prints.

In this rare appearance in England for Intelligence Squared, Tufte will discuss his theories of visual thinking and analytical design.

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Art fairs, scoff the critics, have become shopping malls for the super-rich. They are giant marketplaces for the wealthy to buy, invest and speculate on the commodity of art. Galleries pressure artists to churn out 'safe', sellable works, which are not so much looked at as bought in bulk. But are art fairs in fact the perfect format for visitors to see art from all over the world which they wouldn't otherwise see? And by allowing artists to show their work to potential buyers en masse are these shows a crucial lifeline for artists today?

Chaired by Simon de Pury.

Arguing for the motion are Louisa Buck, Jasper Joffe, and Matthew Collings.

Arguing against the motion are Richard Wentworth, Matthew Slotover and Sir Norman Rosenthal.

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Antony Gormley, Alain de Botton, Camila Batmanghelidjh, Grayson Perry and Stephen Bayley share their views on whether the 'facebook generation' can be taught art.

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