Train Them Good

A great talent. A brilliant provocateur. Who died too young. But is Sergey Kuryokhin a critic of quality? We listen carefully…

__________

You said in an interview that the meaning of art is to be found outside art…

For me there is a definite contradiction between art and creative work. Creativity is a spirit, a liberation from the burden of matter, and when the spirit leaves, what is left is a dead work of art, a museum exhibit, an object of worship. That’s why I think that the real essence of art is to be found outside art, but is contained in the creative process…

A real artist is a non-conformist. (Sergey Kuryokhin, Divine Madness)

It is a strong statement, which embodies the idea of the age. Dada, lest we forget, the century’s patron saint. But are religions defined only by the mystic? What about the church, the congregation, the laity, and the bureaucracy that supports them? Can everyone see the divine light without the aid of priest and mystagogue? How many do without images and the candle-lit icon? Everybody their own Jesus Christ… Is that what you believe? For the rebel of all ages the answer is an emphatic yes! And yet, even after two thousand years of Christianity, the divinity of everyman awaits us.

The gist of Community Criticism is to be found in the quotation at the head of this page,1 the dateline of which could just as well have been Washington, the Vatican or The Art of the Ages. The key is the word ‘formalistic’, which in the pseudo-aesthetic jargon of the anti-Modern front means ‘lacking in significant content’, ‘alien to the world or real values’, ‘pathologically self-isolated and private’, ‘insensitive to the tragedies and hopes of our epoch’, ‘snobbish refusal to communicate with the people’, etc. (Harold Rosenberg, Extremist Art: Community Criticism)

The mystic talks to himself in the shed at the bottom of the bishop’s garden. A few decades short of the second millennium and the people are still not listening. Always they want to see, to touch, to grasp - especially to grasp - the object of their belief. For these minds, never free of the senses, require visible signs of God’s existence.2 And the deity must be good; he should do things; be a policeman arresting sinners, a charity worker saving souls. Have you got that sir? as we fill out the questionnaire. We want a building in which to worship him; its pews and dark corners ideal for meeting friends and flirting with the attractive young. And some simple explanations will not go amiss. We like to feel educated, clever and wise. Are you listening to me! The real thing to be always suitably labelled to know what we’re looking at. That’s more like it. A beautiful object - which is perceived as beautiful - it should also help the community; by educating the kids, civilising the youth, bringing culture to the benighted old. Otherwise the layman - always the majority of church members - will reject it. Useless. Noise. It’s gobbledegook. Don’t give me that! as they watch Jackson Pollock dancing around the canvas. That man’s clearly a charlatan. It’s Sergey, climbing inside a grand piano.

A painting that is an act is inseparable from the biography of the artist. The painting itself is a ‘moment’ in the adulterated mixture of his life - whether ‘moment’ means the actual minutes taken up with spotting the canvas or the entire duration of a lucid drama conducted in sign language. The act-painting is of the same metaphysical substance as the artist’s existence. The new painting has broken down every distinction between art and life. (Harold Rosenberg, The American Action Painters. Both quotes are from the seminal The Tradition of the New)

Action Painters were artist-outsiders only just beginning to get an audience; having suffered the critical backlash of a conformist press. But the times were changing. The press’s perspective shifting from conservative to contemporary, their ethos now to celebrate not condemn The New. Though tension remained during the 1950s. Adamantine conservatives still wrote columns. There was the ignorance of the fashion-mongers. While the public had not been trained to look at art in this new way. Thus Harold’s concern that Modern Art, having become “news”, should not be treated as first cousin to the vacuum cleaner and can-opener, sold as a commodity. His aim to protect this art by fencing it around with an enlightened critical discourse. Thus the argument for a new art-critical language, widening the range of reference to encompass all the subjects of life: psychology, history, sociology…The critic to become a scholar of the street as well as an expert in the academy. A new kind of critic who, in understanding this radically different art, would articulate it to the lay person. But this wasn’t quite enough in these new times. The creative spirit - we use Sergey’s phrase - had to be grasped by these critics, who’d transmit it to this enlightened public. Action Painting saved from the consumer trap by tuning in the audience to the mystic act.

This changes significantly in the 1960s. There was Warhol. 

But let’s step aside for a moment from art history. The Action Painters began as both artists and outsiders. The combination is important, if one wants to understand Harold’s argument. This is a time when the artist was believed a person apart; their unique quality as much to do with their sensibility as with their skills with brush or pen.3  But by the late 1950s it wasn’t enough to be just an artist: one also had to be a non-conforming artist, going against the established and the mainstream. Such characters, it was believed, not only thought and felt, and were seeing the world differently, but had a spirit more intense, a perspective odder and more interesting, than those who worked at the centre of art’s metropolis.4 It was the artists on society’s edge who counted the most.5 As with Sergey, Harold is valuing the spirit above the art work; though he describes it in more standard art-critical terms: art’s value depending upon “the authenticities…” of the “mysteries” of the creator’s psyche. Through Pollock’s shamanistic performances we are touching the spirit of his art and connecting to his artist’s soul. Harold’s task was to persuade the critics to accept this new conception of the aesthetic. The audience reaction - not without resistance - to be determined by the response of this critical establishment, upon which art had come to depend.6 Inevitably, there were conservative attacks - the occasion for Harold’s article - but they were led by those outside this critical-aesthetic elite, whose legitimacy these conservatives assailed.7 However, such voices, increasingly strident, were losing their influence; soon they would be too conservative even for the University.

In the 1950s Action Painting, Abstract Expressionism, Fluxus and the rest were expanding the meaning and nature of art (so widening the range of those who could make it).8 When the object was fused with the act the emphasis ineluctably shifted towards the act, and its animating spirit. How the artist performs more important than what he creates. 

In the following decade the act detaches itself from the artist. There is a shift away from the artist’s personality to method; meaning now found in the process. Think of Steve Reich’s Come Out and Alvin Lucier’s I am Sitting in A Room. Even more conventional compositions, like Luciano Berio Recital I For Cathy, where the singer’s interior monologue replaces song as the main focus of the piece, are shaped by these now authoritative ideas. Process rules.9 Yet the 1960s was more than a set of mechanical instructions. New technology, new drugs, a rich youth, a consumer boom, and the catalytic fusion of popular and high culture broke apart all existing art forms, and saw the creation of experimentally new ones.10 From Terry Riley to Meredith Monk to Soft Machine and The Beatles this was a renaissance decade.11 The old world was cracking up, and R.D. Laing was there to tell us we were entering the Real, the Good and the True.12

The similarities with Russia in the 1980s are striking. But twenty years had gone by…

As Russian artists were breaking free from a repressive regime something very different was happening in the West. In Europe and America the anarchy of the 1960s was being institutionalised. First the artists were allowed into the galleries, museums and exhibition spaces; they could even have a shag at the ICA.13 But soon the officers in these institutions regained control.14 To use Harold’s phrase, those who believe in “Community Criticism” - the politicians; the bureaucrats; the schoolteachers; the social workers… - began not only to administer but to determine the nature of the art they exhibited. Within weeks the anarchists were compelled to fill out forms, apply for grants, speak nicely at interviews, where the HR person asks about the social relevance of their work. Driving this bureaucratic process (though bureaucrats have a life of their own they run along other people’s ideas: they’re a train on somebody else’s tracks) is the belief in the bettering of The People;15 although how art can do this is never adequately explained.16 They don’t care! The excitement of social engineering consumes them,17 producing orgasms of pleasure in the offices of the art industry; curators, administrators and managers writhing around on the floors, banging away on the exhibitions cases in their galleries and museums. We cannot get into the lift of the Arts Council for the cunnilingus and fellatio. Come in come in, says a senior editor, as she raises her backside towards me. Who’d refuse? And so we rush inside… Oh! Oh! Oh! Or is it help! help! help! as the lift jerks wildly up and down…  We are too high to care, as some young aristo slides up behind us. Yes! Yes! we shout, as thrust against the stainless steel walls our faces smudge into ecstatic grimaces. Our knees battering the sides we cry out Ah! Ah! Ah! until the lift returns to the ground floor. It is a time for calm reflection, as squeezing out of the crowd we think about bigger lifts and larger stairs and ramps and huge floor spaces… There should be more! more! more! We are to get our wish. How these institutions expand!18 And with this expansion their power. An institutional mentality suffusing the atmosphere that encourages what Harold calls the “nightmare of the 1930s”: the belief in the artist’s ’responsibility’ to the community. This idea is everywhere in polite society today. The artist’s duty, it is argued, to serve the cause of radical politics and its transformation of the world.19 Once again to carry the White Man’s Burden.20

…Goldberg notes how much performance art challenges misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, racism, fascism and capitalism. But her case for performance as a global language…is not really convincing. While one would hope that performance has the potential to communicate across linguistic, national and cultural barriers, its visual and time-based nature as well as the movement of bodies and objects in space makes it only superficially more globally legible than text. Performance is also not inherently political. Some artists do sell out. (Sophie Seita reviewing RoseLee Goldberg’s Performance Now)21

This is our Socialist Realism. 

