Culture is by definition an inclusive concept; art, however, is not. The word “art” is not neutral. To talk of “art” is to imply a sense of values, of taste, of standards and – because of educational disadvantages – the word is inevitably shadowed by the spectre of class. All things being equal, the choice of going to the opera or ballet or theatre or gallery or bookshop is a free one, open to everyone. But all things aren’t equal: the “choice” of going to the theatre or the opera or an art gallery is a choice that doesn’t exist for vast numbers of people in this country, who, if they feel anything at all about art, feel disenfranchised. But that’s another story.

The questions I’m begging are these: what is the difference between art and entertainment? Do we believe that if something is popular it can’t be art? Or do we believe its corollary: that unpopularity is a measure of artistic worth? Why is Peter Grimes art and not Phantom of the Opera? What do we mean by “art”?

Here’s a personal catechism: art – good or bad, high or low – must have form, it must have shape. It’s a way of knowing the world, of giving form and meaning to things that seem formless.

A work of art has to have ambition beyond wanting to please the audience or appease fashion, a desire to examine the world – people or nature or society – and make it look or sound or seem new.

A work of art should introduce something to the world that didn’t exist before. Of course when we look at the art of our own times we can easily get caught between complimenting the emperor on his new clothes, and sounding like Ruskin saying of a painting of Whistler’s that it was like “flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face”. Just because art doesn’t look or sound like we expect it to may be precisely why we need it – because it’s original, because it makes us look at the world differently, because it uncovers new meanings. Or, of course, it may just be tosh.

Art is everything that politics isn’t: politics generalises about people, art particularises. Art is about the “I” in life, not about the “we”, about private life rather than public life.

There has to be a complexity about art but that’s not the same as obscurity. Because it’s difficult it doesn’t mean that it’s “elitist”. Opera is elitist – but elitist in the sense that it can be performed by only a very few, very gifted and very skilful people to a live audience limited by the number of people who can sit in an opera house at any one time. It’s only fair to use “elitism” as a pejorative if the opera house repels a prospective audience through excessively high prices or through a selectively exclusive attitude to the public. Moreover, it’s unreasonable to judge an art by the company it keeps.

There must be mystery, a sense of unknowability in a work of art – as there is in every human being. In art reality must be given the chance to be mysterious and fantasy the chance to be commonplace. The DNA of art is metaphor: that’s the genetic cell without which nothing can be mutated by craft into art. Art strives towards the mythic – towards seeing heaven in a grain of sand. Art is unquestionably a form of magic, conjuring something from nothing – sounds from the air on a musical instrument, a human being in paint on a stretch of canvas, a world with a pen on a page of paper.