What art is meant to do

I was in Manchester to see the British Art show 6 but I was distracted by a big oil of a lonesome Pennine landscape with an elephant. It tells this story.

In 1872 a new elephant was needed for Bellevue Zoo. The owner bought Maharajah from a menagerie and the elephant was to travel by train from Edinburgh, but he broke his railway carriage, so he and his keeper Lorenzo had to walk the 200 miles to Manchester. Outside Bolton they came to a gate across the road at a toll booth. Lorenzo got into an argument with the gate keeper about the correct toll for an elephant. Meanwhile Maharajah curled his trunk round the top rail of the gate, lifted it off its hinges, and walked on.
Elephant 1 - Bureaucracy 0.
The true story may be slightly more complex

As for Britart 6, I discovered an exciting painter, Phillip Allen. I can’t find on the web the painting that really grabbed me, Contact and Belief. In the middle ground is a sort of oblique, zig-zagging and three-D scaffold with brightly coloured rectangles, doors or flat blocks (the contacts, I guess), and along the top and bottom big fat swirls of paint, the beliefs, splurging into each other; the orthogonal, hard, bright and saturated; and the spherical, mixed tints and shades, interflowing. Viewed from a greater distance it becomes more three dimensional, the swirls and blobs at the bottom resolving into, bottom left, a space with sitting people maybe, or earth, and the shallower zone of blobs at the top, sky, but with the indication these zones go up and down to infinity and return, a circle of the universe.
Why did I look at this picture for fifteen minutes, and nearly everything else for about five seconds? (I ask myself, to save you the trouble). The five seconds engagement is easier to explain. Susan Sontag on photography: snapping people is a kind of theft. An example from Britart 6, a video of a giant mechanical irrigation sprinkler that looks a bit like a Bionicle, clacking and squirting. It runs for about a minute, then goes back to the beginning, and you think, that really does look like some primitive alien life form. But what the artist has done is to steal that experience, which we all have all the time, it’s part of our brains, of seeing something, a stain on a wall, a shadow, a massive irrigation sprinkler, and turning it for ourselves into something strange. We don’t need an artist for that. So all the artist is doing is academicising the object, appropriating it from the common stock to become his or her “work”. Bollocks to that. It’s whimsical, capricious and cheap.
What the paintings Contact and Belief and Densequalia did to me was, first, engage me in an aesthetic experience, but then communicate something from the painter’s intellect to mine, something recognised and anticipated, otherwise I couldn’t have seen it, but also quite new. What art is meant to do.
Let the spinklers squirt in the fields, and surprise us there.