posted on 26 Sep 2022

Art Matters by Neil Gaiman, illustrated by Chris Riddell

For a cohort of teenagers and those in their early twenties, Neil Gaiman is something of a guru and can command an astonishing level of commitment (something I’ve noted elsewhere on the Letterpress site). Art Matters: because your imagination can change the world is his attempt to write a manifesto for his own art and what feeds his artistic impulse. For good measure he also throws in an attempt to produce a guide to setting the creative impulse free. The book is split into four sections: Credo; Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming; Making a Chair; and, Make Good Art.

The latter two sections are not, for me at least, anything like as successful as the first two. I really don’t think trying to describe, codify or give tips on how to be a creative writer or creative spirit in the wider artistic sense can ever work. But the idea of a set of guidelines – a credo – to live by seems to me to be an essential thing in an age when the written word and free expression through the written word is under threat from all angles. And, of course, it follows that the vehicles for transmitting the words we use to express our ideas – books – must also be protected. It seems astonishing that we even need to have someone like Gaiman to articulate just how vital it is to protect books and libraries but, sadly, we do.

Typical of the statements in the section he calls Credo is this:

“I believe that you can set your own ideas against ideas you dislike. That you should be free to argue, explain, clarify, debate, offend, insult, rage, mock, sing, dramatize and deny.”

This freedom to have ideas and express them doesn’t come, he says, with a mute button for those ideas you personally don’t like. The freedom to say and believe things that I don’t should never come with threats or with peril:

“I believe that you have the absolute right to think things I find offensive, stupid, preposterous or dangerous, and that you have the right to speak, write or distribute these things, and that I do not have the right to kill you, maim you, hurt you or take away your liberty or property…”

Ultimately:

“I believe that in the battle between guns and ideas, ideas will, eventually win..”

As you might expect for a piece that’s being posted on a website to promote and campaign for the spread of the physical book, I can only endorse everything Gaiman says in the second section about books, libraries and the value of the imaginative life. One quotation will suffice to illustrate why this is so:

“I do not believe that all books will or should migrate onto screens….Physical books are tough, hard to destroy, bath resistant, solar operated, feel good in your hand. They are good at being books, and there will always be a place for them.”

Crucially, he argues, they are the best way to teach us all what empathy really means.

You could argue that Neil Gaiman is the ultimate crossover author – that he bridges with ease the supposed gap between the ‘young adult’ and the adult reader. And if that’s the case, the same can be said for the superb illustration by Chris Riddell. He too is equally at home with audiences of all ages and never needs to compromise the inventive intelligence of his drawing. Riddell’s illustration isn’t just an added extra to this book but a crucial part of a partnership in which text and drawing enhance each other.

This is a pocket-sized book with a massive message to give you. Copies can be found in hardback only but will cost you well under £10.

 

Terry Potter

September 2022