Do the arts matter? Leading up to next month's publication of What Good Are the Arts? by Oxford English Lit professor emeritus John Carey, The Observer asks a range artists to weigh in. One of them, Geoff Dyer, writes:

The arts don't make us morally better people but they do enable us to discriminate more finely and this means that we live fuller, if not necessarily happier lives. At a time when the culture at large goads us towards an ever-coarsening response to almost everything, the demands made on our attention by 'difficult' art are to be especially valued...