The Doctor is in (part 2)

Gordon Brown’s premiership

Why has Gordon Brown’s public standing deteriorated so badly? Tony Blair faced more serious problems, e.g. the Iraq fiasco, yet seemed to hold up better.

Brown and Blair are probably similar in terms of innate abilities. Their different levels of success in the public arena can be attributed partly to the differences in their schooling. State comprehensive schools, like the one Brown attended, purvey a mediocratic ethos. The individual is unimportant: he should regard himself as no better than anyone else, and as subordinated to society.

Blair attended a private school, where teachers are paid to generate an ethos according to which individual pupils are entitled to feel good about themselves. This is much better preparation for a leadership role, or indeed any role which involves interacting with other people. It is also far better preparation for a role in which you have to endure a lot of pressure, scrutiny, criticism and downright hostility. Think of any British individual in the public domain with a ‘Teflon’ quality, and they are almost certain to have been educated privately.

Ironically, an ideology which stresses the social over the individual undermines people’s ability to interact successfully with others. Instead, they tend to come out sullen, resentful and introverted — qualities which in a mediocracy are insultingly redefined as ‘autistic’. (It is one of the paradoxes of mediocracy that some of the characteristics it is intolerant of are ones it tends to foster, e.g. lack of sociability, or politeness to people who are different from you.)

Righteous indignation leads to self-explosion

Why is a play sympathetic to the 7/7 bombers being given a warm reception?

The play Pornography, inspired by the 2005 London bombings and receiving its British premiere at this year's Edinburgh Festival, has received warm reviews in the Telegraph and the Guardian. According to its author Simon Stephens, the bombers

weren’t demons [and] weren’t operating in isolation from their country or their cultural movement – but were absolutely a product of it.

The primary function of culture in a mediocracy is to criticise or challenge bourgeois values. Provided it is understood that only particular versions of ‘critique’ or ‘challenge’ will be tolerated, a cultural producer cannot fail to go wrong by ticking the relevant boxes on the pseudo-radical agenda.

A play such as this functions as a useful legitimisation device for aggression targeted at the non-mediocratic. As Cherie Blair once memorably said, “As long as young people feel they have got no hope but to blow themselves up, you are never going to make progress.”

It is important, however, that the source of the desperation is not attributed to any of the features of mediocracy. Stephens carefully avoids the traps. He does not suggest that the anger of the bombers could have something to do with the boredom and frustration engendered by a culture that is hostile to all values incompatible with reductionism and egalitarianism. No, it must be something to do with capitalism.

[Stephens:] “at the heart of their action was an alienation from the people they were going to kill and from themselves. This seemed to be symptomatic of a consumerist culture, which objectifies everyone and everything.”

And with individualism, of course.

[For Stephens] the bombings were part of a bigger pattern established by the extreme individualism created in people by, amongst other things, modern technology.

Banal art "challenges banality"

Sometimes there is a pleasing congruence between observations of ideology first made in the Mediocracy book, and subsequent expressions of that ideology. For example, on the subject of art I wrote:

What passes the mediocratic criterion for art is that which has the appropriate ideological effect. ... Good mediocratic art should make the audience accept their subordination to the physical, and to society ...

One method particularly likely to gain approval is ‘subversion’. But only subversion of things which are safe to subvert, e.g. capitalism or bourgeois culture. Never subversion of the central tenets of mediocracy, such as equality ...

The old-fashioned idea of artists — exceptional individuals free to pursue their creative drives without reference to society — is considered dubious in a mediocracy, as it conflicts with concepts such as awareness and responsibility. However, two ersatz versions will be permitted. First, there will be support of approved serious artists, who need not have much originality but must convey the right ideological messages ...

Artist Cornelia Parker provided a suitable illustrative quotation for my comments:

“I don’t think art is necessarily about skill. It might be about semantics or about putting two things together.”

Parker here managed to express several ideologically correct positions: (a) art is not about ability but about 'semantics', i.e. socially agreed conventions; (b) art is about 'putting two things together', i.e. anyone can in principle do it (fairness, egalitarianism); (c) since no special skills are involved, those to be considered artists must simply be those whom the collective happens to have appointed to that role.

Last week in The Times, we had appropriate confirmation of the ruling ideology, in the form of an article about Parker and her latest piece of work — a video of Noam Chomsky.

A year after she had been to [a seminar on environmental issues], she was invited to a biennale in the United Arab Emirates. The theme was “art, the environment and the power of change”. And Parker could hardly miss the irony. This was “the most consumerist, most decadent oilproducing nation in the world.”

