I once attended a magical meeting where someone presented a ritual based on the idiom 'putting your fingers in all the pies'. A few months afterwards, I went to an artistic happening, where a performance artist presented a piece on the very same theme, involving exactly the same activity. The first occasion was supposedly 'magic', the second 'art', yet they were identical.

First off, I wasn't impressed by either as a piece of work in its own right. In my opinion, magic and art based on 'turns of phrase' tend to seem contrived and shallow. They give me the feeling I get whenever I encounter a pun: it feels clever for about half a second, but is just as likely to make me groan with irritation as it is to make me laugh. I suspect I'm not unique in this.

In my own approach to rituals I'm always wary of anything that feels as if it's straying into art. It's difficult to put a finger on, and it's a fine line, but if I sense anything in my ritual is an expression of an idea or theme, rather than a means for creating an experience, then I'll chuck it out.

When magic strays into art you tend to get over-elaborate or static rituals, where the magical intent is lost behind the trappings of a performance. Most likely, it's the lack of a genuinely felt intent that leads to this sorry state of affairs.

When art strays into magic and regards its own forms and processes not as media for expression, but as forces operative upon the world, then you tend toward the kind of writing, drawing and imagining commonly found in the sketchbooks of people held in psychiatric institutions. Most art of this type, it should be pointed out, is fantastically dull. It takes a genius, like William Blake, to raise sublime art from a magical intention.

Magicians caught on the job in public places commonly excuse their behaviour like this: 'Oh, it's just an art project,' they say, or: 'It's okay, we're performance artists.' This highlights how in art there is always a respectable deniability; it's not supposed to be mistaken for something 'real'. The skill of the artist lies in playing objectivity and subjectivity against each other, committing himself or herself to neither. The skill of the magician, however, lies in collapsing the difference between the two as thoroughly as possible.

In other words, although they are closely related, art makes bad magic and magic makes bad art.

Nothing gives me more pleasure than brilliant writing with the capacity to alter my perception. I wouldn't want to argue we should keep art and magic apart. A well-written invocation will always tend to be more effective than one that isn't, no matter how sincere the intent of the poorly-written version. Yet I'm sceptical of magicians like Alan Moore who sometimes seem to argue that the magical act and the creation of art are synonymous. This introduces a notion of skill, craftsmanship and agency that is non-intrinsic to magic, which is at its most powerful when experience collapses into desireless non-doing.

Art requires an artist, but the main obstacle to magic is the magician.