It can be interesting to revisit old postings in other places on the web and see what has changed in one's views over months or even years. This posting takes us away from international relations completely to ask some basic questions about how we respond to Art. 

It is a 'wild card' on As It Happens and we hope you appreciate the occasional break from politics - though we can rarely resist some commentary hidden in our texts. The original posting related to the major Gilbert & George retrospective in London earlier this year.  Only the internet permits this process of editing one's own views over time quickly and simply.

Can any art rooted in place be fully appreciated by someone who has not shared that sense of place to some degree with the artist? 

You may see a work that owes its apparent meaning to a particular place yet know that a combination of art market pressures and perhaps the sheer scale of a work may mean that it is displaced quite quickly to the large and spacious houses of the rich or to the public gallery of a foreign land. 

How can a wealthy collector understand references to the East End street in Gilbert & George's work? How much of a work by Anselm Kiefer or Georg Baselitz requires the owner not merely to understand German history and culture but to be 'German'?

Is Art appropriately universalised by the art market and popularity or is this universalism nothing more than inauthenticity and commodification? Do owners as investors even need to care if detachment from original context causes no loss of value?

Similar questions apply to portraiture when the subject of the portrait becomes detached from the person or the family and their purpose in commissioning it. If you commission a work of art, you are laying some claim to its meaning but if an artist entrepreneurially takes your image for his purposes, then he is taking meaning from you. 

If an artist takes a commission and does not produce the meaning you intend, is he engaged in a fraud? This might mean, by extension, that an artist who takes your image and uses it for his purposes is engaged in a 'theft of meaning'. 

We have 'economic crimes' in both Soviet and American regulatory culture - perhaps, one day, some future culture will create a category of 'creative crimes' in which 'theft of meaning' becomes a criminal act and schools of artists categorised as organised crime.

Only this weekend, we have seen one pop realist artist, Sebastian Kruger, produce retrospective portraits imagining the Rolling Stones as children of 10 - it is poignant that Brian Jones has not been included. 

Is this stealing childhood? It would seem that the 'meaning' of this programme of work did not have room for one founding 10-year old because history has been retrospectively fitted to meet current reality - this Rolling Stones is preferred to that Rolling Stones in an act of artistic arbitrariness. 

On the one hand, Kruger has sold the work on to a German collector so the enterprise is commercial as well as artistic. On the other hand, the artist claims friendship with Ronnie Wood and says that he has the band's blessing and that Ronnie Wood and Keith Richards are collectors. 

The transfer of 'meaning' seems to be one that the owners are happy to see pass on, probably because they long since detached their real selves from the hoopla and show business involved in being a major cultural icon. 

This brings to mind Hockney's Ossie Clark painting and all the pop portraits shown currently at the National Portrait Gallery. The 'iconic' Marilyn and Elvis portraits detach the images wholly from any sense of the real person that inspired them, the sources as unknowable to themselves no doubt as to their friends and the wider public.

The 'real' Marilyn, the 'real' Diana, the 'real' Jesus - how much human energy has been spent on attempting to 'know' (or rather appropriate) so many unknowable different godheads. 

This is the cult of celebrity brought down to its basics - the appropriation of meaning regardless of underlying truths. Art has always been a vector for belief. Once it was belief in God and now it is belief that other people and places can be known without being them, without knowing them, without meeting them and without being there.

In all these cases of place and personality, meaning changes the further that an art object travels from its moment of creation. Some artists are engaged with the facticity of their inspiration - they want to connect with the real object. Others use the object as mere medium to create a new object which has more meaning than the original - that is often truly great Art.

The cynical, however, will grab place and personality to meet the meaning needs of others, even if those needs are crass. Supplying meaning to lives is a trade like any other and artists have as much right to make a buck out of it as politicians, churchmen and businessmen.

We can probably agree that a Duccio madonna and child cannot be fully understood without thinking about how it fitted into its church environment. The 'presence' in the icon was once Mary Mother of God, certainly the divine, but on the wall of an art gallery its meaning will have changed so drastically that the same object will, in effect, have become transubstantiated - in a sinister reversal of what is believed by many Catholics to happen in the Mass. 

If the host can become the Body of Christ through transubstantiation, the Madonna or Pieta ceases to contain the divine as it moves from church to gallery - or to a rich man's home (having presumably failed to reach them through the eye of a needle) unless the rich man is, in fact, a man of belief.

Even then, the 'belief' of the owner may involve a re-sacralisation of the object but the actual belief will be new and not a true reproduction of the old. In most cases, the object is transsubstantiated away from the divine to the material - or at least to the social.

If the divine and personality are lost as a work moves through the exchange system into socially constructed reality, fixing place is going to be equally difficult. Students of Art spend lifetimes trying to recreate the symbolism or the cultural, social, economic and even political context of a work of art.

What cannot be reproduced is the felt sense of being in a place and time shared by the artist any more than we can know God or another person long since dead once the work of Art has come between us and the original. That the art acts as a path back to God or a person is not plausible unless we knew that particular iteration of God or that person originally.

You might now come to see why many Byzantines and all Muslims disliked and dislike the artistic representation of Mohammed and Allah. What appears to be an honour to God in Western tradition degenerates, in practice, into something else disconnected from the original inspiration, a displacement.

All the perceptions, the gestalt, of place in particular may be partly reproducible in living memory but still not be conveyed through the work of art itself to a 'stranger'. Art might fix some aspect of place but only so that other aspects are crowded out. 