So, Parker clearly passes the 'awareness' test.

At first she thought of showing her forest fire piece. But then she decided she wanted to be more direct. She decided to invite the outspoken, left-wing intellectual Noam Chomsky to come to lecture at the biennale ... When Chomsky couldn't come, she compromised and asked for an interview. “I wanted to do something very minimal: to include just him. And I wanted it to be as open to interpretation as possible, so I took all my questions out and just left his answers.” This is the film that she now presents at the [Whitechapel Gallery].

It is called Chomskian Abstract, and it consists, quite simply, of footage of Chomsky talking about current affairs. His jersey is scruffy. His hair is grey. His delivery is calm. His words are measured and thoughtful and his opinions are clear and completely uncompromising.

"It consists, quite simply, of footage of Chomsky talking about current affairs." Even pretence that we are dealing with art rather than politics can now be safely dropped, it appears.

We are already supposed to know that art essentially is politics. The descriptions of the recent Turner Prize nominees make that clear.

Zarina Bhimji has travelled extensively throughout India, Zanzibar and East Africa. Immersing herself in their discrete yet intersecting histories she took numerous photographs, studied legal documents, conducted interviews and read the biographies of policy makers in the shaping of British power within those countries.

Nathan Coley explores how power can be inferred through architecture and public space. ... Annihilated Confessions present exquisite framed photographs of confession boxes obliterated by black spray-paint, referencing street graffiti and censorship ... Like absolution, the works examine how power can be inferred whilst not, in fact, being visible during correspondence. Referencing a famous song of English patriotism, his art piece Hope and Glory presents us with a generic English house, hand-built and imbued with a sense of incompleteness. Its physical status is unclear. The work explores how ideas of Englishness become entrenched in national memory, informing territorial identity.

With art's purpose now being the assertion of social and political statements, it makes sense to regard the artifice of aesthetic creation as de trop and switch to politics pure and simple. At first, journalist Rachel Campbell Johnston seems to have some qualms about whether a video of Noam Chomsky talking about politics should count as art.

The problem with the finished piece ... is that it is not visually interesting ... All signs of artistry have been wilfully eradicated. It is all but indistinguishable from a piece of political propaganda. It is potentially as boring and, presented by any lesser artist, would feel pretentious to boot.

However, we must recall the contemporary re-definition of art: a visual product that challenges bourgeois preconceptions. As such, Chomskian Abstract is arguably a success.

Parker has ... earned the right to our attention. And that is why it is worth pausing and giving her the benefit of the doubt. Chomskian Abstract is not a great work of art. But it may turn out to be important. Parker is obviously struggling to find a way to embrace her new passion ... the work has a present point in that it expresses dissatisfaction with what art can achieve. Its dullness gives art's failures a visual form ... “Art is always about reappraising the way we look at the world,” Parker says.

So art that appears poor, vacuous or banal is simply 'expressing dissatisfaction with what art can achieve', and should therefore be applauded. Provided, of course, that the artist has been duly accredited by the mediocratic elite. Banality created by a nobody would not do at all.

A market economy, but not as we knew it

Arts Council England is cutting funding to a significant proportion of the cultural organisations it has been supporting. On the execution list are, for example, the Bristol Old Vic and the City of London Sinfonia. Predictably, artists are complaining, while arts honcho Sir Brian McMaster seems positively orgasmic about the future prospects for British arts:

British society today is, I believe, the most exciting there has ever been. It has the potential to create the greatest art ever produced. We could even be on the verge of another Renaissance.

Phew. McMaster’s report is clear about the kind of culture which needs to be supported to fulfil this destiny. It demands that art be "exciting", "risky", less "superficial" and that it provide "lasting impact". (For how to interpret these noises, see here.)

A shake-up is said to have been needed for some time. The new criterion for selection is supposed to be "excellence", allegedly a retreat from the previous overt political programme of egalitarianism (e.g. opera: bad, community art: good). However, given what is likely to be the predominant politics of those appointed to make the selections, I doubt whether the term excellence can be taken entirely at face value. In any case, "broadening of audience" is still explicitly on the agenda as a factor.

"Cutting government subsidies". Wouldn't most free-marketeers argue this is a good thing? Some are not so sure: Devil's Kitchen is understandably concerned about cuts to the theatre, including the National Student Drama Foundation.

