Two years ago I was flown to Reykjavik to interview the Icelandic performance artist Ragnar Kjartansson. It was a weird old trip, booked in at 48 hours’ notice, but Ragnar was consistently charming and generous. Indeed, the only slightly touchy moment came when I asked him about his 2012 video installation The Visitors, a berserk undertaking split across nine screens, in which the artist and an entourage of musician friends spend 52 minutes chanting the baleful refrain from a song written by his then recent ex-wife. The artist tensed up as he considered the question. ‘Shit, I gotta go,’ he said.

He probably did, but his reticence might also have had something to do with the fact that the work was possibly conceived as a cathartic means of putting his first marriage behind him. But I’m now getting divorced myself, and I can fully sympathise with his reluctance to elaborate on a work commemorating the collapse of his marriage: when it comes to these things, it’s deeply, illogically personal. More to the point, I can only salute his decision to address the subject in his art.

Romance – whether tender, or no-frills-carnal – has always been a draw for artists, yet there’s no real ying to its yang: divorce scarcely figures in the........

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