rising the stakes not sure any pop record could duke it out with Guernica, could ya not have chosen something less potent!

any more, or if it ever did as much as we like to think it did. I certainly don't think that it matters if it matters. It is what it is. It serves as a soundtrack to grow up to,sometimes to keep growing with, and sometimes to comfort you when you wish you didn't have to be grown up.

So it that sense, yes it does matter. It's just not going to change the world.

that it was all about Coca Cola?

Pop music that is.

Not Guernica.

Sorry to be crude, but I think that there is simply no comparison.

Crowds flock to see Guernica because there is only one and you physically have to go the Prado museum in Madrid to see it for yourself. Unlike a painting, the copies of the original piece of pop music are just as good, so multiple copies can be distributed.

I would counter that far more people have been moved by socio-political commentaries like "The Message" or "Ghost Town" or more recently material from Eminem and Mike Skinner.

I love a bit of art, me, so I am not putting it down. I just think that its potency is overstated sometimes. An installation of a dead giraffe with a banana up its bum doesn't change the world.

I can remember having a big argument with a friend about who was more important. While I can appreciate that Rothko may be as revolutionary as Dylan on purely artistic terms, painters can never match popular musicians in terms of their cultural reach and influence. For the majority, music is more important than painting.

i suspect that Picasso deliberately painted Guernica in monotones in part so it could reproduced to best effect in newspapers etc it's one of the few paintings that works well on postcards!
also I contend no pop songs has ever produced any notable change in any society.ie votes in parliaments, dictator hanging from lamp posts etc.

The tapestry of Guernica was covered up to avoid the all-too-ironic content of the press conference. No doubt about that.

But let us suppose that the tapestry was of Roy Lichenstein's "whaam!", they would have covered that up too. Same applies if it was a Warhol Marilyn print, which would have been seen as a bit flippant. Or if it was a large photo of George Formby, or indeed the famous photo of a chimpanzee on a toilet.

Powerful though it is, Guernica in itself did not bare its fangs from the canvas and scare the most powerful nation in the world as Schama would have it. The emotion in Schama's delivery and the brooding music on the clip gives us the impression that this was a massive headache for the yanks and shows the power of art ("don't mess with a masterpiece").

I doubt whether that much thought was put into it. I can't imagine Colin Powell banged his fist on the table and shouted "DAMN that Picasso!". The quick solution was to cover it up, as they would have done with any number of images, as explained above.

The older I get the more I sound like my dad. Bloody hell.

The power and impact of any art depends on the audience's willingness to understand, their senstivity and knowledge - how attuned they are. I can't think of any more bleak or powerful artworks than some of Goya's - for example a later painting showing what could be the last two men alive in the world battering each other to death, or his prints 'Disasters of War' - more effective images of man's inhumanity to man than Picasso's I think. Yet people will happily walk past such masterpieces in a gallery, blissfully unaffected, nattering mindlessly, annoying people like me trying to appreciate the paintings!

Pop music can have great power and meaning - for example Pink Floyd's 'Time' and 'Us and Them', Dylan of course - 'Hard Rain' is one, and there are many others which show it can be done (on any aspect of the human condition, including the more intimate and personal, of course), but I am sure many people listen to songs and don't really notice what the words are saying (which is their right) - they may still be affected by the music in some way. Clearly how people respond is a personal thing you can't control. And what you think a work of art is about might not be the intended meaning at all. Much pop music has endured and continues to be taken seriously, contrary to what the sceptics once predicted. Some of it will continue to endure I am sure, and still have a profound impact on new listeners, but it's too soon to know for how long - obviously paintings have been around for a few more years!

Young people seem more apolitical now than when I grew up in late 70s / early 80s. Maybe that's because material times have been relatively good in the interim. Add to that I lived through one of those occasional events when the cultural margins overrun the mainstream - until they get saddled up and broken in anyway. I hope right now there's music (or more probably web based expression) that a few of the current generations vibe to and which at least challenge the puerile culture, life expectations, politics and war they're taught to absorb. I've two late teen boys and while I've had my Holidays In The Sun and my Tommy Gun (even my Tom Robinson) it's no good being a punk / new wave old fogey. Something's got to come along that engages them on all levels like that era did me. It's peculiar but I wish they'd rebel in turn -and to a soundtrack.