As Russia left the Soviet Union, we were joining it; in the name of freedom, individual expression and the market economy. Harold’s two quotations merging into one. The artistic “moment” and “the community” fusing into a single participatory act, where the artist bestows her “significant content” onto the audience, a site of transformation and revolutionary fervour. It is also a very special audience: ideally the helpless, who - via some magic formula - are to be given ‘a voice’.22 No longer an act of mystic grace Action Painting has become a psychiatric intervention, social work, an aggressive political act. Sergey’s creative spirit the solution where this symbiosis occurs. Only the few are artists. Not so with the spirit of creativity. Everybody has it.23 This spirit discharged into home decor, gardens, youth clubs, local churches, hobbies of all kinds and our workplaces.24 When art became socially important, then popular - amongst the middle classes - then a market commodity,25 and an essential component of industrial and commercial design,26 plus a career for the bourgeoisie, art changed to serve these evolving scenes. Art now looking outside itself, towards society, for its meaning and purpose. It stands on the street begging passers-by for meaning and value. Give us your lost, your hopeless, your abused… Thank sir, thank you. They’ll be right respectable, when we’re done. Tarted real right up they’ll be, good enough to take home. Oh, you don’t want that sir? What about a job in John Lewis sir, will that do you? Thank you sir. Thank you.  All ideas welcome here! Meaning for the meaningless! Value for the valueless! Much obliged to you guv’nor, may your canvas be touched with Poussin’s fingertips.

The creative spirit is the front entrance gate where academics, clerks, tourists and the deluded enter art’s country estate. But art isn’t supposed to be just a pleasure trip; although increasingly the peripheral entertainment replaces the main building as the centre of attraction. Our cultural masters, like the guides of the National Trust, want always to educate us; the only way, it is felt, to gain real worth from our visit.27 For art to be a good it has to serve some social purpose that transcends our own lifestyle. Thus the culture clerics who, professing a belief in the egalitarian society, preach to the ‘deprived’ (those who are not bourgeois) about their artistic salvation.28 Art will save the poor people! Yet not everyone has the artistic gift or has anything to meaningful to say; while the connoisseur is a rare beast, going the way of the dodo. Ah! This is no problem, replies the cuddly culture bureaucrat, no problem, no problem at all; as she goes on to tell us that everybody has the creative spirit. This idea nicely separating art from commercial design and giving us all the chance to partake of it (for doing is now regarded as more important than receiving).29 Once the artist was a god. Today he is the Common Man, aided by the art care assistant, who holds his zimmer frame.

Harold was writing about the Artist, a distinct figure, with a particular set of skills and a unique sensibility. In the 1950s this figure tried to protect himself against the consumer impulse, with its tendency towards decoration,30 by mystifying his own craft. The Action Painter shifting the essence of the work to the act of its creation. To maintain art’s magic powers in a world of commodities the artist had made of himself a shaman. Artists more important than the art.31 

It worked for a while.32

Then the shaman became a pop star. Warhol again. For a pop star how you appear is more important than what you do; the audience buying into the person not the product; albeit the star’s talent is the source of their first success. The results are predictable. When the person is more important than what they produce most attention will be given to that person, whose image is increasingly shaped to attract an audience. Very quickly the image replaces the star, who is squashed into its tiny frame, itself small enough fit inside the Market’s purse. Small, cramped, smelly and uncomfortable… Who cares? They squash you in, and snap the clasp shut. Thank god for that! shouts the manager, and as they decide the details of your next record. Calling up the magazine editors they tell them about your new concept, quote your ideas on life, reference your favourite musicians and designers; they may even mention your top authors, all targeted for maximum market effect: JK Rowling for the kids, Sally Rooney attracting the cutting edge. On release day they let you out, and now you’re only too happy to follow their script.33 Once again the bourgeoisie has taken control.

There are tensions. Young talent fights against the older executives; this conflict partly responsible - there is also the technology and the drugs - for the rapid development of popular music from the 1950s through to the 1990s. But after that first exciting irruption into life each new movement is absorbed into the corporate culture. Every pop star succumbing to the capitalist imperative. In Eden, a marvellous evocation of one such movement, the DJs are told if you don’t change your style - to meet the ever changing tastes of fashion - you’ll go under. They can’t and they do. The third choice - to develop the music within themselves - is not available to these characters, because they are popular entertainers not artists.34

The suits win. It is never enough. To make money, shape taste and be famous is intoxicating, thrilling, wonderful, but, alas…they want to be artists too. Breathing in the atmosphere that surrounds the studio they mistake the smell of cannabis for the sweat that comes of graft and concentration. They go to parties, where young women go wow! you work in the music industry, why you must be so clever, so creative; when’s your next record coming out? Soon their mates, relatives, and old school friends are wanting some of this action. They are followed by a rush of social workers, teachers and office clerks, who, being better bureaucrats, take the place over and run it.35 And these characters never stop talking! On and on they go, telling us how everyone, you know, is really, like, you know, a genius.36

Harold’s original conception of Action Painting has fused with Community Criticism to become the Art Act. No longer the expression of a unique vision art is now simply a performative action, participation for its own sake; which is then heavily marketed to a drifting, purposeless bourgeoisie that has been educated to believe they should have meaning in their lives, and that this can only be achieved by doing some pursuit (reading, listening, looking are no longer considered as by themselves significant activities).37 Do we need to add that the employment opportunities are enormous? Creative writing schools, community art workers, art administrators, gurus, curators… Today the art is hardly seen for its teachers and advocates.

In Exit Through the Gift Shop we watch as the salesman displaces the artist. Here is the parable of our times. When the cuddly culture bureaucrat has turned us all into creative spirits out pops Thierry Guetta - Mr Brainwash to you and me. This man, without a trace of artistic talent, becomes - overnight! - the hottest artist in Los Angeles. Art turned into a production line and sold like advertising. There is no actual art here, but there is the spirit (100% proof) of blague. Mr Brainwash has a genius for it. Once he sold thrift shop clothes as vintage designer wear. Now he sells himself as an artist. And the rich kids crowd around to touch his talent. Are they worshipping superhuman capacities? The film does not say. In truth these young adults, seduced by the advertising campaign, are identifying with a mediocrity like themselves. This is the art of the advert: to sell an idealised version of the average and the ordinary back to the ordinary and the average. Although in our time this has become a very odd affair; since we are expected to believe ourselves sceptical and cool, each exceptional in our own way.38 Everybody a star inside their minuscule machines. In Banksy’s film a wealthy art collector makes a knowing gesture towards a vandalised copy of Grant Wood’s American Gothic. Exactly! The debasement of an original work of art elicits nothing more than recognition and a hint of irony. No aesthetic feeling here, just a dumb cleverness. For a few seconds - it is the participatory moment - this woman can feel smart and superior: she is in the know. For this insider liking art is also looking down on art, its pretensions not to be taken too seriously: they won’t be conned by that old spiritual uplift routine. Not knowledge. Not sensibility. No feel. No taste. Merely a sense of one’s own sophistication because one is turned on by kitsch: a collector clocks the obvious, is thrilled by a simple act of transgression. Let's switch locations. A tourist screams out in joy when her coach drives past Big Ben.

The salesman rules when words replace product as the centre of interest. And when we buy the idea of the artist, this idea erases the artefact.39

Action Painting facilitated the move away from the craft of art, even though its celebration of the aesthetic gesture - the craftsman’s act put on a par with what he makes - is the apotheosis of the craft mentality. Functionalism ruled in the Fifties. During the 1960s the act - having become so significant - was separated out from the object. One direction taken was process art. But there was another less productive path. Slice a canvas. Throw paint on wooden boards. Lay bricks on a gallery floor…The act itself became the important thing, if…and this was crucial…it was first turned into an idea. (Carl Andre’s Equivalent VIII is just that: an idea. The Tate would have saved a lot of money if rather than buying the bricks it had understood the concept.) By the 1970s the artist no longer someone who acted out their persona on the material, but one who could conceptualise the act, and articulate it to the critical establishment. The creative spirit was metamorphosing into ‘the concept’. Poor Harold! His ideas are being cruelly abused.40 The critics no longer restricted to describing and judging art, they had begun to penetrate, suffuse, even shape it with their discourse. Is it a coincidence that this occurs when the university population expands massively, and bureaucracy becomes universal? The artist now the graduate who thinks up an idea, and applies to the Arts Council for a grant, which will pay for its exposition.41 The critic had replaced the artist. But no king rules for long. Soon the critic - one step away from the salesman - is giving way to the fashion editor, later again the celebrity.42 By the time of Mr Brainwash even celebrity is superfluous. A simple advert will do.

That the advertising sells a void…who cares? This will be hidden by media sleight-of-hand. Whatever incoherent nonsense enters Mr Brainwash’s head to be interpreted by ‘creative advisers’ who then make the objects that litter the production line. Art the logo on a garbage truck. Thierry Guetta is the end of a trend Quentin Bell detected in the early 1960s, when what he calls “the boom in art” began.

Certainly those of us who review the great armies of art books must sometimes think, not only that the demand is large, but in the matter of text and illustration it comes from a very uncritical public.

The dangers are manifest: we are giving people a taste for ‘canned art’; we are feeding them with a kind of prose in which pretentious language is regarded as a substitute for thought and in which, as it sometimes appears, we find the inarticulate expatiating upon the incompetent. We are perhaps living in an age which, while believing itself to be one of innovation, is in fact profoundly reactionary, in which the revolution has devoured its own children, in which fashion is called progress and ingenuity genius. (Quentin Bell’s Fine Art in Crisis in the Humanities, edited by J.H. Plumb)

We do a time-travel check… reviewing Banksy’s film, Quentin!