In theory, the most efficient outcome is supposed to be if the state doesn't intervene. But is it that simple? Not if we are dealing with a heavily distorted market to begin with. The theory of the second-best tells us: moving from an imperfect market scenario in the direction of perfect markets, but not all the way, can make things worse.

It's not surprising if the reaction of some to cutting subsidies to the arts — many of which seem these days to be generating material that is either vacuous, ugly, or over-politicised — is good riddance. And cutting may be the best solution in this particular case, though I suspect this exercise, like most exercises initiated by New Labour, is really designed to achieve ideological objectives: some more destruction of bourgeois culture (classical music, traditional theatre) under cover of 'anti-elitism'.

However, the full story is not just about the market as we know it, because we don't really have a pure market, but rather a mixed economy which has been heavily engineered over the past sixty years to achieve downward redistribution, particularly with respect to capital and investment income.*

The market as it is usually conceived these days means: buying and selling end products among a relatively homogenised salary-earning population. This partial version of the market can produce plenty of good culture, but it cannot easily produce cutting-edge high culture. It does not, by itself, produce novel theories in theoretical physics, or philosophy, or genuinely innovative theatre — though it may produce pop culture which trades under the 'iconoclastic' label, e.g. Mark Ravenhill's in-your-face plays, or Bernard-Henri Lévy's pseudo-radical chic. (Baumol and Bowen have highlighted some other problems with cultural markets fuelled purely by consumption expenditure.)

Innovative high culture requires patronage. This can in theory come via the state, collected by forced subscription from taxpayers, but the evidence suggests that what this generates is severely limited on the good-culture side, and not nearly limited enough on the bad-culture side. That leaves private capital.

Private capital has few supporters these days. Inherited capital has even fewer. However, many of the cultural advances of the past would not have happened without it. I am fairly certain it would be possible to construct an economic model, based on genetic heritability, which purported to show that culture progressed best if inheritance was not taxed at all. I am equally certain such a model has not been published by an academic economist. (I am happy to be proved wrong on this, if someone has a reference.) The assumption of genetic transmission is considered so ideologically unsound that many economic papers now simply assume the opposite, i.e. no heritability, without even listing it as an assumption.

Two recent books on culture and capitalism, which otherwise have some interesting things to say, curiously avoid this crucial issue almost completely. In Human Accomplishment, Charles Murray points to a correlation between cultural progress and capitalistic developments, but seems to prefer to attribute the link to moral factors, boggling about the possible role of capital itself:

[...] whether wealth was a direct cause of Florence's artistic accomplishments or whether the wealth and artistic accomplishments were both effects of some other cause is difficult to entangle. (p.337)

Well, difficult if — like the academic historians whose work Murray accepts somewhat uncynically — you have an ideological resistance to seeing the obvious.

Tyler Cowen's In Praise of Commercial Culture, while making a number of worthwhile points, also suffers from a mysterious lack of comment on the issue of capital inequality and cultural progress. Cowen rightly points out that

Parents and elderly relations have financed many an anti-establishment cultural revolution. Most of the leading French artists of the nineteenth century lived off family funds — usually generated by mercantilist activity — for at least part of their careers. (p.17)

But I did not come across anything in his book about how the decline in transmission of capital down the generations, as a result of stringent capital taxation, might have affected this, or about the related issue of how the changing character of the rich (fewer inherited, more self-made) has affected the top-level culture which gets produced. Perhaps because it has potential overtones of elitism, which would undermine Cowen's markets-are-good-for-the-people running theme. Very odd, however, given that the relationship between changes in what is called capitalism and changes in culture is — or should be — among the book's central concerns.

Bottom line. Genuinely free markets are perfectly capable** of generating innovative high culture. Economies in which capital and capital transfers are heavily taxed are not, at least not to the same degree. Should such economies have government subsidy instead? Probably not. What gets subsidised is more often than not whatever is considered correct at the time, so genuine potential innovations will be passed over. Should existing subsidies be cut? That is more difficult. Second-best theory says, you may make things worse. Some good things may be being subsidised, and if there is no private capital to step into the breach, culture will deteriorate. On the other hand, the subsidised activity, if not exactly bad, will tend to crowd out the more innovative culture which is bubbling under, waiting for private patronage. Such patronage is less likely to arrive if there is already an official high culture.

