Art is the drug

The invitation to the Frieze Art Fair was a bigger parcel than anything that arrived on my birthday. It looked like a kind of ambassadorial visa package to a higher realm, and spa. Art invitations now outweigh fashion invitations. I mean they weigh more. The events grow ever more lavish as the art bubble perpetuates and stretches and puffs itself wider. There is more money flying around in the art world than there is flying around in space, the whole of the rest of the universe beyond the planet: perhaps as a species we’re still looking vainly in mirrors when we should be looking in telescopes.

The Frieze invitation didn’t extend to my wife, who, having been excluded, immediately declared that she wanted to go. This is the great gypsy trick of contemporary art: it manages to trade on its power to exclude. Exclusivity is where science falls down. Science is always apologising for being difficult and pretending that it’s simple. Science could easily be as cool as art, though. It has been in the past. Goethe’s definition of genius as ‘the ability to put form on the indeterminate’ applies equally as a definition of art or of science. Science is knotty, but it’s always intriguing. If rich people spent as much time considering Riemann manifolds as they do talking about their art collections, then they’d know more about what shape the universe is, and even the vaguest sense of the universe at its largest scale is something that’s really worth having.