Everyone has ideas. Therefore, our fashionable wiseacre argues, everybody is an artist…if only we will perceive it; an enormous industry developed to create this awareness. Although this view is beginning to look naive. For we have taken Harold’s belief - that “t[he new painting has broken down every distinction between art and life” - and extended it to its ultimate conclusion: all of life is an artistic event. Living in a tower block. Teaching art classes. Crowd control. Each one an act of art.43 Though they must be conceptualised and recreated in a gallery or some other agreed art space to be endorsed by the art establishment.44 The bureaucrats of art not quite accepting the logic of their ideas; for if everything is art and we are all artists there is no need for either art or them. Close the galleries, defund the Arts Council, sack the art critics, dismiss the art teachers… But dear sir, this will not do: we need to eat sir, and what about our children, I’m got them signed up for Bedales. Would you deprive them of their education, sir? Oh my, oh dear; it’s a sad sack shame. These characters cannot live off the creative spirit alone. Do they even recognise it? Yet, when Harold formulated his phrase he wasn’t thinking of the standard bourgeois model, but of an unusual type of person with a peculiar way of looking at life. An ascetic of pleasure. A bohemian monk drunk on the mind's spirit. Alas, the superficial cleverness of the University-mind easily misses such subtleties. An over-reliance on argument, logical order and epistemological equality produces a crass extremism, with its corollary: a reflexive iconoclasm. Only its need for comfort saving the bourgeoisie from its own concepts. These philistines, unable to forgo their wealth and status, refusing the logic of their philistinism.

Although everyone is potentially an artist, society, naturally repressive, refuses to recognise this fact, thus the need for teachers, social workers and ‘creative’ professionals to release our artistic souls. But it won’t stop there. These same officials are soon determining who is and who is not a writer, a painter, a musical talent - by handing out the grants, setting up the patronage networks, writing in the trade press.45 Art manufacturing its own nomenklatura; although unlike the Soviet Union, where there was a clear line between official and artist, today there is no distinction between bureaucrat, commissar and practitioner: all are interchangeable. 

Come back Sergey!46 We need you. Tell us again about the weird and the bizarre, the eccentric and the strange, the madcap, the certifiably crazy. Come on! We want to hear about these artists, those characters at an angle from the ordinary run. Harold nods his head…

…a veteran New York painter, finding himself in art’s dugout at the beginning of the forties, [having] the ingenuity, inspired by years of submarine existence, to fill it to the top with water and reproduce in Kodachrome the hues of the different levels by the light falling through his fishpond… [B]efore this submarinist…I knew much less about being a fish, although there had been a few passionate outcries about this condition - for example, in Eliot’s Wasteland and some novels heralding a new Ice Age.

The artist has a special sensibility, which distinguishes him from the craftsman. Sergey calls this sensibility the creative spirit which he opposes to art. Process is pitted against object.47 Art and the act of creation allocated to different categories. A useful distinction that illuminates how the finished object differs from its source - the creative event. It also offers an explanation as to why some art feels alive, others dead: it is due to the quality of their spiritual energies.48 But Sergey goes too far. This is reflected in his music. Listen to a piece like Second Siberian Concert. The brilliant moments do not compensate for the formulaic free improv and the lack of a satisfying form. The craft of art - its shaping and polishing - is absent. The greatest works of art, jazz included, are more than creative spirit; they have the skill of the virtuoso, plus an editor’s discipline. Miles Davis completes his work on the vinyl record.49

The greatest…!? Make this distinction and the whole sorry business of this belief that everyone is an artist collapses.50 To balance the seesaw: for every Picasso there will be a hundred thousand Thierry Guettas. But if an artist is so bad as to be useless should we be calling this man an artist at all?51

Despite its attacks on ‘formalism’ the Soviet Union was a highly formalist regime. A vast bureaucracy, whose bureaucratic process and bureaucratic form emptied out the content and spirit of what people thought and did.52 This determined officialdom’s view of aesthetics. Art was either the rules you followed - the style you must adopt: some kind of realism - or the classics on a museum wall, icons to which we genuflect.53 Sergey, living at a time when a weak authoritarian regime was starting to disintegrate, was right to emphasise the creative spirit, to value the act more than the object. Better Pop Mechanics than Beethoven! in Russia in 1982. At such times the emphasis will be on the creation of new things, the audience to be carried away by the energy of the performance. And in a regime where a clear distinction is made between artists and hoi polloi, and where the successful artist is the one who becomes a servant of the state,54 the artist-outsider’s bias will naturally be in favour of the anarchic creative act, with its implicit egalitarianism. The unleashing of energy on a stage in 1984 vastly more important than the CD recording the event decades later.

But in times like ours, where the idea of creativity is ubiquitous, and has become part of a totalitarian Neo-Liberal package, and where talk and the hard sell replace the making of things, the idea of the creative spirit drains art of all value. We are left with a bourgeois populism, and the mass amateurism it produces in galleries and across the public realm. Today we have reached the end of art. Our history resembles a syllogism: beginning with the artist’s act it concludes with those who consume it. Today, art belongs to the audience, whose experience is paramount.

Some of the videos were “pristine”, others less so. Some were tedious to watch. I enjoyed them for that very reason. Performance art can be tedious (sometimes deliberately so) or it can turn into tediousness by way of being mediated through film because it is often not made for a camera. The tedious isn’t an aesthetic category in need of being propagated but it might highlight that performance is something you have to sit through, not ponder briefly over a cup of coffee. (Sophie Seita)55

It is a very special audience - the academic expert. Sophie reminds us of Bansky’s comment on Thierry’s unwatchable ‘film’: it drove me “mental”. Only a psychiatrist happy to watch such a mess, and then only to diagnose the director’s malady. Psychosis has replaced art. And the therapist throws the artist over the balcony… Slowly, gently, methodically, the aesthetes have been taken out of the room, to leave just the academics, who speed read Derrida, cut and paste their Badiou. Sales Rep and Advertiser popping in now and then for a friendly tête-à-tête. Talking about the upcoming show at the old gasworks their eyes catch a strange figure in the street. They rush to the window to laugh and jeer at a thin, pale man, in his floppy hat and dirty velvet suit, who mopes along the pavement….

Can this poor chap be saved? Only if we go back to art and the virtuoso; the well-made object to interest us once again. Reynolds. Degas. Braque… Back to the Old Masters. Come on, we must worship once more!56 shouts our velvet-suited friend. We must return the creative spirit to its proper place as source and servant. The essence of art to be found in art, not outside it. A drunk and three children look at him in incomprehension; the pedestrians rapidly walking by, refusing eye contact. Sophie and her mates have already left the window, and are discussing the new show: the guest list, the caterers, the amount of Sauvignon Blanc… Let’s do something really crazy! What! What! cry Jade and Avalon in unison. Serve it in bedpans.

Sergey was right, the real artist is a non-conformist.57 But each age has its own rebel.58 Today our rebels are the conservatives - Proust shares a pocket with Burke and Thomas Hobbes. These are characters who want to remove The People (it is what the bourgeoisie call themselves) from the world of art.59 They hold secret meetings over Brahms, and concoct plans around Alexander Pope. Storming into a gallery they hold a gun to the administrator’s head. Cooly, and with Ciceronian exactness, they read out their demands. Go on, get out, piss off you ***king cunts.

__________

1.  MOSCOW, November 14. The official view was still that the Impressionist school was a setback for French art because it was formalistic and divorced from realism. New York Times, 15 November 1955.

2.   While Gnosticism isn’t the source of Christianity it is its truest expression: a religion of pure thought and the mystic spirit. Gnosticism appearing in that most fruitful time for a movement, when still fresh and new it has already began to generate an intellectual tradition, allowing powerful and original thinkers to grapple with its conceptual and phenomenological complexities but within an established intellectual language. (See Diarmaid MacCulloch’s A History of Christianity) 

Hans Baron’s The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance  stresses how political events - especially major political changes - stimulate the sensibility of key thinkers and intellectuals; this stimulation the source of original thought. Although Baron overdoes the behaviourist argument - he is apt to reduce everything to politics, thus ignoring the parthenogenetic element in any tradition - his approach is surely sound. New ideas arise not so much from concrete facts - the materials of change - as from the atmosphere generated by radically new events.

3.  The popular melodramatic view is captured in Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place.  For the reality - a mix of bohemianism, poverty and asceticism - see Cathy Curtis’ Restless Ambition,  a journalist’s biography of Grace Hartigan.

4.  Deep inside Harold’s critical discourse are The Modern’s all-prevailing tropes: Progress and the Rebel. Contrast with an older aesthetic, such as Schopenhauer’s (in the World as Will and Representation, Volumes I and II ) where art is described as taking the viewer out of themselves. In this conception art is timeless, its special power the ability to vanquish our ego for a few minutes or hours of contemplation. 

Harold’s Tradition of the New is not unrelated to the rise of the specialist critic, with its inbuilt tendency to exhaust the aesthetic sensibility. No longer a way of tuning off after a day in the office art appreciation has become the critic’s job. A mental-physical engagement replaced by discursive reason, and a constant need for variety to spark the jaded aesthetic nerve. Though Harold retains something of the older conception - his “spirit” is an ally of the artistic sensibility - he combines it with the new emphasis on rational discourse; it is, as the history will show, an unstable combination.

5.  We are coming close to the ideas of madness that were to overwhelm the early 1960s. It is only a short step from celebrating the wild ones on society’s fringes to identifying with those who are out of society altogether.