* I know inequality is supposed to have been increasing, but I don't buy the usual version of this theory. First, the measure is too crude: we need to look at the relative performance over time of individual classes, not just a single measure like the Gini coefficient, which is currently being distorted by a tiny minority of super-rich at the top. Second, nominal increases in income need to be deflated by reference to class-specific baskets (which they typically aren't), since inflation has been varying widely between different areas of expenditure. Third, some of the studies purporting to show increases are clearly based on nonsense data, since they look at pre-tax instead of post-tax incomes.

** As always, I wish to add the caveat that I don't believe the free market produces the best outcome, just the least bad. Culture has some public good characteristics: it is mostly non-rival, and is often unexcludable, so it will tend to generate market failures. However, the contemporary knee-jerk reaction to anything being less than perfect, which is to want to throw the state at the problem, should be resisted. Particularly in this case, because there is no reason to think that government agents, or those whom they appoint, will select (genuinely) progressive culture.

A suitably finite shelf life

Another mediocratic business model, apparently not adequately thought through. The Financial Times reports that works by Mr Damien Hirst are suffering deterioration. It seems that insufficient attention was paid to whether the art in question would maintain its condition over time.

One of Damien Hirst’s most famous sculptures, Mother and Child Divided — an installation of a bisected cow and calf preserved in formaldehyde — is leaking and is to return to the artist’s studio for repairs. ... the museum’s director said the damage appeared to be caused by a flaw in the glass, resulting in the loss of some formaldehyde.

Or is it possible we are dealing with a case of planned obsolescence?

It is not the first time one of Mr Hirst’s formaldehyde pieces has had maintenance problems. Last year it was reported that his notorious work The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, which depicted a shark in a tank, was also in trouble. The work, bought by the American collector Steve Cohen for a reported £6.5m three years ago, had deteriorated significantly since its unveiling in 1992. The chemical solution surrounding the shark had become murky, and the animal itself had changed shape.

Lower quality standards in art production are consistent with an ethos of cutting corners and 'today — jam; tomorrow — whatever', a.k.a. mediocracy. As such, this phenomenon has interesting parallels with banking, civil liberties and various other models built on similarly dodgy foundations.

Art insurance expert Charles Dupplin has written to the FT, sounding concerned:

Sir, The leak of one of Damien Hirst's best-known installations ... raises a huge issue for contemporary art collectors everywhere. Many iconic works of contemporary art are inherently less durable and this is something that collectors need to think about carefully. Items such as Tracey Emin’s bed and the frozen blood in Marc Quinn's Self sculpture are all at risk simply due to the march of time.

How unexpected.

Some contemporary artists purposely produce work with a short life span ...

How can those demmed artistes be so cynical?

... and this raises significant questions for collectors and how their pieces can be insured. Natural ageing is not something insurers will ever cover. To date there does not seem to have been any consideration of these issues being reflected in the value of objects prone to ageing problems.

Strange, isn't it.

The Hirst leak will at least bring the topic up for debate. I for one believe that the art world will begin to think about these issues much more seriously in the future.

Hmm. You mean, like British and American governments will (post subprime, Northern Rock etc.) begin to think much more seriously about whether private and public sector debt booms are prone to 'ageing problems'?

The tone of Mr Dupplin's plaint strikes me as a bit naive. Does he not realise that one of the key themes which contemporary art seeks to express is the arbitrary, contingent and evanescent nature of creation? And that bourgeois concepts such as permanence and durability are as out of place in art as they are in architecture?

Making torture seem acceptable

The old inhibitions against torture are slowly being worn away. (With the help of certain blogs that should know better.) According to the Independent, "Britain intervened last month in a case before the European Court of Human Rights which, if it goes Whitehall's way, would make torture at least excusable if not forgivable."

Liberty has been on the case. But as Shami Chakrabarti points out, the erosion of resistance to the idea of torture is not confined to the legal arena. We find it culturally too — in, of all places, the Harry Potter books. Although I found the early Potter books a nice antidote to the grimness and degradation that passes for 'realism' in much contemporary children's literature, I thought I detected a creeping note of mediocracy as the series went on. In Order of the Phoenix, the psychological theme seems to be: Harry gets stroppy, impatient with normal procedure; demands drastic action, immediate social change, "why don't you people do something?" A bit like Tony Blair banging the table and demanding to know why he cannot just rewrite the legislation to solve the latest crisis. Attributable to mere teenage moodiness? Possibly, though Rowling makes little attempt to suggest there is anything wrong with Harry's reactions.

