Question lays down gauntlet: Is art useful?

Among the colour and vibrancy of Artweeks, those who enjoy thinking about art as well as looking at it will be hurrying along to the now well-established Artweeks Forum.

The debate will as usual take place in the Lecture Room at the University Museum in Parks Road, Oxford, on Wednesday. The subject: Is art useful?

Although many may have a short, sharp answer to that question, others will encourage heated discussion long after the forum is ended and the audience faded into the May night.

When I met with some of this year's speakers, there was definitely a great deal more ground to cover than an hour or two would allow.

Juli Beattie, founder of the Art Room at Oxford Community School in East Oxford, is herself an answer to the question.

Juli's everyday work is using art as an essential tool to help children who have lost their way in school.

"We offer art as therapy to children and young people between the ages of seven to 15. Three senior practitioners work with a maximum of eight children. The practitioners are all trained in the Art Room methodology and all have a varied background.

"There is a teacher, artist and a therapist and they make up a creative and committed team. There are many reasons why the students get referred or refer themselves. The most important thing is that they are struggling to engage and find it difficult to access mainstream school."

They come from primary and secondary schools in East Oxford, the Community School, the Inclusion project and the Pupil Referral Unit.

The Art Room has a distinguished record, working on projects that can fire the child's imagination and get them to use skills that they did not know they had. The self-esteem that this engenders provides the beginnings of a path out of the troubled place they have found themselves in.

Of the remaining three speakers, sculptor Martin Jennings is an artist, John Stein is an expert on dyslexia, and Caroline Case is an analytical art therapist who works in private practice with children and adults.

As in the Art Room, Caroline uses art as a tool to help people express things that are otherwise inexpressible and believes that art is, above all, useful.

"In therapy, art can help provide a third perspective in that the maker can look at a part of themselves externalised."

This, as well as the physical act of the making of art, can help someone come to terms with an experience or a memory that is otherwise unbearable.

Dyslexia expert John Stein has spent many years working with dyslexics. He is very aware that many of the greatest artists also show symptoms of the condition.

Dyslexics may have a problem with language but this is balanced by a corresponding strength in other parts of the brain, especially retaining and expressing visual objects and events.

He points out that Turner's late paintings, such as Rain, Steam and Speed The Great Western Railway, are so phenomenally popular because they stimulate very different responses.

"This is because they cut through the normal visual process. They provide the kind of stimulus that would normally activate a motion-sensitive area of the brain. They provide direct access to the idea of motion. "

Of course, you don't have to be dyslexic to be a good visual artist, but art is a tool that needs to be seen as a way to help people who are not suited to a traditional, mainstream education.

Martin Jennings is an Oxford-based sculptor, who has just been commissioned to complete a sculpture of poet John Betjeman for the new Eurostar terminal in the old St Pancras Station building in London.

To Martin, his art is his work, and in that way it is useful, but here we step into a different world, one where art is less functional but still important to many of us.

For Martin, his sculpture, whether commissioned or not, is a way of expressing order in this chaotic world of ours. Whatever the artist, they do have a need to communicate and art is a means to do that, but it also promotes communication beyond the artist and their material.

Communication is a human trait. From our earliest moments we begin to communicate. Through imaginary games, children work out problems and try out ideas that they might not feel able to do in reality.

Martin believes that art is simply a mature form of these games, providing an intense and heightened sense of truth and reality that will hopefully communicate to his audience.

But he too is aware of art as a tool and cites two examples of acquaintances, one who used art as a way to express and deal with grief of bereavement, and another who uses art as a way to deal with the maelstrom of schizophrenia.

Neither of these examples necessarily use their art to communicate, but it is still a useful way to contain experiences that might not otherwise be bearable.

One only has to think of Van Gogh to realise how, in the hands of someone with a true talent, powerful art can emerge from a difficult psychological situation and be universally useful.

Art Forum is at 7pm on Wednesday. For information on the forum and tickets, call Artweeks co-ordinator Susi Moxley on 01865 516556, or jeweller Tess Blenkinsop on 01865 513812.