6.  Towards the end of the 19th century art’s existence increasingly comes to depend upon definition. Led first by the artists - the Cubists, Dada and the Surrealists - later it is the critics - here is Harold! - who define what is and what is not art. These critics soon to be replaced by specialist academics. The trajectory is a sad one. At some point in the 20th century art is no longer a free-standing aesthetic object but an idea wholly dependent upon an art-critical discourse. This shift illustrated by Harold when he cleverly reverses the formalist argument to bash realist paintings, which he regards as merely signs devoid of the artist’s spirit (a brilliant performance, not altogether convincing). By the late 20th century this kind of performance had become the norm; examples on exhibit in Anthony Julius’ Transgression: The Offences of Art, a scrumptious treatise, yummy yum yum.

7.  And still attack. It is why characters like Brian Sewell and Roger Scruton (and to a lesser extent Robert Hughes) are so critical of the art establishment. They have to go on the offensive if they are to advocate their vision of art. For art is no longer a physical craft but an intellectual discourse, where who wins the argument pockets the Arts Council grant.

8.  Fruitfully described by Tom Wolfe in his Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby; although he stretches the definition of art so far that it snaps. Neither is he helped by his prose style, with its constant repetition of a few simple ideas; this style getting in the way of what is good cultural anthropology. Wolfe an example of what happens to a highbrow idea when it goes pop: the material reduced to crass caricature, where it loses all force and value.

9.  For the wider intellectual atmosphere see my Critic as Clerk.

10.  The excitement and dangers of these experiments are marvellously evoked in Edgar Reitz’s Die Zweite Heimat.  Even now, after all these decades, we hear the holy fool’s prophecy at the the beginning of this epic: the avant-garde is moving too fast!  By the time of Laing, in his The Politics of Experience, fashionable society had long stopped listening to such sanity.

11.  Robert Irwin’s Memoirs of a Dervish: Sufis, Mystics and the Sixties captures the atmosphere brilliantly. It also supports Will Self’s contention - in the William Burroughs pieces in Junk Mail  - that too many of the Baby Boomers had read the zeitgeist wrong: they mistook the forms of creative rebellion - especially the drugs, but also the sex and the politics - for the true achievements of these years. Although, as against Self, I attribute the increasing sterility of the culture not to a romanticisation of the demonic outsider - drugs replacing graft as the secret of the artist’s gift - but to its almost complete institutionalisation.

12.  Alas, every renaissance is followed by a reformation… The best book on our’s Andrew Gamble’s The Free Market and the Strong State, which makes the strong argument that Thatcherism began as a culture war against the 1960s. The irony - as with most reformations - is that Thatcherism encouraged the very trend it tried to eradicate; because in its particular mix of ‘free market economics’ and social reaction the economics eviscerated the morality.

13.  See the COUM section of Wreckers of Civilisation: The Story of COUM Transmissions & Throbbing Gristle; and John A. Walker’s Art & Outrage.

14.  Harold’s own Art on the Edge  is useful here.

15.  Pauline Kael: why does every educated America resemble a social worker? (I Lost It at the Movies)

16.  For a different, older, and I think a more accurate view of the psychological and social effects of art see my Aesthetic Maladies. It is truer to say that art will have its most beneficent effect on the audience - the informed listener, the educated reader, the intelligent looker. Yet we are told - by our bureaucrats of culture - that such ‘passivity’ is a bad thing (social workers don’t read Schopenhauer) making us slaves to authority. Of course, this doesn't stop galleries hosting massive exhibitions of Old Masters, with high ticket prices… how our institutions are run - the survival needs of this particular species - is often at variance with their ideology that governs them. We are lucky that this is so.

17.  This excitement, together with a sense of superiority, arrogance, and the inhumanity, is tellingly if naively captured here.

The common people of the world have been noted for their obsolete views concerning the advancement of science; despite persuasion, they will not swallow anything that is beyond their infinitesimal brains. But science fiction changes that—the sheer power of magnificence that will leave the reader vainly wondering what he is on this wee tiny Earth. The force of science-fiction can never be equalled by any other type of story. What I finish a science-fiction yarn, I feel overwhelmed with thoughts that surge in my brain. Can it ever be true? Will such things ever come to pass? The glorious heights that the reader soars to make one realize why there are such active fans. Science-fiction makes one think—to ponder on the whole universe. It is a wonder that science-fiction is an opiate?—to feel that exuberant thrill course through your body; to feel you sense rise and your pulse beat stronger. Ah, deep is the love… Science is stupendous. The huge thoughts we humans try to understand., to analyze, are great. Science-fiction has the ability to grasp me and to whirl me up—up—up into the realms that dominate the cosmos. A fiction that gives fact, food for thought, and yet contains exciting adventure, is indeed a marvellous fiction. It is a fiction that is intelligent and that educates, not towards the bad or immoral things, but for the future advancement of the people of the world. Why do I read science-fiction? Ah! Feeble are the words to express such a great subject. (David A Kyle, ‘a 16-year-old fan’, quoted by Edward James, Science Fiction in the 20th Century. Italics mine.)

And the reality… James shows that this young fan would have read mostly formulaic and highly conformist genre fiction. (We knew it anyway: “[e]xciting adventure” tells us all.) We can only hope he grew up, and reduced those “huge ideas” to a more manageable size. 

For an example of adolescents who never mature see Will Self’s excellent The rise and fall of the high density madmen. These architects and social planners couldn’t leave off playing with that big idea of the early 1960s: The Car. If only Ballard had been around before the war: our cities may have been saved from an entire generation.

18.  John Updike has a good light piece on MOMA in Due Considerations. With the expansion of the institution his aesthetic experience deteriorates.

19.  At the same time we have an academic industry telling us that art is elitist, sexist, racist; a vast conspiracy whose origins (some say) lie in British Capital and the mind of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. A confused reading which mistakes the spread of art - coextensive with the rise of the market - with its own essence, which is not a market commodity. For an excellent discussion of the market relations see Donald Sassoon’s The Culture of the Europeans.

20.  Chinua Achebe’s devastating Things Fall Apart gives the details.

21.  Compare with James Macmillan’s piece on classical music. Today to be truly radical - in Sergey’s sense of being a non-conformist - is to be for the traditional arts (with the conservatism they suggest) and against the kind of stupid radicalism offered here. Stupid? Because there is no thought: RoseLee Goldberg regurgitates platitudes. The reviewer quite rightly notes this, but then appears to agree with the sentiment behind it: performance artists are selling out if they are not political, she says.

We note the odd reference to a “global language”; to an art that communicates to everyone directly without need of translation. If such a language existed it could not convey art, which is a creation of culture and an act of artifice designed to mediate individual sensibilities through the finished work. All art is translation. Though it doesn’t need to be “direct” to be understood. RoseLee Goldberg, intoxicated by fashionable beliefs - drunk on the alcopops she bought in the bar - cannot see, as she staggers through the galleries, the citizens of all nationalities looking at Titian, Leonora Carrington, and the Japanese painters of the Floating World…

As RoseLee collapses on the floor, and is carried away by gallery officials, Sophie turns to a trade magazine to hide her embarrassment. Both are exhibiting the typical blindness of the bourgeois intellectual. For the lay person performance art is opaque, and far more difficult to understand than traditional art; unlike with the Mona Lisa or Van Gogh’s Sunflowers the audience has to be educated to accept these performances even as art. Many still resist. Only the establishment insider fails to see how alienating such work is to those who do not speak its highly specialist language. 

On the bench reading her magazine Sophie doesn't notice the gallery audience… class is not one of the “barriers” mentioned here. The omission is telling. When these characters talk about a global audience they are really describing an under-educated bourgeoisie that has been trained just sufficiently to accept the authority of the art experts, who tell them what they are looking at is art. The workers will always be more sceptical, and derisive: my best times at private views outside the gallery; with the jokes, the laughter and the fun poked at the crap we’ve been asked to see, the homilies we’ve had to listen to about the good it has done us.

Having battered the boat I will leave it to be washed away by the waves… There already exists a “global language”, which though highly artificial is understood by everybody (educated and uneducated alike): it is that of Hollywood, and the market economy it so perfectly embodies.

22.  Many of the false assumptions on which most of this art is based are revealed in Claire Bishop’s Artificial Hells. They support my own experience of one of these projects. Almost no art; the educative value extremely weak; a great deal of condescension - the poor are assumed to be less intelligent than they are -; an almost total ignorance of the community coupled with an arrogant disregard of local criticism: where people disagreed they were either ignored or had to be re-educated about the benefits of the work. The atmosphere after the project finished was one of a vague sense of disappointment: was that it? (My own feeling was the essential amateurism of the thing, together with its inflated claims that jostled with the clichés, which were everywhere.) Oh, there were good things too: an enjoyable session listening to actors; a fun day; and I got to know a lot about the current art world and gallery culture. But sending a coach to the seaside produced the same happy faces (and it cost less cash). 

23.  James Kelman makes a similar point about creative writing in Elitism and English Literature, Speaking as a Writer (in “And the judges said…”). We all write ‘creatively’, but this is not the same as literature.

24.  This world is brilliantly described in the introductory chapter of Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. The book as a whole sinks under its own bombast, as the crude portrayals of the art crowd are collided against the boosterism of the street designers. Let’s tell a terrible truth: the majority of those into customised cars and drag racing are just as boring as those bourgeois who profess a liking for art. In all cases we are desperate for characters with talent, charisma and intelligence.

The most interesting chapter in Wolfe’s book is on Cassius Clay, where we see how real talent - both with the fists and on the lips - is smothered by popularity. Clay forced to repeat the same routines to vast numbers of people who can only parrot the verbal formulas they have heard on TV or read in the newspapers. This is the problem with popular culture: anything alive with interest and skill is rapidly killed off by overexposure and repetition.

