The bright spot on the financial horizon is that – in theory at least – after
a period of disinfection a new, sanitized world awaits us. In culture no
parallel purge is necessary, because the arts in Britain are in blooming
health. We know because arts bodies say so, ministers echo them, and most
critics bring up the chorus. Against their judgements there can be no
appeal: now that the arts have become a state religion, dissent would be
sacrilege. It follows that it is to the arts that we must turn for solace in
these troubled times, and ask no questions.
Nowhere is it suggested that the era of British boosterism that is crashing to
its close in the City might have any counterpart in our galleries, theatres,
fiction, films or television. At the start of the year of the shriveling
pound our Secretary of State for Culture, James Purnell, said that in
Britain a renaissance comparable with fifteenth-century Italy was under way:
“This is not an overstatement, it’s exactly true”. No one except the TLS
thought this remark silly, and I have heard no one suggesting that it sounds
even sillier now.
In Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, the chapter headed
“Pseudo-reality Prevails” describes how the hero joins the patriotic
“Collateral Campaign” to celebrate the cultural ascendancy of his country at
what turns out to be the eve of the demise of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Direct parallels are not in order, though governments and arts persons in
our supposedly level-headed nation have a penchant for self-celebration that
borders on the manic. Eight years after the Dome fiasco, we have launched a
four-year campaign of the arts, collateral to the Olympics. Our economic
collapse may not equate to Austria’s nemesis; on the other hand one should
never neglect an opportunity to sober up.
The background to the euphoria in the arts is important. Partly it reflects
our economic success, much of it now exposed as hollow, partly a genuine
quickening in cultural life, but mainly it was temperamental. For decades
the puritanical British have been discovering sensuality in all its forms,
and are mightily excited about it. Good things have come of this late
maturation, and our loosening up would be an unqualified plus, were it not
for our apparent conviction that in sex, food and the arts we are doing
things no one has ever done before, at which the world will wonder five
centuries from now.
No other construction can be put on Mr Purnell’s asinine comment, or on the
Arts Council report that inspired it, whose author informed us that Britain
was on the verge of producing “the greatest art yet created”. Contemporary
art shows British boosterism at its most frenetic. What is sold as
innovation to hedge funders, credulous widows or ageing critics pining for
youthful credentials is in fact a prime instance of Britain’s endemic
conservatism in art: it has taken us almost a century to get the
Duchamp/Dada joke, and now that we’ve got it we massacre it in the
retelling. Scuppering the claim that the popular work of today was based on
yesterday’s most daring, esoteric art, the arch-modernist Clement Greenberg
wrote: “Of course no such thing is true. What is meant is that when
sufficient time has elapsed the new is looted for new twists, which are then
watered down and served up as kitsch”. Greenberg’s observation holds good in
much self-consciously “daring” British writing, theatre or opera production,
as well as art. Hedge funders will now have the leisure to read him,
contemplate their quirky video or tin of excrement, and take what solace
they can.
It would require more space and a lot more knowledge than I possess to review,
here, the state of the arts in Britain. The sad thing is that it is so rare
to see it done honestly, by which I mean in non-boosterish fashion, by
anyone in a position to do it. We are blessed with some keen-eyed critics,
but ageism can be a problem. In a live-for-the-day economy, youth has its
foot on the pedal, while older, more discerning critics can lack both
independence of spirit (to be dismissed as a grump is professional death)
and the means to exercise it. “F–k off money”, as the unattractive phrase
goes, is not widely distributed among commentators on the arts. Frightened
for their jobs, not a few bite the populist bullet to keep the broadcasting
or reviewing mite coming.
It is not only cash that drives them. Make-believe insurrection is the tenor
of the times, but this culture of institutionalized dissent breeds its
hyper-conformist critics. Unless you are notionally against the system you
can play no part in it. One result is a striking homogeneity on the arts
pages of newspapers whose editorial columns remain widely different. Left or
Right, the tone overall tends to be exultantly positive and patriotic. At
the same time the arts are increasingly business-orientated. Baudelaire
deplored the “immense nausea” of advertisements; in his role as critic he
would have found ad-speak in the arts even more stomach-turning in the arts
today. Ministers too act as cultural barkers, jollying the populace into
museums whose less recent exhibits they have been trained, through a
rigorously anti-elitist education, not to understand.
Artsworld pietism blinds us to many another truth. At its worst the “arts
industry” (no one winces at the philistinism of the term) can be little more
than a system of outdoor relief for slight or non-existent talent, or a
source of windfall riches for artists who in politicized guise are
hot-collared critics of the bonus culture in the City. Hypocrisy about cash
is endemic. If art is our spiritual sustenance, the conscience of the era
and an antidote to Mammon, should not the fat cats of the art boom pass the
hat to buy the two Titians, instead of parading their consciences in letters
to The Times? Another, even more fundamental, truth concerns audiences.
