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If you ask a grown-up, ‘Is art important?’ they’ll probably say:

Yes, it’s very important.

But suppose you ask a big question. Suppose you ask:

Why is it important?

What might an adult say if you ask this question? Perhaps they might say:

Because it’s very old.

But this is not a very good answer, because a stone is very old too — actually much, much older than any work of art — and they don’t ask you to go and admire a pebble. They might say:

Because it looks so real.

But that is not a great answer either. All the photos on your phone look real too, and they’re always telling you to get off your phone. And anyway, lots of art doesn’t look very real at all. Or they could say:

Because it costs a lot.

But that’s not convincing at all: the most expensive art in the world costs about the same as an oil tanker and most art costs much less than that. But grown-ups don’t go around saying how wonderful oil tankers are or have special places in the middle of big cities where you can go and look at them, and they never worry that your school doesn’t spend enough time teaching you about container vessels.

Parc de Montjuïc, Barcelona, Spain

In short, if you really ask a grown-up why art is important, they probably wouldn’t be able to give you a very good answer.*

* An adult might be surprised if you ask this because hardly any one does ask this question, even though it’s a pretty obvious thing to ask, once you think about it.

But maybe it’s not very fair to expect all grown-ups to know why art is important. There are lots of things the grown-ups you know don’t understand, but that doesn’t mean there is not a good answer. They don’t know (really) how their phone works, but someone, somewhere, knows perfectly well.

So perhaps, instead, the answer could be in a book about art. There are lots of books about art, so surely one of them must cover it. But actually, most art books do not tell you why art matters. They tell you: what the famous pictures are.

But this isn’t a huge help. Just because something is famous doesn’t mean you should be interested in it. It would be a bit of a surprise if the grown-ups said:

We have to take some trips to visit famous airports!

We’ll start with Heathrow and then maybe go and see

Schiphol, it’s one of the most famous airports in Europe.

Or imagine if your mum said:

I want to go to Chile so I can see the Escondida copper mine, it’s the most famous copper mine in the world!

Escondida copper mine, Chile

If they’re not talking about which pictures are famous, books about art usually tell you: who the great artists are. They will probably mention some of these people:

But going through names is not actually a very convincing answer to the question of why we should care about art. You could find a book to tell you who the great dentists and great dog trainers in the world are.

Or you could make a list of the people who have had the greatest influence in the development of fridges and freezers:

Usually your school and parents are not trying to get you interested in fridge and freezer people. Of course, it’s really great that these people helped us keep our vegetables fresh, but we don’t need to spend a lot of time finding out about them. You could be completely fine if you never heard another word about them in your life.

So, even though we have asked adults and looked in books about art, we still haven’t got an answer to the big question:

Why is art important?

Books and people say art is important, but they don’t say why. This can feel really odd: You’re used to the idea that the adult world understands everything, even if no one gets around to explaining everything to you. But sometimes if you really push for an answer you realise that no one has an obvious one to give you.

But maybe it is not so strange really — there are plenty of important questions adults haven’t got good answers to yet. For instance:

How can you make a big city beautiful?

No one really knows the answer to this — which is why there are not any really big cities where all the different districts are lovely. Or:

What’s the best way to organise a school?

Perhaps hardly anyone knows because there are very few really brilliant schools. It’s not that there can’t be good answers to these questions. It’s just that adults have not found the answers yet. So maybe it’s the same with art. It’s not that there can’t be a good answer to the big question, it’s just that we haven’t found the answer yet. In this book we’re going to be doing something new and unusual: We’re going to find an answer to a big question…

Why might some works of art be important to you?

It’s a bit like being an explorer. There were the first people to go to the North Pole, then the first people to climb to the top of Mount Everest, then the first people to go to the moon.

Robert McCall, The Space Mural, A Cosmic View, 1976 Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, Washington, USA

The same thing can happen for questions and ideas. We are going to explore this big question, for the first time, together in this book. We are adventurers in big ideas.