Perhaps it was the realisation of this that persuaded so many contemporary artists to stop aiming to connect to any enduring truths, to abandon any attempt to pursue beauty or truth and instead to simply say to the public, ‘I am down in the mud with you’. Certainly there was a point in twentieth century Europe when the aim of the artist and the expectations of the public changed. It was evident in the way in which the public approach to art moved from admiration (‘I wish I could do that’) to disdain (‘Even a child could do that’). Technical ambition significantly diminished and often disappeared altogether. And the moral ambitions of art travelled on the same trajectory. One might blame this on Marcel Duchamp and his sculpture Fountain (a urinal), but enough of the continent’s artistic culture fell in behind him to suggest that he had merely led where others wished to follow. Today, if you walk through a gallery like Tate Modern in London the only thing more striking than the lack of technical skill is the lack of ambition. The bolder works may claim to tell us about death, suffering, cruelty or pain, but few have anything actually to say about these subjects other than pointing to the fact that they exist. Certainly they provide no answers to the problem they present. Every adult knows that suffering and death exist, and if they did not then they will hardly be persuaded in an art gallery. But the art of our time seems to have given up any effort to kindle something else in us. In particular, it has given up that desire to connect us to something like the spirit of religion or that thrill of recognition – what Aristotle termed anagnorisis – which grants you the sense of having just caught up with a truth that was always waiting for you.

It may be that this sense only occurs if you tap into a profound truth and that the desire to do so is something of which artists, like almost everyone else, have become suspicious or incapable. Go to any of the temples of modern culture and you can see great crowds of people wandering around looking for something, but it is unclear what they are after. There are strands of art that can remind people of something greater. Once, while wandering somewhat aimlessly and underwhelmed through an art gallery, I heard the strains of Spem in Alium and made my way towards the sound. Suddenly I realised another reason why the earlier galleries had been so depopulated. Everybody had migrated towards the same ‘sound installation’ by Janet Cardiff, consisting of 40 speakers arranged in an oval, each relaying the voice of a singer in the choir. In the centre people stood mesmerised. Couples held hands and one pair sat embraced. This was before Thomas Tallis’s work featured in the sadomasochist novels of E. L. James, or who knows what might have happened.