My intention is not to come up with a correct answer, nor to reduce the concept of art, so that there is no room for personal interpretation, since this is the lovely thing about art. However, visual art does have the power to make a statement outside of subjective thought.

At its broadest understanding, ethics is a natural part of all art because it is inherent in all things. By ethics, I am referring to the moral principals that govern a person’s or group’s behavior, and which is linked to a utilitarian outlook on life. I’m suggesting an understanding of ethics that can bring about a conscious debate.

I hope to suggest that art in some way can and should be reflective; it should get us thinking about the world and our relationship to it. This is a big question and one that has many different approaches and very few conclusive answers. Nevertheless the question of art and ethics is important, particularly given the growing influence of the visual medium.

The visual is fast becoming the number one method of communication, which makes this medium very powerful indeed. What we ‘see’ stays with us, it plays on our imagination as a loop, or hook pulling together messages and meanings through conscious thought and subconscious behavior. The ‘visual’, influences how we see the world and how we respond to each other.

Visual art, in the 21^st century in the west, now has a legitimate voice. Art has the power to provoke change, to bring about discussion and also to generate a lot of money, all these factors mean that art has earned the right to join in with serious debates about things that matter. Arguably the viewer may not understand the artist’s intentions, which is why to a large degree the responsibility falls on the artist to make his or her views known.

At a conference in June this year entitled ‘Culture and Consequence’, held at Kings College, Jude Kelly, Artistic Director of the Southbank Centre said this, “Are artists using their minds in constructive ways, solving the gap between those that have and those that do not have? This is not about making art with no idea about where it will land, in terms of it message…this is about responsibility beyond the individual artist…it’s about saying what you believe in and how you are demonstrating your belief, other than just by making yourself powerful”.

Given the tremendous power of the visual, it is not too surprising to note that images have often been used to influence us in a negative or arguably unethical way. In 2007 Sao Paulo banned all public advertising on billboards and screens, so that the promotion of everything from jeans to mobile phones was prohibited. The authorities called these images ‘visual pollution’ and as a result of the ban authorities believe that the landscape has been transformed and the city now offers unimpeded views of the surroundings. I can’t help but wonder whether ‘good’ or ethical visual images would have made a difference.

Art is to a certain degree subjective, as we have said, but we can and do draw upon basic universal truths which go beyond the individual. Artists, if they choose to, can identify with universal truths. So that the emphasis is not on the viewer to unpack the subtle nuances behind a piece of work, but on the artist to depict a piece in such a way that there is something explicit about truth within it. Of course, how that link is achieved is down to the artist’s reflection. The viewer can then actively engage with the art as they do with the world they live in, since works of art should reflect the world.

Art, despite the power of the visual, is often viewed as a playful exercise, lacking in sobriety and responsibility. For many people, art is not seen to engage with ethics at all, or if it does, then it does so on a playful and romanticised level. However, even within seemingly playful art there has been ethics. The pop art movement for example, exalted the criticism of consumerism and explored news and non-traditional materials in the conception of works of art.

Perhaps our need to reduce art to ‘play’, comes from our discomfort around dealing with moral issues, or our feeling of helplessness at the sheer enormity of many difficult problems. Jeremy Deller is one such example of this. He made a proposal to put a real car, wrecked by a bomb in Iraq on the plinth in Trafalgar Square.

Deller was one of six artists shortlisted, his piece showed a real car, that had been destroyed in a real war. Art critic Jonathan Jones, when considering whether Deller’s car would be next in line to the plinth, commented, “it’s not likely. And yet this is by far the best work of art proposed for the fourth plinth”.

In recent plans to develop Hackney, near where I live, for the 2012 Olympics, a 3D visualization of the proposal was designed and displayed in the local area. Artists recreated the same design by adding a few minor amendments. The design entitled ‘Gentrified Hackney’, included captions and speech bubbles like, “Just Buy it”, “buy phony” and “love love love”. The poster was taken down and replaced with another new one. Whether or not one agrees with the resistance to the gentrification of Hackney, the exploration behind what this might mean for the community at large is evident and the billboard begs the question, ‘Do you agree with what is happening in your community?’ This image does make us feel uncomfortable because it challenges us; after all we are all guilty of excessive material spending and are tempted by the allure of comfort and exclusivity. It asks the viewer to take part in thinking about the moral and ethical implications of such a development, where some are included and others are not.

Within other genres such as poetry, there was a firm philosophical view that artists must also be ethical. However unlike the visual arts, ethics in poetry, like love, tended to deal with the non-principled kind of ethics - for example love of the fallen world, or of a superficial nature, in fact history is filled with such poets as these. Oscar Wilde for example, advocated aestheticism (art-for-art’s-sake) or Lord Byron, who like Wilde had a very colourful personal life. This by no means makes their poems any less creative. The work of artists like these is ‘real’, but they are expressions of fallen love and agony, they are the reality of falling short.

There were however, writers who expressed true love, like Leo Tolstoy who exposed fallen life in the upper classes of Russian Society of the time. He expressed true love; while employing realism to express reality, he also employed the style of idealism to express the ideal. There have been few artists like Tolstoy, and more recently Deller, who arguably engaged in true creative activity while pursuing ethics. Even in more recent years Brit Art has become almost completely commoditised where its message is largely in its worth and its apparent originality and authenticity.

Mathew Taylor, one of the speakers at the “Culture and Consequence’ conference said this, “We may be coming to the conclusion that you cannot tackle climate change through choice…Actually your response to climate change has to be driven by a more visceral sense of your relationship to the world. Maybe it is that we cannot tackle globalisation unless we can somehow get in touch with a capacity to recognise that our lives mean more than the stories we play out for ourselves…maybe a more collective notion of our identity, is going to be crucial to our succeeding and prospering in the world”.

As a Christian and as an artist, I can relate to Taylor, because of my understanding of God as the universal glue that holds everything together and the ultimate creator of beauty and goodness. For me, the exact language of faith is the exact language of ethics, but unless art is able to speak of these things independently of the artist, it will struggle to be seen and understood as ethical.

Having ethics happens with maturity and growth, (which is not necessarily dependant on age). Art should attempt to be a culmination of belief and active engagement with the world. All art to a certain degree is limited, not by a pressure to be ethical, but by its very nature because it is not the real experience, it is art. Art now has the opportunity be, and perhaps owes it to itself to be (now that it has a plinth of its own), a forceful representation of truth and a new language of faith.

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The Revd Elizabeth Adekunle is a curate at St Luke’s Homerton, Hackney in the Diocese of London and is an artist.