Governments can set targets, but unless there is a tidal change in our dreams and aspirations, it's going to be tough to change our behaviour in time to meet emissions targets set by the International Panel on Climate Change. If artists are the people who push the limits of our imagination, what is their part in changing the way we think about our futures?

In the feature “Light Conditions” published elsewhere on this site, Olafur Eliasson makes his view clear, “Today we face a situation in which global perspectives have advanced into our everyday lives with a new force: we cannot afford not to think about the environmental consequences of our individual actions; about the relation between the individual and the collective.” We have, he says, “reached a stage where such deliberations can be integrated with our aesthetic feelings.”

But how far are Eliasson’s sentiments shared in the wider artistic community? In this new feature marking the launch of the RSA Arts and Ecology Centre, Matthew Taylor, Ekow Eshun, Michaela Crimmin and Ed Gillespie discuss whether artists are rising to the challenge of climate change. What are the big achievements in art that should be being celebrated? Should art be doing more? As the credit crunch leads to a collapse in the glitzier end of the art market, does this give a generation of more engaged artists a chance to shine? Who are the names to watch? What can the RSA Arts and Ecology Centre's role be in promoting this new art?

At times like these, should artists be doing more to engage with social issues like climate change?

Mathew Taylor: I make a real distinction here. I don’t think artists should be doing more but I think that artists have a real responsibility to engage with the issues. So I think that if an artist chooses to say that they have nothing to say about this, or that they only want to talk about other things, that’s an artists perogative. I’m not talking about compelling anyone. But I think that artists can reasonably be asked the question. And I don’t think it’s an impertinent or unreasonable question to ask, just as I don’t think it’s an unreasonable or impertinent question to ask of any politician or any business leader.

Ekow Eshun: In my experience, you can say what you like to artists, [laughs], it makes a precious lot of difference to what they do. I think it’s important to recognize that art has no function - that the objects or the images artists create have no value other than what they are worth in themselves. So they have no extrinsic value. And I always think that puts artists in an interesting place, because they’re one of the few sets of people – I mean contemporary artists here - who are allowed to think and create without any rules and any boundaries. In one respect their job is to keep imagining the unknown and the until-then-impossible. So it’s rather missing the point to suggest that they should work in one way rather than any other way.

The times when that is done are – to put it bluntly – under totalitarian regimes, when artist are rallied to social causes. Which isn’t to say that artists can’t/won’t/aren’t capable of making works that are responses to climate change, but I think that if we look at them to make a bald and literal response as a way to get something provoking, that’s a mistake.

Michaela Crimmin: I think it’s absolutely reasonable to ask that question. We need artists insights into these huge challenges that we have, because they seem to me to be the only sector – if you can call artists a sector – who can operate very freely across disciplines, across issues, under them, over them, inside them, and have that mobility that most people in most disciplines find incredibly difficult. And also I think artists are – by their being – licensed to ask questions. I think that’s what we need. We need a very questioning, lateral type of thinking.

Ed Gillespie: I think we all have a responsibility to be doing something about this enormous collective challenge that we face. I understand why artists don’t want to be propagandists, and they don’t want to be seen as pushing an individual agenda, but the quote I always use is “Art is to the community what the dream is to the individual,” which is a Thomas Mann quote. It’s helping us imagine and challenge ourselves about what climate change is going to mean for us. The biggest opportunity artists have is to create compelling visions of a positive future – where we might be going. And that’s not necessarily towards some utopian future, but it is trying to take us away from a lot of the Armageddon/Doomsday types of vision that seem to predominate in the climate change debate.

Artists – in particular those working within the gallery scene - have taken a lot of stick in the media in recent times for the amounts their works sell for, as if there’s some sense that what art’s saying doesn’t merit the kind of money people have been paying for it. Does the credit crunch offer a new chance to re-evaluate what art’s for?

Matthew Taylor: There’s no reason why artists – like any section of the population – don’t need to attend to issues of legitimacy. And in as much as a lot of artists depend on public subsidies either directly or indirectly – or they receive their education through public funding – then I think it’s a reasonable question to ask whether they do feel a sense of social responsibility. And I think beyond that it seems to me that art is to do with our connectivity. People don’t produce art just for themselves. They produce it for other people. It is about communication with other people. So I think to ask the question, what are you trying to communicate here is OK – even if the answer is they’re just trying to communicate aesthetic values. But in as much as there is a message, what does that have to say about wider society – and in particular this huge challenge that faces us.

Ed Gillespie: It’s not like any of us are going to be untouched by climate change. It’s not something that’s optional – that you can remove yourself from. I can’t believe the scale of the whole challenge is not something that sparks artists and challenges the creativity of the people who drive ideas. It’s almost like some people can’t get their head around why climate change could be a great creative force.

