Introduction

Abstract

Among the artist Paul Gauguin’s many strange adventures in Tahiti, he recalls that of being thought of a useful human being. A young native had watched him carving a figurine and finally declared that he, Gauguin, ‘was useful to others’. Gauguin could hardly believe his own ears: ‘I believe Totefa is the first human being in the world who used such words towards me.’ Hadn’t Gauguin been taught to regard art as wonderfully detached, beautifully impractical, a rebuke to utilitarian philistines everywhere? And yet he was charmed by this odd new idea—let’s call it the Totefa Hypothesis: that art and artists might be useful components of society.