In Deathly Hallows, this pressure to shift the moral and legal boundaries continues. The Crucio curse is equivalent to torture, and its application would normally earn the culprit a life sentence in the nightmare prison of Azkaban. Previously, Harry had failed in his attempt to use it, which seemed to be linked to his essentially non-malicious personality, and it was all presented as a fairly big deal. In the latest book, however, the debate appears to have moved on. Harry successfully applies the curse as a punishment for spitting, and little fuss is made about it.

Potter is hiding under his cloak of invisibility when Amycus, a minor henchman of the arch evildoer Voldemort, makes the mistake of spitting on one of the hero's favourite teachers at Hogwarts, Professor Minerva McGonagall. Incensed, Harry casts the Crucio curse again, and this time it works.

McGonagall's reaction?

"... Potter, that was foolish!"
"He spat at you," said Harry.
"Potter, I – that was very – very gallant of you – but don't you realise –?"
"Yeah, I do."

And with that, the matter is dropped.

I'm with Ms Chakrabarti on this. Torture should never be presented as acceptable, not even in books, and certainly not in children's books.

Music shall be political

Financial Times review of Weber's Der Freischütz at the Salzburg Festival:

When the best things in an opera performance are the special effects, it is time to worry. Especially when this is the Salzburg Festival, with the Vienna Philharmonic in the pit and one of the key works of German music history on their music-stands ...

As Max finishes casting his magic bullets, columns of fire shoot up from the stage floor and explode into mushroom-shaped conflagrations with a whoosh. The heat reaches the back row ...

[Director Falk Richter] has decided that the German shooting competition — a tradition still alive and well in many villages — was really master-minded by the military, in order to single out the best marksmen for their own ends. He has updated it to the present, and set it in a place that he obviously wants us to think of as rightwing America. In case we miss the point, he adds large screeds of didactic dialogue, which often lapses into pseudo-Hollywood English. "Be a man, for Chrissakes," Kasper urges Max, then explains: "Rape, war, invasion/Burnt children, low taxes and religion/That is what we would kill for/That is what our hearts yearn for." ...

[Another character] has two verbose interpolated "helpers" who explain to us that the magic bullets contain uranium and a pinch of genocide. They distribute crosses to the chorus and use the dead Kaspar's blood to write "In God we trust" on the wall during the final scene. Richter wants to tell us that ambition, success and money are the roots of all evil ...

Richter pads the townspeople out with fake fat and lets them bop on the beat, parodying Yankee plebs.

Culture in a mediocracy is rebranded as an intrinsically social activity. Cultural output is to be regarded as an expression of the community rather than as the output of a few individuals. Culture must always be seen as a product of its time and place, and determined by the position in social space (class, gender, etc.) of the individuals associated with its production.

The idea of an artist or intellectual standing outside the political process is bourgeois and hence invalid. Cultural output cannot, we are taught, be assessed or appreciated without awareness of its political motivations, social implications and historical context.

No art form is allowed to escape the requirements of the mediocratic ethos. Music may seem relatively harmless, as it is hard to see how it could be making appropriate statements about the social condition, but that makes it in some ways all the more threatening. There must not be any area of life immune from the social searchlight. If something exists, it is social by definition, and hence we need to consider its compatibility with agreed ideological standards.

With musical drama, the decree that culture should express social reality becomes relatively easy to implement. Mediocratic opera productions emphasise the supposed political and sexual aspects of a piece, regardless of whether they were in the mind of the author.

"Iconoclasm" ... by decree

Literature should be political and ... should unmask the rottenness of bourgeois culture.
Lenin

Question
How do you know when a society's culture has stopped being genuinely challenging and iconoclastic?
Answer
When a government minister insists that "challenge" and "iconoclasm" are essential components of culture.

Culture Minister James Purnell on the functions of culture:

There is something ... that should be taken for granted: that the arts matter in themselves. Of course, the arts, like sport, are some of the most effective ways of reaching disaffected teenagers, of helping people to think about mental health, of regenerating inner cities or coastal towns. But the arts would still matter ... even if they did none of those things. ...

In other words, the arts help us be who we are — and they help create Britain. It’s not just the old cliché that our public face to Thailand is Man United, to America Harry Potter, to Germany Simon Rattle. It’s that an open, iconoclastic culture is a precondition to being a modernising, tolerant country ...

Targets were probably necessary in 1997, to force a change of direction in some parts of the arts world. But now, ten years later, we risk idolising them. Without change, we risk treating culture like it’s an old fashioned, unresponsive public service — not a modern, complex network of activity, with plurality of funding, with a sophisticated and complex relationship with its global audience. Without change, we’ll create an overly technocratic approach when we should want a transformational one, where we give you the power to take risks and be the best. ...

