Farewell, Christo. You offered a lovely summer gift

Like summer heat, it was here and now it’s gone. The colourful, inexplicable Christo installation floating on London’s Serpentine will begin to be dismantled today; all done, suddenly, with its strange business of delighting and baffling visitors to Hyde Park.

Last week, the 7,506 oil barrels of Mastaba, the artist’s 20-metre high pink, blue and red fortress, were still glinting in the evening sun when I took a trip on the Solar Boat that crosses the lake during the summer months. As we took photographs, on one side of me I could overhear praise for the artwork’s playful grandeur. On the other side, someone was grumbling about how dull and pointless it seemed.

Mastaba’s creator, the veteran installation artist who for years worked alongside his late wife, Jeanne-Claude, has always prompted these contradictory responses. Christo has wrapped up Berlin’s Reichstag, the Pont Neuf in Paris and even a network of Australian coastal cliffs in white cloth, making some people gape and others roll their eyes. And he has a long history with oil barrels, creating his first work from them with Jeanne-Claude in 1961.

The 83-year-old paid for this floating monolith on the Serpentine with his own money and has promised, with the royal parks, that all his barrels will be recycled and that the lake’s wildlife will benefit from ecological investment afterwards.

The name Mastaba, for those of us who don’t recognise it, comes from the flat-topped ancient Egyptian tombs made out of mudbricks. But that doesn’t really explain much.

The force of a large-scale public artwork such as Mastaba comes from its gratuitous nature. Nobody needs it. Not, that is, until you are wandering through the park and come across its ludicrous, other-worldliness. Then, like seeing Maggi Hambling’s shell on the beach at Aldeburgh in Suffolk, you are happily reminded that you are on a planet with other humans who see the same things, but differently.

And an artwork such as this always changes the landscape around it. The lake looks flatter and the trees rounder – and both seem more improbable in the middle of a dirty city. It can also help, it turns out, when a public sculpture has temporary status. In this case, Mastaba’s departure will mark the end of an especially hot, dry season in this country.

When the lake is empty again at the end of the week, park-goers will know what they have lost. It doesn’t seem too much of a stretch to reflect that art, far from being as unnecessary as it might seem, is often a potent marker in time.

Mastaba will have imprinted itself by now in many childhood memories. And without, I hope, too much of a leap, this is why letting art into the curriculum of every school is important. And far from just grumbling about cuts, over the last fortnight lots of influential names in the creative industries have begun to mobilise, acting now, rather than simply speaking out, against the diminishing value put on the arts in British education.

The Art Fund, the charity that supports galleries and saves significant works for the nation, has launched Artful Opportunities, a scheme to bring paid work in arts institutions to 500 young people. In the same week, Simon Rattle, the esteemed conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, has pledged to find and nurture more young musical talent across London, starting with 20 string players. Earlier in the month, famous actors and musicians, including Kate Winslet, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Benedict Cumberbatch, rallied at the Royal Albert Hall to call for more arts in schools.

So while art can be relied upon to live on in the memory, it would be bleak indeed if we had nothing to look forward to but its power to show us what we have accidentally lost. As the mad, bright Mastaba now weighs its 32 six-tonne anchors and sails off, its departure may also mark the beginning of an autumn of concerted efforts to shore up an artistic future for Britain’s children.