The attempt to ironise this phenomena - à la Warhol - only compounds the original inanity. An object of no interest is reproduced as an art object whose only interest is the irony - how quickly do we tire of that?

25.  Donald Sassoon does an admirable job in showing how art, culture and the market grew together from the late 18th century. However, because his interest is the social, economic and cultural history of art he downplays art’s own distinctive nature. For a more subtle appreciation of the tension between art and those who sell it we need to go to Laura J. Miller’s Reluctant Capitalists: Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption. The publisher Charles Chadwyck-Healey’s interview with Alan Macfarlane gives further insight into this odd relationship. See particularly his comments on how traditional publishers were reluctant to embrace the new digital technology because of their sentimental attachment to the book. Since the 1990s, with the corporate takeover of publishing, this sentimentality has vanished and the tension removed: books now simply another product to be sold. Culture is ceasing to be an independent realm.

26.  See Quentin Bell in Crisis of the Humanities. Many art colleges were originally set up to teach industrial design not art.

27.  Picoseconds is a “jeu d’esprit…which takes on the Group of Seven and reconstructs their vision of landscape in the light of contemporary experiment and post-modern pastiche.” (Cat’s Eye)

Here is the authentic voice of the curator. Abstract. Allegorical. Left-political. And wearing the latest intellectual couture from Paris. This curator is not looking at the picture. Certainly she doesn't understand it…because she does not feel the meaning it seeks to convey. Instead she searches her own mind for all the general ideas circulating there; those clichés of the academic and curatorial worlds. What she nets is more or less random, but since there are very few ideas inside that mind she easily catches what she needs. These ideas are also safe: ‘everybody’ believes in them. And are too abstract to be contradicted. They also have the authority of the academic class; although in truth they are merely the sign whereby an animal recognises their own kind. Such labels are also extremely useful for the gallery crowd. They give the viewer permission not to look at the pictures. To read this explanation is have understood what you see, the brief glance that follows sufficient to confirm what you’ve been told. Poor Elaine Risley! Her work has been reduced to the pop philosophy of the graduate class. Emptied of meaning it has become simply a symbol, demonstrating the truth of a new religion - its faith manufactured in the universities - and whose church is this gallery. Contrast with the concreteness of the artist’s view.

It is in fact a landscape, done in oils, with the the blue water, purple underpainting, the craggy rocks and windswept raggedy trees and heavy impasto of the twenties and thirties. This landscape takes up much of the painting. In the lower right-hand  corner, in much the same out-of-the-way position as the disappearing legs of Icarus in the painting by Bruegel, my parents are making lunch. They have their fire going, the billy tin suspended over it. My mother in her plaid jacket bends over, stirring, my father adds a stick of wood to the fire. Our Studebaker is parked in the background.

They are painted in another style: smooth, finely modulated, realistic as a snapshot. It’s as if a different light falls on them; as if they are being seen through a window which has opened in the landscape itself to show what lies behind or within it. 

Underneath them, like a subterranean platform, holding them up, is a row of iconic-looking symbols painted in the flat style of Egyptian tomb frescoes, each one enclosed in a white sphere: a red rose, an orange maple leaf, a shell. They are in fact the logos from old gas pumps of the forties. By their obvious artificiality, they call into question the reality of the landscape and figures alike.

28.  Though we note the high prices at the entrance gate….

29.  For incisive criticism on this obsession with activity see Simon Leys' paean to leisure in The Hall of Uselessness. Inside those covers is an old universe, a lost age. Not all is nice there, of course… We need to step carefully, with a large shield and a long spear.

30.  A work of art for the majority exists either as wallpaper, status symbol or seduction rite. Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters plays hilarious fun with all of these preoccupations.

31.  Will Self is acute on how this idea degenerates from the 1960s, as the artist is conflated with the rebel, narrowly conceived as the outsider overdosing on drugs. In the Sixties the idea of the rebel-artist became popular, spreading way beyond its original (and small) bohemian circles. In this decade the image of the rebels of the 1950s was sold to rich and highly conventional young adults, who used sex, drink, drugs and radical politics to convince themselves they were non-conformists. This is wonderfully caught in Don’t Look Back, where Bob Dylan humiliates some drunk rich young things after they throw a television out of an hotel room: he compares their sorry personalities with a mensch like Allen Ginsberg.

The classic satire on this cultural drift towards rebellion is Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road.

32. And is brilliantly realised in Donald Cammell’s and Nic Roeg’s extraordinary Performance, which plays with every idea in this piece.

33.  See Privilege, and my review Pop Art.

34.  For comment on the differences between pop and art see Pop Art.

35.  We hear the frustration of such characters through the tirade below.

Once again we were children, usually spoiled brats. Those of us who refused to stand up and sing our party-piece for the visiting businessmen and other adults were sent to bed without a chocolate biscuit. The authorities were unsure how the visitors treated their own naughty children. However, some of them lost their temper and gave us a smack in public. The city’s PR team, including most media commentators, responded in mitigation, and with one or two exceptions they took great pains in pointing to how naughty we were, how sorely we had tried the patience of the adult authorities, didn’t we appreciate the embarrassment we spoilsports were causing? Surely we knew it was all for our own good, we didn’t even have the wit to see this, not knowing which side our bread was buttered, how could we be so disloyal, but that’s to be expected of artists, their selfishness is a byword, they luxuriate in their perpetual infancy, their rosy-hued world, the world of the everyday, the world of compromise and necessity, if the good old adult authorities didn’t get their hands dirtied why then all us artist-children would in in a right pickle and the amazing thing is we wouldn’t even know it, because the world of adult authority is mysterious and secretive and beyond the ken of infants. (James Kelman, The title piece in “And the judges said…”)

Just do what I say!… so we can make Glasgow safe; our City of Culture attracting as many visitors as possible. Here is the great threat to art: the corporate world’s unwillingness to offend. Any customer turned away is a dollar lost. It is this corporate economy, with its consumer ethos, that destroys liberty, by taking all risk out of an environment. No one to feel pain…except the undesirables, those who make the culture that is to be celebrated!

Kelman rightly notes the institutional take-over of art, and its baleful consequences; although his piece as a whole is confused and shallow. The angle of his attack is obscured by his constant shouting about “evaluation”. He wants to know what criteria the directors, administrators and CEOs are using to judge works of art. A good question, badly phrased. Kelman should make the distinction I describe below, but instead bangs on about class privilege and the British elite, whose aesthetic decisions are dodgy because of their social background. This, as we’ll see later with Will Self, misreads the problem.

He is spot on regarding the bourgeois’ obsession with institutional evaluation, the source of much social distress - those outside the privileged acreage of Middle England always lacking something when assessed by its standards. Kelman writes of a different sort of assessment, the aesthetic sense that knows when a work feels right, which is developed through prolonged practice and contact with others in the same craft (by reading their books, for example). It is the aesthetic judgement, toned by exercise and deepened through absorption in a trade or profession. But he doesn’t develop this idea, preferring to abuse an elite and his favourite villain: that British state. We must go to Alan Macfarlane’s interview with the horticulturist Steven Coghill for a better discussion. Such judgement is organic; it grows out of the craft, and is measured by that craft, and those who have an interest in it. It is this evaluation that is legitimate. The kind of assessment that comes from outside, and is administratively, politically or commercially motivated, is much less so, if at all. Yet, it is these external criteria, though they have almost no aesthetic value, that have become dominant, forcing craftsmen to follow their rules, obey their priorities, and adapt to the culture they create (Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman has sensible comment). It is bureaucrats that Kelman is fighting, not the state, his metaphysical bogeyman. Alas, he fails to notice that it is precisely his radical politics, with its “community criticism”, that increases the number of administrative officers. They are employed to realise his ideas! And - being good naive souls - they carry his politics in their rucksacks when they visit council estates and provincial towns. An alien army, they set up their tents in the fields of art, then scout the local terrain…

Craft separates the craftsman from the layperson. To be a writer is to grow away from the community where you grew up. Am I clear? A craftsman belongs to an elite: it is his trade. 

Historically, only the bourgeoisie had the resources to write literature - they had, most importantly, the literate education and the highly verbal social milieu, plus the time, plus the financial resources (for study and travel). Out of this class comes the classic 19th century novel. Of course Victorian novels reflect the environment in which they were written; but such perspectival bias is very different from the narrow prejudices that Kelman attributes to them; and which I do not recognise. To believe Kelman is to see only (class) bigotry when we read Villette or Jude the Obscure. This is a Presbyterian minister interrogating his congregation for sin. Although the times have changed; Kelman attaching a political microscope to the text; he adjusts the lens - sharper or blunter we are not quite sure - and searches for the fascist microbe in everyone to the Right of his sect. Only if the writer stands to the Left of Jesus Christ on election day will they secure their literary worth. Come off it James! this is no way to read literature. And don’t pull the working class schtick with me, for when it comes to working class roots I go down deeper than you. I go way down, pal.

So what if most of the great novels have been written by the sons and daughters of the bourgeoisie? Their class origin is not artistically important. To write these works they became bohemians - think of the biography of that uber-respectable dame George Eliot; or read the diaries of Virginia Woolf. And what about the 18th century, Mr Kelman? Just how much literature do you know of that 100 years…  The facts of history have been confused with the aesthetic impulse, this confusion producing a morality play, whose ethics are political not Christian. Get out of that pulpit now Kelman! But no, he will not listen. After a few sandwiches in the cafeteria he’s back again, hammering away at the English elite and their ‘literature’. Like all good moralists Mr Kelman doesn’t notice that his views are those of his opponents turned upside down. But even this is not quite correct. Kelman creates a caricature of English Literature and then produces its mirror image, which he celebrates. It is poor stuff. An ounce of truth lost under a kilogram of nonsense. Crass polemic is not Lit Crit. We expect better than that Mr James Kelman. We’re not on a demo now, intoxicating ourselves with slogans. Kelman! Out! Out! Out! Firbank! In! In! In!