Large numbers of cultivated people (and not just the more conservative ones)
take it for granted that new British plays, novels and art are
systematically oversold, and leave them alone. Yet another line of credit
that is close to exhaustion. Nor do I know of many Londoners paying their
own fares to wonder at our running renaissance in the city-states of the
North. Most cultural commentators travel there for a fee, return with
glowing tales, and don’t go back. The idea that the prosperity of often
benighted regions can be rebuilt around the arts is a cruel and perfidious
act of Southern condescension.
Links between the arts and commerce are of course natural (the theme is well
covered in Margot and Rudolf Wittkower’s Born Under Saturn). Things go wrong
when they converge inextricably, as in some fiction and much contemporary
art, at which point each sacrifices its raison d’être: the art ceases to be
art and investors lose their money. When works that are said to satirize
reality are in fact integral to that reality, art is dead as the dodo.
Meanwhile, as in banking, short-term success short-circuits criticism,
ethical or aesthetic.
How much have market excesses and the booster mentality damaged the arts in
other fields, such as publishing, theatre and opera, and what happens when
the money men’s grins turn sour? Could penury enhance quality? The spare
beauty of Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale is due in part to its minimalist
instrumentation, a result of the war, and a more Spartan culture could have
attractions: fewer, shorter, more scrupulously edited books, a rest from
blockbuster exhibitions in favour of less familiar artists, truthful films
made on modest budgets with fewer stars and special effects. Maybe recession
will throw up pleasant surprises. Could there be hidden treasures out there,
things suppressed until now by the arts oligarchy and which a swing in
fashion could bring to light? The risk, of course, is the reverse: that the
populist imperative will become more irresistible than ever, with even more
bottom-line publishing and a till-ringing drive to perk up a morose public.
We cannot know, because there are no precedents. The Great Depression occurred
before mass culture permeated society at every level, and before
governments, business and arts bodies set up the corporate triumvirate of
the “creative economy”. Walter Sickert once lampooned the belief that the
future of English art depended on a small sum of money secreted somewhere in
the Treasury, and whatever happens we can be sure that as budgets tighten
the cry will go up that the nation’s creativity is wilting for lack of cash.
I predict calls for a British version of the WPA (Work Projects
Administration), Roosevelt’s 1935 New Deal initiative, with its arts, drama
and literacy programmes.
The trouble is that here it already exists, in bloated and bureaucratized
form. Watching an arts establishment plump-jowled with self-satisfaction
being pared back a bit will have its guilty pleasures. (Losing more
worthwhile theatres, publications or orchestras, should arts bodies continue
to trim back performers rather than bushy administrative tails, would be
less fun.) Most promising of all is the prospect of a dose of realism.
Speaking truth to power is easy nowadays; think what wonders could be
achieved for our cultural economy by an outbreak of truth-telling to our
arts persons and “creatives”. Our model should be the young black
Frenchwoman who attended the opening of a modish exhibition of graffiti in
Paris some years ago. Asked by Jack Lang, Minister of Culture at the time
and a modish fellow, whether she was enjoying the show, she shot back: “Vous
croyez que parce que je suis noire je suis vouée à la sous-culture?” (You
think I’m sold on sub-culture just because I’m black?)
Gloomy truths need telling, but there is no cause for gloom itself. Excellent
local produce can still be found, and escape from provincial puffery is
nowadays simple, whether to the past, or another country. Seriously good
stuff, American mostly, is there in profusion: The Rest Is Noise (a history
of twentieth-century music by Alex Ross), a novel by Don DeLillo or Denis
Johnson, a Coen brothers film, or MoMa, so embarrassingly superior to Tate
Modern. Alternatively you can take the train to Paris at a cost similar to
Manchester, or the plane to Shanghai for not much more.
Criticism of governments is usually described as bold and invigorating.
Wrinkling an interrogative brow at the quality of the arts will get you
dismissed as a doomster. What is truly dismal is the spectacle of able,
expensively educated folk inclining their heads before mediocrity or
populist convention, out of careerism, for cash or a quiet life. But there
too, recession could bring hope. With luck many of them could be shown the
door along with their spiritual brothers, the confectioners of sub-prime
financial packages.
George Walden was a diplomat and politician. He is now a writer, and
Chairman of the Russian Booker Prize for Fiction. His most recent books
include Who’s A Dandy?, 2004, and Time To Emigrate?, 2007. His latest book,
China: A wolf in the world?, was published earlier this year.