The question we should ask ourselves now is what is necessary on top of ... self-regulation. In the past, we’ve chosen a small part of the picture to look at — the Department’s current targets for culture refer to attendance by priority groups. Access will continue to be vital, and there is still more to do. But it’s not all I’m interested in. I’m interested in what people have access to. If any part of our cultural sector is substandard, doesn’t take risks, doesn’t push barriers, ducks difficult questions, it’s not worth subsidising. [emphasis mine]

A mediocracy has ersatz versions of everything related to intellectual or artistic independence: questioning, analysis, scepticism, radicalism, and so on. No real questioning or radicalism is involved, since that would be too dangerous.

There are two reasons for a culture of pseudo-iconoclasm. First, having a replacement version is safer than trying to eliminate openly. The latter would make it too obvious that something was being suppressed. By suitable redefinition, it becomes impossible to complain that an activity (e.g. real challenge) is in fact absent.

Second, the energies of those who might in other circumstances be doing the real questioning, challenging etc. need to be safely absorbed by being directed towards attacking the enemies of mediocracy.

"Feminist" art

Kate Muir on the 'Sugar and Spice' exhibition at the Vegas Gallery:

I'd previously seen the work of one of the eight female exhibitors, Kelly Jenkins, who knits radiators. She uses large stitches, plain and purl, made of steel tubes that actually heat up. Possibly it says something about a woman's place being in the plumbing. ...

Sugar and Spice was advertised as "a show about little girls' dreams and lost innocence". For a moment I thought the whole show was a huge joke, but no, the curator "Ken Pratt" was real, and he added, "A feminist critique is, naturally, present in many of these artists' works ­ — after all, what woman making art in 2007 could do so without the historic framework of feminist thought?" ...

[How] could Jenkins have failed to notice the Emin-imitation of her stained pillow prettily sewn with the words: "But I thought you were on the pill". Then came Hinke Schreuders' Into The Woods. Yes, it was a reference to lost innocence with a felt Red Riding Hood cloak, and to modernise the theme, a blue felt Monica dress with white stains.

Physiology, in evidence here in the work of Jenkins and Schreuders, combines two of mediocracy’s favourite themes: (1) the body (supportive of "equality" i.e. homogeneity), and (2) realism (i.e. the desire to disgust).

In effect, realism is a form of aggression against those members of the audience who find its presentations offensive. However, the aggression is 'legitimised' by reference to the fact that the sensibilities being offended can be regarded as bourgeois.

The point of 'realism' is not to make people more aware of reality, but to make them feel hopeless and degraded. A dejected person is more likely to surrender to the collective, and is therefore more useful to mediocracy.

"Progressive" art

The Times on the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition:

Gavin Turk’s Dumb Candle, a sculpture of a candle made from the end of a broomstick, and Gary Hume’s untitled work combining furled black plastic on a sheet of glistening aluminium, are two of the six pieces shortlisted for the £25,000 Charles Wollaston Award for the “most distinguished work” in the exhibition.

Bill Woodrow, the sculptor and Royal Academy member who was on the judging panel, said that both works were indicative of the the venerable institution’s more progressive direction in recent years. “The membership of the academy is changing all the time, with new members arriving with new ideas,” he said. “The majority of members really want the place to be up to date.” ...

The black plastic in Hume’s work (priced at £70,000) “is not a bin-liner”, Woodrow said. “It is the protective film you find on the front polished surface of a sheet of aluminium to prevent it from scratching. He has peeled this back and then screwed it up into three dimensional forms to make a beautiful object. It’s asking a lot of questions about how you make work.”

The mediocratic criterion of art is based on technicality rather than aesthetics, i.e. on consistency with fashionable trends. It does not matter if art is horrible, banal or even disgusting, so long as it demonstrates methods and references approved by the professional art community.

The purpose of art in a mediocracy is not to enlighten or illuminate. It is to make its audience feel subordinated to material and social forces. Most mediocratic art fulfils this function well, and can therefore be described as ‘good’ art, on mediocratic terms.

Art as the new (phoney) politics

Ooh, this Grauniad article by Madeleine Bunting is just too good to pass up, it ticks so many mediocracy boxes. (Not that I wish to single out Ms B for ridicule; she is simply echoing phoney platitudes about art that have been fashionable among the mediocratic elite for some time.)

