The Balinese are a supremely artistic people. For centuries they regarded painting and carving as talents reserved, almost exclusively, for princely palaces and temples; the embellishment of architecture, with care taken to keep the decoration on a par with one's social station, the only art for art's sake.

Most of the island's considerable artistic prowess was expressed in the sculpting of god effigies, palace pavilions, pagodas and doors, and the painting of banners and bunting for temple ceremonies.

The multifarious household ceremonies -- tooth-filings, weddings, cremations, to name but a few -- also provided occasions for the fashioning of extraordinary offerings. Bali's greatest indigenous art form, traditional Balinese architecture, with its interplay of graceful roofs and slender pavilions is as complete a testament to man's arful moulding of his environment as any of the world's classical architectural modes. Whole villages of traditional Balinese architecture still survive to this day.

Bali's extraordinary history of cultural contagion is nowhere more evident than in its art and architecture: the Chinese red and gold on temple doors, the Indian deities in sarong and sahs, the Polynesian choirs of chanting warriors, the Moorish mouldings on community halls, and lately, the cantilevered colossi and ghost train gothic from fashionable Manila, Jakarta, Singapore.

The key to the resilience of the Balinese culture is its ability to adopt, adapt and absorb. At the core of all this resilience is a system of traditional laws from which there is little dissent. The culture keeps th art alive and vice versa.

The focus of the communities' creative conscience - be it music, dance or that craft elevated to an art form in Bali, the woven offering - are the temples, the jewels on the rich architectural tapestry, the spires admidst the alumunium cladding. Barely a day passes without a 500-celebrant strong procession, immaculately drapped and dressed, spirited on by a gamelan marching band, bearing gilt gods and towering offerings, moving from one of the island's over 100,000 temples to another.

In the 20th century, the concept of Art with a capital "A" was introduced by Europeans - the Batuan school of painting and the Maha Pita Foundationin Ubud in the 1930s - and then patronized by the tourist dollar. The result, in 1990, is a band of very dedicated, highly innovative professional artists, a school of traditional painting in Kamasan, Klungkung and ten thousand artisans producing exquisitely crafted souvenirs. By now, almost every home on earth must have at least one Balinese wood carving.