To be a writer is to be apart from the community. Yet nothing follows from this. The great working class writers in learning their craft inhabit a different mental space from the people they wrote amongst. The Working Class Highbrow explores its eponymous hero, and suggests a uniquely Welsh and Scottish identity. In Scotland and in Wales the psycho-physical connection with their class remained, but this disguised the transformation that had occurred inside their minds: for in order to write they had to acquire the literacy and the verbal ingenuity that can only be had through education and hard graft, which necessarily isolates one from those are not reading (so much) and not grafting (so hard). Am I clear now? The mark of the bourgeois is upon them. All artists have it. But they are artists because they are more than burghers, managers and good taxpayers. J.G. Ballard no ordinary resident of Shepperton. Belong to a craft and you become a king of your own kind.

36.  Contrast with Trotsky’s highly sentimental view of how art would transform The People…

…the imperceptible ant-like piling up of quarters and streets, brick by brick, from generation to generation, will give way to titanic construction of city-villages, with map and compass in hand. Around this compass will be formed… the parties of the future… Architecture will again be filled with the spirit of mass feeling and moods… Mankind will educate itself plastically, will become accustomed to looking at the world as submissive clay for sculpting the most perfect forms of life… Man will occupy himself with re-registering mountains and rivers.. rebuilding the earth, if not in his own image, then at least according to his own taste… More than that, man at last will begin to harmonise himself in earnest. He will make it his business to achieve beauty by giving the movement of his own limbs the utmost precision, purposefulness and economy in his work, his walk, his play. He will try to master first the semiconscious and then the subconscious processes in his own organism. Social construction and psycho-physical self-education will become two aspects of one and the same process. All the arts - literature, drama, painting, music and architecture - will lend this process beautiful form…. Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser and subtler; his body will become more harmonised, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise the heights of an Aristotle a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise. (Quoted in Bernard Wolfe, Three Who Made the Revolution)

Imbued with an older idea of art as beauty Trotsky envisages a society transformed into part classical sculpture and part high-art play; a life shaped by aesthetics. Here is the religious mentality. When applied to society it is naive and foolish. It overlooks that in trying to extend art to the whole of society the art disintegrates before that society's demands (those everyday compromises that Kelman mocks). Art vulnerable to the obtuseness and indifference of the social realm. The masses are not interested in art. Their indifference lethal to artists (and scholars).

Where the multitude rules, there is no respect for any accomplishment that does not yield a profit; accomplishments that make money are accepted, those of leisure are rejected. For when everybody is either engaged in piling up money, or is indifferent to a name beyond the city walls, everybody has as much contempt of the poets as he is ignorant of them, and will rather keep dogs that maintain scholars or teachers. (Giovanni Conversino, quoted in Hans Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance)

Art is only for the few. Try and give it to everyone and society - like a bunch of heavies - barges in, pushing the aesthetes out. Then, when the bully boys of the art bureaucracy arrive, only those who flatter and faun will be allowed back in; they will sign contracts, be given a job description and told what they must do… Art to become like the Catholic Church Pascal describes in The Provincial Letters; a shabby caricature of the society as a whole. Art cannot change the world, but art can be polluted in its attempt to do so.

Mr Schloss! Mr Schloss! shouts Archibald Longacre. I stop and turn around, to find a tall lean figure almost toppling into my face. So close I can see behind his eyeballs, or so my imagination tells me. Mr Schloss, you sound just like John Fowles, that same old foolish elitism; it never goes away, attacking some fake mass to rise yourself above them. He smiles a half moon smile so large I think his forehead will fall into it. Allowing his lips to settle into the fine wrinkles of his mouth's smug complacency, like a wave coming to rest on ripples, I step back to reply. Poor old Fowles. That’s an extraordinary piece by James Campbell in the TLS.  A man who couldn’t cope with the contradiction between his popularity and his ideas. According to his ideas he shouldn't be a success. But he was making millions! Which proves - doesn’t it? - that he belongs to the Many not the Few. But to consider your point Longacre… He’s grinning at me now, like a salesman who thinks he’s clinched the deal. To restate a position isn’t to refute it. What Fowles described is in fact true. Only the Few have the sensibility for the arts, in the same way only the few can do astrophysics; or play badminton to an international standard; though we can all hit a shuttlecock, even you, who has never handled a racket. Having a skill and an aptitude is very different from social class and the snobbery that goes with it. Fowles’ problem, clear from his pathological reaction - those later unreadable novels, his distaste for the money, that depression -  was that the elitism natural to a skill and a profession had got mixed up with feelings of social superiority; his art suffering as a consequence. As Will Self notes in a wonderful interview, such charges of elitism confuse social relations with cultural value. Then there are the virtuosos of all kinds. Not everyone can walk across a tightrope. Can you Longacre? The smile collapses; the face closing down like a window shutter. We should also consider what we mean by the Few. Donald Sassoon - in that Bible of a book - shows that in the natural state only an extremely small number of people appreciate the arts. However, from the late 18th century on increasing numbers were trained to do so. They were domesticated. And so sat quietly in theatres to watch plays and listen to the music. A culture of respect had been manufactured, which by the time of Fowles had netted a vast number of people; but of course they were still only a fraction of the entire population. The mistake from the 1960s was to try to extend this large but relatively small number of artists and aficionados to everybody. But not all of us like hockey, and few of us are any good at crochet: do you want us making our own sweaters… He frowns at the floor. This attempt to extend art to everyone is what breaks it: I am encouraged to do a mathematics degree, and fail after the first year. And who is responsible Longacre? Well, people like yourself. Your charge of elitism is really condescension. I believe you’ve called football the workingman’s ballet. Is that right, Longacre? Longacre… He turns his back and slouches off.

37.  Contrast with a truly original thinker, John Gray: “I’m more proud of what I’ve read than what I’ve written.”

38.  This is bizarrely conveyed in Jon Ronson’s You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, which gives a marvellous insight into the journalist mentality, especially its inability to see just how dull, stupid, empty and horrible is this entity they call The People. Ronson’s book projects the journalist’s own illusions about his profession - smart, socially responsible, sceptical - onto a public that doesn't exist, but which these journalists think they represent; indeed, are part of, thus the continual refrain “us” that festoons Ronson’s book. We receive a picture of just how ordinary, dull and empty is the media world itself, suffused with self-righteous people who live off extremely simple ideas and believe in a parody of what they portray: society and the institutions that manage it. Twitter reflects that caricature back on to the journalists, making it - as The People do: Tom Wolfe should be read here - more extreme, more weird, more dull, more nasty, even more vacant than the original. Ronson, more sensitive than most, has seen his own face in this horror-show of mirrors, his book a cri de cœur as he tries to come to terms with his own reflection.

39.    …I think the idea is more important than the object. The object can look after itself… You can always get another shark.

Damien Hirst, talking to Will Self. Yet, although the artist elevates the idea above the object, he still emphasises its physicality, attacking the critics who rather than just describing his work write about it through abstractions. Self crucifies them with an epithet.

…the excesses of contemporary art critics in attempting to define and fix the work of artists such as Hirst reflects a wrong-headed and truly pretentious attempt by manipulators of language to reduce formaldehyde, flesh and bone to some chintzy philosophical abstraction. In literary criticism we have seen the phenomenon of deconstruction - an attempt by critics to hijack the mantel of the metaphysician for their own scrawny shoulders; and this is what we are witnessing here as well.

But Hirst protests too much. If the “idea is more important than the object” not only do we expect the critics to write about this idea but they must be encouraged to do so: for only by articulating it will they give the object sense. This art exists only in the meaning. I’m in Chipping Norton, do I want to travel all the way to the Serpentine Gallery to see a decomposing animal… Better surely to look at one in a field, where the farmer, if we ask politely, will describe the process of its decay. Cow parts in formaldehyde? A helpful lab assistant will take us around the jars that decorate the shelves of her professor’s laboratory. And a bit of machine painting… We go into a wood and fire paint balls at each other, dressed in combat gear from Army Surplus. Hirst protests too much. We guess he knows that his identity as an artist is wholly dependant upon the critics, thus his need, as Self’s interview shows, to encase himself in the aura of The Artist: that air of mystery, those “gnomic comments”, the emphasis on the materials. Yet if, as Self says, all of Hirst’s creation exists inside the head, in the imagination, what makes him any different from a writer like Margaret Atwood, who begins Cat’s Eye with a note informing us that none of the paintings in her novel exist?

Here is the problem for Hirst. He isn’t a writer or a craftsman, but an ideasmith, relying on others to manufacture the ideas he conceives. His worth, ultimately, to be judged on the quality of his conceptions, the actual objects of secondary interest, for they are made by these others. His role essentially that of quality control: he is less artist than supervisor or Chief Executive Officer (we think of Steve Jobs and his ‘zen-like’ decisions on Apple products). Damien Hirst is a factory that turns ideas into things that are then sold to galleries and collectors. It is the ideas they are buying, though these ideas increasingly have worth only because they have Hirst’s designer label attached to them. Young British Artists having become pop stars follow the usual trajectory into fame and vacuity.