I'm not going to apologise for turning Guardian verbiage into my own cultural product, by means of the sneaky device of copying it but sprinkling a few subversive elements. If it's good enough for Mark Wallinger et al, it's good enough for me.



Antony Gormley has done it again. He has used castings of his own naked body to provoke national conversations about big questions — about the meanings of places as disparate as the north-east region, a Merseyside beach and London, and about our place in them.



The critics may sniff at both Gormley and Goldsworthy (some do so very loudly) but when has art ever been this popular?



It's about much more than the elite world of collecting. It's about how central a role art now plays in the public realm. No one needs convincing any more. Leftwing local authority council leaders, property developers — these were the types that once dismissed art as an unnecessary and frivolous accessory to the business of relieving poverty or making money. Now both constituencies are falling over themselves to commission that Gormley factor. Council leaders talk as earnestly these days about "place shaping" and the "narrative of place", as they once did about fighting job cuts.



The very success of visual artists, facilitated by the generous funding they've enjoyed since 1997, is putting them under new pressure. Now that they have such a popular, well funded place in the public square, what do they have to say? What do we expect of them? Are they just a form of entertainment to delight and surprise us with unexpected invention (slides in Tate Modern for example) or is it rather that we want them to be saying something weightier, providing insight into ourselves and the conditions of our time? Artists now get lumbered with expectations that in other cultures might fall to shamans, preachers or prophets — or once fell to politicians.



What inflates these expectations of artists is a frustrated desire for change, and an equally profound sense of confusion as to how to effect that change. Over the last decade, art has scored some striking triumphs on this score: Marc Quinn's statue of Alison Lapper pregnant in Trafalgar Square arguably did more to challenge images of disability and beauty than the most carefully constructed anti-discrimination legislation. (*) The Angel of the North's aspirational optimism helped overturn the reputation derived from two decades of industrial decline and demoralisation. Our understanding of how art can bring about certain key aspects of change has increased: it can transform reality by inspiring the imagination.



Art can never do the messy business of politics — the negotiation and compromise. But politicians are now grappling with a new politics about how to change the way people behave in their private lives: how they eat, travel, shop, exercise, drink. And art can open minds and change hearts in a way that our politics is singularly failing to do.



Art is not about the simple certainties of political soundbites. It engages emotionally, prompting a self-questioning. There is no predetermined answer. As Gormley puts it: "The beholder has a share in the giving of significance to a work." The passer-by can interpret Gormley's figures on the skyline just as the art critic and the artist can: art is about opening up conversations and connections in a myriad of ways, even between strangers on the street who share their delight — or contempt.



Some of the most fraught political controversies of our time are migrating into art. In the case of Mark Wallinger's State Britain, this is literally true. One of the entries on this year's Turner prize shortlist — which is billed as the most political ever — State Britain [commentary here] is a re-assembly of more than 600 of the posters and objects of the anti-war protester Brian Hawes that were forcibly removed from Parliament Square in 2006. Now they're sitting in an art gallery.



After the failure of the political process either to prevent the war or to call to account anyone for its prosecution and subsequent development, art appears to be the only vehicle left by which to express the anxiety and unease. Steve McQueen's work, Queen and Country, in Manchester, depicts 98 of the British servicemen and women who have been killed.



The biggest challenge of all to artists is the environment. There is growing pressure on artists to use their new-found authority and audiences — prized assets not available to politicians — to increase awareness of our environmental emergency.



Gormley's figures, with their references to the human race's ecocide, are looking over to the National Theatre flytower, seeded in grass that will flourish and slowly die back over the next six weeks: two installations in conversation across the banks of the Thames. If art has the power to shift engrained habits of mind, if it can prise open the apathy and indifference that is deaf to campaigners, scientists and politicians, then it must be enlisted, insists Matthew Taylor, director of the Royal Society of Arts, which is launching its big programme on the arts and ecology next month.

(*) Apposite comment from NathanPCoombs: "Er, what exactly does [the statue of Alison Lapper] challenge? It seems quite obvious to me that Quinn just saw the potential for PC box ticking and took a shot at it. His only achievement is to convince people that doing enlargements of casts is an adequate substitute for real sculpture. It will be forgotten as quickly as it was made, because technically the work is p*** poor. Its appeal is only limited to social engineering types in the media."

Picture source: Wikipedia.

Re-definitions: from Mediocracy: Inversions and Deceptions in an Egalitarian Culture

Verbiage: copyright The Guardian.

