"Art doesn't alter things. It points things out, but it doesn't alter them. It can't, no matter what a painter wants to do"

Arthur Boyd voices a stringent modesty about artistic power: brush and chisel do not move mountains, stop wars, or mend torn families. They illuminate. To say art points things out is to locate its force in attention rather than intervention. A painting does not change the river; it changes how we see the river, where our gaze lingers, what textures and tensions become legible. The world remains materially itself, yet the coordinates of meaning shift.

There is a bracing honesty in acknowledging this limit. It resists the romantic fantasy that a canvas can legislate reality by sheer intensity of feeling. The painter may want to rescue, punish, redeem; the pigment can only witness. Goya’s disasters do not halt violence, but they expose its anatomy with such clarity that denial becomes harder. A still life of rotting fruit does not alter decay, but it arrests the moment long enough for us to notice time at work. The landscape painting cannot cool a burning summer, yet it can reveal the fragility of the place we inhabit.

Pointing, however, is not trivial. What we attend to shapes what we debate, remember, and eventually choose to do. Art reorders salience: it frames, juxtaposes, names. That orientation of consciousness is often the precondition for change even if it is not the change itself. The difference matters. A signpost does not carry you down the road, yet without it you may never set out. Boyd’s insistence protects against confusing representation with action, while leaving intact art’s moral and cognitive leverage.

There is humility here, but also trust in an exacting craft: to look so sharply that others must look too. Art cannot alter the thing, only the seeing; but seeing differently is how altered things begin. The painter’s want meets the world’s resistance, and in that friction, new perception is forged.