And the object itself? Just like that farmer’s dead cow it needs writers who will make it interesting for the reader, by turning it into literature. Thus the object becomes wholly dependent upon the reaction of the audience, their artistic and conceptual abilities. Self, being an artist himself…

But it seems to me that what you’re really interested in is this dark side, this anima, the ingressability and internality of the body, and the way that culture refracts that experience. Your art is very kinaesthetic, it’s about the internal sensibility of the body.

…has no problem making sense of the work, and he makes us see it in an insightful way. But note: even for Self the quality of the work resides in its meaning; no mention here of aesthetic criteria. Long gone the days when Gulley Jimson, putting the stylus on the record, dances around the room…

But my head was blowing off like a champagne cork… I forgot myself… Sara looked different from the other end of the room. The formal composition appeared. Rather better than I had expected. But nothing to my real pictures. No, I thought, it’s a masterpiece in its own kind. But it’s not the kind I like. It’s the real stuff. But in a small way. Lyrical. Impressionist. And say what you like, the epic is bigger than the lyric. Goes deep and further… It surprised me. Especially the shoulders and back. Sara in that picture is reaching her arms forward… I moved to the other side of the room. And took Sara from the new angle. And called up Coker’s arm for comparison. Yes, I thought, the Coker forearm is a marvel. But the upper arm’s much too tight. Too anatomical. A man’s arm. And a vaccination mark right on the join. Like the pivot of a machine. As if on purpose. Like a piece of silly smartness daubed on a piece of real understanding. Amateurish. Sara had too fine an instinct to be vaccinated on the arm. On any junction of muscle. She had the vision of an artist, even it is was only fixed on herself. Her upper arm is as clean as a baby’s, and that valley under the deltoid as sweet as a snow valley on the Downs. Yes, Mr Plant, I said, Mr Spinoza might look there and thank God to be alive, even if he had his lungs full of glass dust. (The Horse’s Mouth, Joyce Cary)

No longer are we resonating to aesthetic form. No. We think about the ideas behind the object before us. A visit to the gallery a return to the classroom, where we flip through textbooks on philosophy and skim pamphlets telling us about the story of art.

40.  Harold must take some responsibility. In labelling the Action Painters he also created them. Part of a trend he also transformed it, so that, in the following decades, in an art world increasingly dominated by academics, the acts of definition and labelling became more important than the creative instinct. It is to be expected. For an academic, text replaces image as the object of reverence and concern. 

We mustn't forget those journalists. Their task is to turn art and artists into information, making it easily comprehensible to their readers; a newspaper column written to be simple and quick to understand. Labels and definitions are perfect shorthands, preferred to the difficult task of description, whose results may alienate the reader. After constant recycling these labels and definitions are rubbed down to become crude formulas without value or sense. The end product cleverly satirised in Cat’s Eye when the heroine is interviewed by a local reporter, who can only think and write in contemporary clichés.

41.  The most important talent in art today is the ability to fill out grant forms. Meet the requirements of the application - usually to support a worthy community project - and you will get the cash. Success depending on how many people participate and attend, not the quality of the work, which is not measured aesthetically. This is the triumph of the bureaucrat, transforming art into a species of clerical work; which then allows the clerks themselves to become artists. It is the big theme of Claire Bishop’s Artificial Hells; though the author - a conventional university type - is oblivious to this extraordinary metamorphosis. 

For analogous affects of the grant culture on American sociology in the 1950s see Ernest Gellner’s review of Pitirim A. Sorokin in Cause and Meaning in the Social Sciences.

42.  For the transition from academic discourse to pop fashion see Janet Malcolm’s essay on Art Forum in A Girl of the Zeitgeist, in Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers.

43.  These examples are from Claire Bishop’s Artificial Hells.

44.  A gallery owner once said of my writing: it is only a hobby. Could it be clearer? Only if I publish in the right places will I step into the magic circle.

45.  During the European City of Culture Year in 1990 there was an exhibition of British Art held in Glasgow. The director of museums and art galleries was responsible and he caused much controversy when he excluded the work of certain local artists. He is reported to have done so on the grounds that their work was not good enough. (James Kelman, “….and the judges said…”)

46.  He has! Resurrected as Roger Scruton. I would like to thank Sir Roger for his distinction between sound and music - in The Music of the Future  - an influence on this piece.

47.  This bias pervades contemporary intellectual thought, nicely summarised in Simon Blackburn’s What Do We Really Know? Being has succumbed to becoming (to go back to Aristotle’s once conventional distinction). There is no substance just actions. We are less human beings than processing machines. For the confusions and mistakes this can cause see Jonah Lehrer’s attempts at an apology in Jon Ronson’s You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. People quite rightly saw his attempt to offload personal responsibility onto some internal and impersonal mental operation as self-justification. This strongly negative reaction to an attempt to blame his misdemeanours on the machinery of the mind suggests the limitations of the ‘process’ view. We need to acknowledge this reaction, not just dismiss it as foolish error or illusion. In Blackburn’s case I think he is conflating knowledge with existence, ideas about experience with experience itself. It is the consequence of having too rational a view of the world. To understand the human psyche we must grasp what we feel as well as what we think (Steven Rose’s The 21st Century Brain, with its stress on the emotions, is a partial antidote to Blackburn). We have to divine as well as to conceive and to expound. Here is the value of art, divination its special province.

Art suggests a different view of the human psyche. In the stories of Julio Cortazar the personality is porous, it absorbs other ideas, myths, things and people as sand the rain - in Blow Up and Other Stories  there is no stable ego at all. This leads either to complete transformation - man into lizard - or total disintegration and madness. But this is not the way we are in the world; the biology of our mind an insuperable obstacle to our complete surrender to ideas that would erase our personality. While only the few - thankfully - are psychotic. In truth, Cortazar’s stories are elaborate symbols for fragile emotional states. Yet if we were to take a writer like Adam Phillips seriously, they are case studies of our psychological reality, a shape-shifting kaleidoscope of stories and identities; it is the modern psychoanalytic view, adapted to the reigning wisdom of the humanities. Yet Will Self, when reviewing Philips, notes what I see in Blackburn: a merely pushing back of explanation; in Blackburn’s case from the ego to a complex of machine-like activities, in Phillips’ to a series of hallucinations…

Given his espousal of the impossibility of a ‘true self’, only a schema of multifarious personal narratives, it becomes unclear who exactly it is who is doing the dreaming, the worrying, the kissing or the being bored?

As Phillips’s Procrustean labours bend and stretch jargon in new and more elegantly tortuous ways, one is reminded insistently of the cartoon where the man asleep is depicted dreaming himself asleep, and when the man in the dream awakes the ‘real’ dreamer disappears. (Couch Surfing in Junk Mail)

The ego remains, it has just been given a different name. And just as the ego exists, so do organisations, neighbourhoods, regions, nations…Durkheim’s ‘social facts’. Trotsky, Blackburn and the rest, who “accustomed to looking at the world as submissive clay”, are apt to forget the concreteness of things, this concrete quality the reason why the fantasies of Trotsky and Kyle never become wholly true, and often produce a monstrous ugliness. At the core of the human there is an identity, and it will not be changed. And if we try to force it… It resists mightily to survive (the implications for progressives set out in The Zone).

48.  Francis Bacon is brilliantly enlightening in his interviews with David Sylvester: a visit to the gallery an injection of energy… He shoots up with Velasquez. Am I clear enough now? No?! Come on reader, catch up! The artwork emits its own life, it is a force-field and catalyst to those receptive to its influence (we go back to Hans Baron’s ideas on the stimulus of major political events: a visit to  the gallery an existential crisis to those with the aesthetic nerve). 

49.  For the work that goes into these records read Ian Carr’s biography of Miles. Or look at the outtakes on the back of the CD reissues of any major jazz artist.

50.  Carol Tavris gets to the nub:

I recently met a man in his seventies, a radiologist, who, once retired, spent all his time carving wood pieces of exceptional artistry. “When did you begin to develop your skill in this hobby?” I asked, expecting to hear that he was sixty or so. “At sixteen”, he said. “And my hobby was being a radiologist.” In my experience, friends and colleagues who retired with glowing fantasies of learning to play the lute, becoming a woodcarver, or acquiring another skill that takes years to master, often discover that it will take too long to make performing or creating intrinsically enjoyable. 

51.  The risk if we do - as Bansky’s film shows - is that in our intensely commercial environment the salesman will occlude the artist.

52.  This was inherent in Bolshevik rule. See the negative comments of Lenin, quoted in Adam B. Ulam’s biography. And for the historical irony read the school chapters in Trotsky’s My Life: An Attempt at an Autobiography... The very bureaucratic formalism he suffered in the classroom he helped impose on all of Russia. 

A caveat. Bertram D. Wolfe’s Three Who Made a Revolution stresses the continuity between the two regimes; although it also recognises that Lenin’s party, both in conception and in practice, was a pure bureaucracy; the reason why a machine politician like Stalin could master it.

53.  Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark is our free pass into this museum. The classic statement of art as religious imagery is of course Walter Benjamin’s, in Illuminations;*1 the dangers in that essay on show in John Berger’s brilliant Ways of Seeing, where the emphasis shifts from the art to the society in which it is created. An historical irony is that despite the Marxist critique it was in the ‘materialist’ Soviet Union that art worship was taken to its most extreme. The USSR a religious society. Unlike the capitalist West, where the utilitarian bias of the industrial system is in constant tension with the religious instinct of its citizens. These tensions occurring not only in our institutions and political parties but also reflected in art, which at times is seen as a spiritual escape from that society - Dada; Surrealism; Abstract Expressionism - at others a surrender to its commercial values, themselves turned into religious iconography - the American version of Pop Art; the YBAs of the 1990s.

