Madeleine Bunting says that artists have begun taking on the roles that increasingly cautious politicians are afraid to play. “As professional politics becomes ever more remote, the most fraught controversies of our time are migrating into art… Art can never do the messy business of politics – the negotiation and compromise. But politicians are now grappling with a new politics about how to change the way people behave in their private lives: how they eat, travel, shop, exercise, drink. And art can open minds and change hearts in a way that our politics is singularly failing to do.”