The whole draft that we call reality will then be rewritten by the observers of the Art, much as they have done with the Art of the numinous and the personal, to fit their own needs. Art is, self-evidently, never precisely what it represents and there are plenty of French philosophers to tell us more if we really need to have all this confirmed for us.

Two artists bring out this reaction in me because I know the places which contributed to their art (though I would not be so presumptuous as to believe that I understood their art any better than anyone else and certainly no better than the artists themselves).

Gilbert & George (counted as one artist) produce their work within a few streets of East London in territory I know well and Tracy Emin was born (as I was) and raised (as I was not) in Margate. Those streets of Gilbert & George's are very familiar to me. London's cultural shifts and changes are expressed almost precisely in work after work. 

An entire cultural experience over five decades is reproduced, in admittedly simplified terms, to someone who has lived through them without always comprehending what was going on at the time. I rewrite my own perception of my own historical context as I look at them in sequence.

This sense of place lived in and then fixed as a 'memory of sentiment' must be impossible for many owners of these works to understand, so something else is driving them to buy and appreciate. Yet the evocation of a specific time and place is still core to the art and will be lost when people like me and others in my generation die.

The same with Emin. Neither her work nor G&G's can be reduced to this evocation of place but anyone who grew up in the depressed culture of an English seaside town (mine was the neighbouring town of Ramsgate) can see in her graphic work direct reference, perhaps unconscious, to the primitive graffiti and seedy culture of an economy that lived hand-to-mouth on seasonal visitors who sometimes never turned up and, if they did, had little to spend. 

Her autobiographical reactions to a culture of desperation and abuse and her reconstruction of herself through art could have taken place in any zone of deprivation - even in an abusive wealthy context - but the visuals and textures of her work evoke a particular time and place to someone who also participated in it. That aspect of her work will also die as her generation of observers die.

Does this link matter, between the artist's possibly unconscious drawing down from place and the minority of people who may not appreciate what should be appreciated in the art but who still see these unconscious references to a shared world? 

Probably not to the artist or the collector or the art market or the critic or the historian, but this evocation of experience provides a surprising link between watcher and watched. The two sides do not have to like each other but they share an admittedly attenuated sense of being 'distant family'. 

And like a 'family' that shares childhood memories but, otherwise, has nothing in common in adult life, this bond can still draw some people back in a crisis to the art - as a family gets called to a funeral, a wedding or to survival in a war. 

This brings us to Gilbert & George once again. The very first room of the retrospective showed early work very different from the rest of the Exhibition except in scale - a rural idyll of sorts with Gilbert & George apparently celebrating the same sort of English sense of place that dominates Tate Britain. 

There is an essay to be written on how English art moves from celebrating ownership of land [Gainsborough] to becoming integrated with the land as a national ideal, especially in the context of wartime experience and subsequent reactions to postwar changes in society. 

Gilbert & George's sharp shift to specific place from generalised national place in the 1970s and Tracey Emin's reversion to the personal in a revolt against place (yet never entirely leaving it behind) and so many other examples of trying to fix or avoid memory or fix and move on from place seem to indicate that 'English' artists are engaged in a continuous troubled process of coming to terms with the fragmentation of national identity. 

This was especially clear in the very last rooms of the Gilbert & George retrospective where the arrival of Islamic culture in the East London streets is recorded with the same aggression as the arrival of AIDS. There is something nasty in this work and more expressive than any words of the mutual antagonism between the gay culture that emerged in the Thatcher-Reagan years and the new Islamism. They actually hate each other.

One of the 'enfants terribles' was born in Italy and Emin is of Turkish descent with continuing Turkish links. It may be that this enables them to see or feel or express what the indigenous English have long felt - that there is a profound disconnect between what our inherited national culture claims for us and what is experienced in the streets. 

Not that most of us care any more. The English now believe with LP Hartley that the 'past is another country'. But the shift from the culture of the 1940s and 1950s to the urban multicultural highly sexualised culture of the 1990s and 2000s has shattered the old sense of place and nationhood.  

It has replaced it (in many cases) with a stronger sense of specific place, such as that of being a Londoner, and of personal rather than collective memory. 

Our artists, with that genius for the semi-conscious articulation of hidden truths, may be chronicling a cultural revolution in which a world of rootless transient communities has emerged, where there is no longer any shared institutional authority and where memory is unstable because it is not easily reinforced by community norms as a national 'myth'. 

A real war might change that, of course - but not the phoney war on terror. Yet Art is never entirely definable or explicable in words. If it was, we would not need it. We would simply write. Words may be the currency of society and politics but they leave gaps. 

All I have said here is that these gaps, being wordless and numberless, are never fixed. Any original intention or inspiration is unlikely to last long before it becomes acquired by those whose determination is to account, in words or numbers, for the objects in some way.

The person painted at that time, the place that inspired, the divine and the numinous - we can get slivers of original meaning outside the point of creation, but the only way to recreate fully the original inspiration is to be the creator or to have been in at the moment of creation. In a paradox, the price of art is high in direct proportion to its failure to be what it was intended to be (unless the artist started out as a cynic).

Whether a wealthy collector in Luxembourg or Liechtenstein really comprehends any of this - any more than a nineteenth century British imperial collector of Italian altarpieces could understand a late-medieval small town Catholic sensibility - is another matter. But I am sure that the collectors are making some very sound investments and need not care too much about philosophical authenticities.

www.tppr.co.uk