*1 Though see my earlier footnote on Elaine Risley’s painting. By the 1980s the religious worship has shifted from the individual works of art to the building that housed them, itself merely the site of the new faith: a faux-radical Left-wing politics. It has changed again since then. Though the priestly sermons are still tacked to the walls, the ‘art experience’ is now little more than a form of window shopping. The gallery no longer a church but a mall.

54.  These lines are not so easily drawn in the contemporary West, as the state forms part of a global corporate network whose values - often opposed to the state - it shares with ‘radical’ artists.*1 To be a success today you have to recognised as a ‘rebel’, this image obscuring the reality that you are in fact conforming to the culture of what is now an international elite. And so ubiquitous is the idea of the rebel that we can’t catch a train without being sold this elixir. I laugh out loud and am nearly arrested when, while waiting at Liverpool Street for the tube, I see a poster for the latest William Blake exhibition: Radical, Rebel, Revolutionary.  A whole tradition ends when it is turned into advertising and sold to stockbrokers and tourists. Today our ‘radical’ artists - Tracy Emin, Damien Hirst, Grayson Perry … -  are apparatchiks of the corporate nexus. They are suitably rewarded. 

It would require another essay to show why these radicals have been absorbed into the corporate world, but I will give a brief hint here. Capitalism is not a mere materialist, mechanical process. Capitalism itself is a religion, which like Christianity, its twin sister, is both embodied in institutions - the market trader, the corner shop, the family business, the multi-national company - and lives independently of them; the history of capitalism a history of capitalist revolutions, where mystics and rebels seek to reclaim the religious spirit from the institutions they believe have captured and coerced it.*2 This becoming highly self-conscious from the 1960s onwards.

*1 The reason why those who now run the state in the West attack and diminish it. Nicely caught in Ian Jack’s essay on the sale of public land…

The notion of idleness is important to the argument: land cannot be allowed merely to sit there minding its own business – it needs somehow to be put to work, to be efficient. As for surplus, that can be created by various ruses, not least by setting targets, such as those that drive up occupation densities in civil servants’ offices from 14.5 square metres to ten square metres (and in some recent cases to six square metres) per full-time employee; or by establishing a minimum area for playing fields determined by the number of pupils at a school, and declaring anything above that figure surplus to requirements. Public land becomes surplus, in other words, as the result of the state’s determination to shrink itself.

*2 To understand capitalism we begin with Weber not Marx. There it is in the title of his most famous book: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. How often is that all important Spirit overlooked!

55  Criticism gives way to participation. Not to reflect upon art but to endure its presence now the critical task. Here is the cult of the body transferred to classroom and gallery. 

This is not to say that art cannot have tedious bits - think of Ulysses. But rather, tedium is a problem which art has to carefully negotiate, balancing it against the aesthetic effect. For Sophie Seita this problem ceases to exist. Tedium replaces art as the centre of her concern. We recall Quentin Bell’s “the inarticulate expatiating upon the incompetent” and remember Michael Billig’s coruscating monograph on the poor quality of contemporary academic writing: these are texts one has “to sit through” rather than savour and comprehend (in Learn to Write Badly). This academic experience - endless hours scanning the catatonically dull - has been transferred to the art object. An art so boring it can only attract the academic, who gives these videos meaning by writing their monographs. And it is these monographs, in reproducing the experience, that creates them as artistic discourse, this discourse all that is left of art.

We register the condescension to traditional art criticism: that “ponder briefly over a cup of coffee.” The great writers and critics dismissed as dilettantes. Goodbye Harold. And poor Hazlitt; your wonderful headpiece is to be visited no more. Charles Lamb is so distraught we have to carry him to bed and sedate him; don’t worry my lad, do not worry now, it’ll be all right, one day, when these fools collapse under their own excess, you will again have your coterie. Listen. Listen to me. Already John Gray is giving sensible and obvious advice: to be well-read read the classics yourself, do not sit in an expensive classroom and listen to an illiterate lecture on books they do not understand. But Charles won’t accept these wise words. Forcing himself up from his prone position, pushing our arms away… No, no, Sophie cannot possibly be referring to me. She is talking about the Jaspers and the Esmeraldas, you know, those who visit galleries like they visit foreign towns, a few minutes walking around before the main course in the cafe; the coffee, the chat, the Instagram. Instagram Charles! Well look, I’m still living, aren’t I, even if only for a few centuries? We chuckle, and shake our heads. Yes, this is true. But Charles, you see, Sophie is a radical; she loves The People, believing they are the source of our best values… But didn’t I, Schloss? Didn't we all? Hazlitt never stopped… Yes, but you see Charles, though the label remains the jar has changed its contents.

56.  Wolfe’s book, and our own experience, shows that although bureaucracy sells the idea of initiative and creativity it tends overwhelmingly to make its employees passive and obedient. Worship, on the other hand, gravitates towards faith, encouraging resistance and rebellion. Thus the fissiparousness of all religions, when freed of the institutions of the church. Lenin - he was a true modern - fused these two elements of the religious and the bureaucratic to create the Bolshevik Party, a sect that was also an organisation. The history of the party before 1917 - its splits and excommunications - a testament to the tensions such fusions cause.

Over the course of centuries the special nature of bureaucracy - its centralisation and fixity - has been transferred from the Church to the State to the Corporation. David Edgerton’s The Shock of the Old  forcing us to recognise the persistence of the major multi-national companies throughout the 20th century. We live in a world where there are far more (semi-)permanent organisations than ever before; though because the culture is more fluid its citizens feel that the entire society is unusually unstable. In the last 20 years a technological revolution has undermined some of that institutional permanence; although, as Adam Curtis shows in The Trap, this has coincided with a greater conservatism in the mainstream culture, for with the Internet and the corporate economy fusing, the institutions have sought to retain their market share and political influence through closer control of the consumer and citizen. The value of Edgerton’s work is to make us question the shibboleth of change.  And when we do… We grasp the real nature of the modern: the manufacture of durable institutions which increasingly - day-by-day - shape our existence.

57. Will Self is right to criticise this notion, arguing that by confusing the rebel with the artist we have created a culture that is a vast scrapyard. But in describing the myth and diagnosing its baleful consequences Self misses the deeper issue: rebellion is our conformity. The young adult is acting out the part expected of him, and which he will hang up in the dressing room when his particular teenage play has ended. So much of what we see is either rites of passage - drink, music, sex and drugs is our initiation into young adulthood - or fake or synthetic product. This nicely brought out in Tom Wolfe’s pieces on stock car-racing and customised cars. Beginning as teenage fun and teenage truculence they are taken over by the corporations who refashion them as safe activities and bland commodities for the accommodating family. Only a few individuals - such as the car customiser Ed Roth - keeping their edge long into adult life (The Kandy Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby).

Since Wolfe’s time our teenage years have extended all the way up into our sixties; staid office workers now acting like naughty children going out for a Friday night sesh. Some watch the Stones play Street Fighting Man at Wembley. Others visit Sheringham High Street and buy Old Man Rules t-shirts - even OAPs can be hooligans today. Yet all is mass-produced, and therefore safe. Thus the jar we suffer on noticing the disconnect between image and the reality; that tinny shout of individuality on a vast factory floor. So much feels ersatz. This was also the feeling of many young Americans in the 1960s. Their rebellion failing precisely for the reason Self gives: it was based on a faulty premise: that to rebel is a good in itself. The dire results are cruelly drawn in River’s Edge. Yet Frank Zappa had already predicted them in We’re Only in It for The Money: the rebel a product to be sold and marketed like everything else.

58. Nicely captured in Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives. Compare the losers, drifters and renegades here - all lovers of the book: can we forget Ulises Lima reading in the shower! - with the academics who bore us each week in the TLS, selling their radical cool. The comedy of their conformity, as they lip-sync the same stale corporate routine, raising a weak laugh before more sombre reflections intrude. We remember Wolfe’s book, where the academics rushed to write about Marx when he was made legal in Russia; the Marxist revolutionaries still in jail, underground or in exile. 

59. In the excellent Valley of the Corn-Dollies (in Junk Mail) Will Self diagnoses the problem - an “uncool cultural elite” living off and sucking the blood out of a “cool” underground culture. However, his identification of the villain - white, middle-class, metropolitan - mistakes the surface for what lies underneath: the corporate world’s ability to quickly absorb and then erase these sub-cultures, so as to sell them in the consumer economy to the greatest number of listeners they can manufacture. Skin colour and ethnicity are only an historical accident, soon to be repaired at Corporate HQ. 

Self's article argues for the idea that cultural innovation comes from below and outside. This ignores the fact that much of working class pop and dance music was made by middle class boys (Eden should be on your DVD player, Mr Self), while immigrants have first to be assimilated into the host culture; writers and artists often second generation, more British than Czech or Indian. Today, of course, there is a global artistic environment which produces an international product, but this is little different from Disney and Hollywood; and lacks the fascinating synergies of which I assume Self is thinking (the piece was written before our complete surrender to the global idea). But I’m picking picking picking… The piece is truly wonderful, correctly noting the propensity of the English to abuse themselves. Alas, what was once a game - when the culture was strong - is becoming a fatal war when that culture has been badly weakened - from Thatcher to Cameron - and is now under real threat from the multi-national leviathans of business, finance and IT.