Ekow Eshun: You tend not to get great art by putting people up against a wall and demanding that’s what they make at a given time. I think there are obviously grave environmental circumstances and actually you have seen quite a lot of individual artists responding in different ways, taking part in Cape Farewell projects. I’d say the role of artists isn’t to make a work which shocks and alarms like Guernica, but I think it is to encourage people to look closer at the circumstances that surround them them. And in that respect I don’t think it’s about saying you have to make a work that’s “about” the environment, but I think that it’s good to create works that encourage people to think more closely about their social or political or cultural conditions. So one artist that springs to mind is Jeremy Deller. His work is all about working with other people and encouraging them to think about the political and social conditions between them. I think that’s actually how art can engage with the times…

Michaela Crimmin It’s about positioning ourselves, and asking whether we should begin to call ourselves activists. I think it was interesting when Jon Snow interviewed Thom Yorke [of Radiohead, after Radiohead launched a campaign for Friends of the Earth in 2006], he asked him, “Well, what are you doing?” That question certainly makes me feel uncomfortable. It’s a motivator. I think Tue Greenfort’s bins are quite a motivator for me. In his work the bins are transparent. I now feel uncomfortable when I look at the ones I see in the street which aren’t.

Ed Gillespie: I think the challenge is making things like climate change tangible. That’s the sort of thing art can do brilliantly. When I do presentations about this this I often use Richard Box’s Field of Lights. It’s such a powerful image that makes the intangible tangible. By illustrating the strength of the magnetic fields around these high voltage power lines. In the context of climate change you’ve got this colourless, odourless gas which is changing in parts per million in the atmosphere – it’s incredibly intangible. Art should be able to find clever ways to help us grasp the intangibility of something like climate change. Damien Hirst supposedly did that installation which was a bunch of cylinders in which his annual emissions of CO² was bottled. It was more of a publicity stunt than an artwork – a hypothetical piece. But I’m also a fan of the more indirect stuff. Mr Starling, who wrode his motorbike across the desert in Spain – his fuel cell bike – and used the emissions from the bike to paint beautiful pictures of cactuses [pictured above]. That kind of elegance appeals to me.

Michaela Crimmin: Heather and Ivan Morison’s work is extraordinary because it combines something about the future and some of the scariness of the future – but it’s also quite comfortable at the same time. Like a lot of art it holds those paradoxes. I find their work draws you in and before you know it you’re in quite deep into thinking about issues.

There’s a lot of focus on political change of institutions but obviously culture change is crucial. Do artists fit in to this?

Matthew Taylor: I think there are two points here. Firstly, by far and away the most powerful way for the artistic community – in so far as there is an artistic community – to mobilise around climate change would be if that mobilisation comes from within that community. I think it would be disastrous if government or the Arts Council or anybody else was to start wagging their finger, but I hope there is a willingness to have this conversation. In as much that I’m in any position to be critical of artists there’s a kind of unwillingness to have the conversation even within the community and I think this is not the time for that kind of preciousness to be honest. I don’t feel in a position to challege artists about what climate change means to them but I’m a bit surprised that artists don’t feel in a position to challenge each other.

The second point here is that in order to tackle climate change we need specific action and I think this throws in interesting distinctions about what art can do in terms of encouraging strong feelings, and what actually inspires us to do the right thing. We know from social psychology that telling people that things are terrible is often just disempowering. These are interesting questions – I’d like to see them being discussed.

What I think it boils down to is the incredible individualism of artists. Arguably the myth of individualism is one of the contributing factors to us living in our not-sustainable way, and in as mucbh as the behaviour – if not the work of artists – underlines an intense individualism, that too I think opens up questions of social responsibility.

Michaela Crimmin: I can completely agree with Matthew. We do need optimism. But actually, even artists at their most dark I often see as ultimately constructive. Darren Almond’s work Bearing [Almond’s hellish film of the Indonesian sulphur miners] is horrifying – shocking in the extreme, but it is also incredibly beautiful and therefore extremely seductive - it draws you in to thinking about something that is diabolical, the treatment of the people who are featured . That’s the effect it had no me, to be more motivated after watching it, motivated to do something. It’s the seduction of artists to draw us into the dark places that makes us ask questions we can usually avoid. 

Is it time – as Olafur Eliasson is saying – for artists to think about the individual and the collective? Could we have a more collective response to the social in the artworld?

Ekow Eshun:  Generally the times when artists work in concert tend to be with particular movements – they aren’t so much political movments, but artistic movements.

It’s a really interesting question, but artists tend to work differently to writers, to poets and film-makers. Artists engagement in contemporary art is non-linear. It is not literal. It doesn’t have beginnings. It doesn’t have endings. It doesn’t have explicit, singular, overt meanings. They deal with complicated things – and in that respect responding to agendas like this is quite difficult for them. To say, “Look, I’m going to make a statement about this,” tends to run counter to every other way in which they work. Artists don’t really respond to briefs. I can think of examples that contradict that. Rachel Whiteread has created a Holocaust memorial in Vienna. But those situations don’t arise spontaneously. They can do in a curated way – so in some ways it’s the curator we should be looking to.

Michaela Crimmin: I find this interesting.Curators in shows have no compunction about putting up shows with headings on them. And artists feel pretty happy to make work or have their work presented like that. It seems there are different rules in public space at the moment which should just be relaxed. Perhaps all of us, curators and artists, should just let go a bit and not see it as instrumentalism – but instead as an honest and a very keen invitation. We need artists!

Matthew Taylor, Ekow Eshun, Michaela Crimmin and Ed Gillespie were interviewed separately.