The poison of contemporary art: from a response to a friend

...Speaking as a comic book artist, I am proud to be one of the people who never in history got so much as one penny of public endowment, and always had to find a public for our work. I think there is a case - and more than a case - for public money to preserve and exhibit art that is already acknowledged as classic, important beyond argument or fading, to build museums and concert halls; but contemporary art, art that is still being produced, must not be treated as though it were a public treasure. It is not, or, if it is, it must be given time to prove itself. The result of public endowment of the arts is art that is not "challenging" in any serious way, but rather facile, childish and self-satisfied; art, indeed, that betrays the very principles of the modern movement. And the reason is obvious. The great modern masters did not go to the state to seek subventions; they exhibited and sold their work. Someone complained that Picasso would only talk about the amount he would charge per square centimetre (Picasso probably had not liked him). Even when their work was unpopular, they relied on private support. Schoenberg and his followers, having to propose an altogether new idea of music itself, set up a "Society for Private Musical Performances": it was a small and separatist group (reflecting, in my view, the nature of their music, which is and will remain a minority and acquired taste), but it worked, and allowed Schoenberg, Berg and Webern to have the music they composed to be performed in front of an audience that appreciated it. It is not just that the artist must please someone; it is that the artist, and art itself, needs to communicate. Whether it is Wodehouse or Stan Laurel out to make people laugh with no further requirements, or Shakespeare or Tolstoy out to face us with the deepest and most tragic facts of our lives, the public is the other half of the work of art. Even if the work of art, like Webern's tiny atonal pieces, is aimed at a very small and select group of like-minded people who can understand it, nevertheless it has to please those people; and to please them enough that they will be willing to pay money out of their own pocket - to show that they, personally, feel that they have gained something by it. That is why compensation is important, and that is why transferring the financing of new art from the private to the public purse is deadly to the very sense and purpose of the arts.

Is it possible to be unconsciously in bad faith?

A well-known conservative writer posted on the recent White House request for information about internet rumours on the healthcare reform plan. His post was profoundly unsubtle, amounting to a reprint of the famous illustration to George Orwell's 1984, "Big Brother is watching you." Now, I could have mocked this or responded in kind - after all, a message of this kind is not calling for subtlety or fair-mindedness. It is a brutal appeal to fear and party allegiance. Instead of which, I chose to respond in the following terms:

I am not quite sure that you (and practically every conservative commentator in the USA) are right. What I read that message to be is a request to be kept up to date with rumours, rather than with people - to try and respond to every novel interpretation of the bill before it goes viral and becomes the received truth for millions. Tony Blair had a very successful operation along those lines in the 1997 election, called a "rapid response unit". The way that internet rumours become accepted facts in modern politics makes this kind of response virtually inevitable. But if you want to feel terrorized by a demonic enemy, of course you will interpret anything your opponent does in that light.

By way of thanks, the response was deleted before another poster had even had the time to answer it.

His excuse for it - whether he was excusing it to himself or to others - was that the closing sentence was an ad hominem attack on him. That is nonsense. It is a statement of universal fact, which in the present struggle applies to both sides (see Nancy Pelosi's grotesque statements about swastikas) and which people ought very much to bear in mind before they take any position. But if he felt that it applied to him particularly - that is what ad hominem means - then I can only say that there is something in it that he felt spoke to his own condition, and that he did not want to listen to.

A song from my childhood

Gigliola Cinquetti - Alle porte del Sole
Even those who have no idea what she is singing ought to appreciate the tune. It was a monster hit in the 1973-4 winter.