"to Tatify" = to turn into po-mo trash

protest by Brian Haw


art by Mark Wallinger

When I started to read this FT article about someone's protest assemblage against the Iraq war — which had been removed as a result of Labour authoritarianism — being turned into art by the Tate, I thought:

It's pushing it a bit to treat a protestor's placards and associated paraphernalia as art. On the other hand, it is a piece of real life, it's vaguely interesting and it's being preserved from the depredations of government repression.

Reading further, however, I discovered that it's not just the bits and pieces being put on display qua work of art by creator Brian Haw. No, it's a reproduction of the entire piece, painstakingly recreated, but posing as a piece of art by 'artist' Mark Wallinger.

Tate Britain claims that Wallinger's purposes are different from Haw's. Well it would, wouldn't it.

In bringing a reconstruction of Haw’s protest before curtailment back into the public domain, Wallinger raises challenging questions about issues of freedom of expression and the erosion of civil liberties in Britain today.

Perhaps. Personally, I think the effect is more likely to be the same as that of all the other contemporary art that is based on the key mediocratic themes of derivation, recycling, and ironic references. I.e. a sense of deflation.

Wallinger 's work, which basically amounts to a postmodern take on the original (Baudrillard, who thinks there are no longer originals only imitations, would no doubt approve), is less not more likely than Haw's version to make people think about the underlying issues. La la la, nothing really exists, everything is socially constructed.

Photo copyright: top Mark Wallinger, bottom Tate

The Turner Prize: a small victory for anti-mediocracy

Further to my earlier post about the Turner Prize, I'm happy to see that — contrary to expectations — Tomma Abts has won.

A small victory for the visually appealing over the ideologically fashionable.

Anyone else out there who was rooting for her?

(Picture is Emo, courtesy Gallery Greengrassi)

The ideology of contemporary art

The pseudo-excitement of Britart and its heirs is back in the news.

First, Charles Saatchi has organised a new exhibition at the Royal Academy, showcasing fashionable American art. The exhibition, entitled “USA today”, includes a work depicting a young teenage girl performing sex acts, and a fabric sculpture of a man adorned with a giant phallus and the words “I want kids”.

According to Martin Gayford in the Telegraph, what Saatchi likes is art that is "head-buttingly impossible to ignore". Well, cultural head-butting seems to be what it's all about these days, whether we're talking TV comedy, advertising or contemporary theatre.

Second, the somewhat farcical Turner Prize has come around again. More or less everybody, including — probably — the people behind the Turner themselves, seem to regard the whole thing as a bit of a joke. "What does it matter if it gets people talking about art?" is a standard line. Or, if you're anti, "who cares if a bunch of establishment people want to get off on rubbish, or even pay ridiculous prices for it?" Indifference: a key theme of mediocracy, but no more useful a reaction to culture than to an attack on civil liberties. As someone* once said, "the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men and women to do nothing."

Apart from tedious-looking installations by Phil Collins, we have Rebecca Warren's sculptures of "cartoon-like women with humongous knobbly breasts and enormous bobbly buttocks". According to the Telegraph's Richard Dorment, Warren "uses parody and humour to deflate the pretensions of a medium that seems to invite over-interpretation and a sense of reverence that the artist may never have intended." Mediocratic cultural box-ticking: deflation, good; reverence, bad. And banal textual art, in the form of slogans done up in kitsch graphics by Mark Titchner, who Dorment expected

would walk off with the Prize this year simply by exhibiting his backlit, billboard-sized text works, each with a message of ferocious optimism or imperious command, lifted by the artist from corporate mission statements, political manifestos, or just songs and advertisements.

Derivation, recycling, ironic references: essential components in the toolkit of mediocratic art.

The other entry for this year's Turner is Tomma Abts, whose work I quite like. (Yes, it's true — I don't hate all contemporary art.) Picture on right is Pabe, courtesy Gallery Giti Nourbakhsch. But I doubt she'll win, because her stuff is too traditionalist. It's actually fairly aesthetic in the old-fashioned sense of that word. Unless the judges go against their own ideological preferences just to prove they're not always anti-traditional. But that seems a bit too subtle for the artaratchiks.

Is shock value an inherent part of modern art, asks the Telegraph. Yes, but only a particular kind of shock. Visceral yes, ugly yes, intellectually challenging – no. There is usually a note of mockery or ridicule – the good old postmodern 'irony', now pretty tiresome. It’s not that anyone still finds this ‘shocking’ stuff surprising or original, but it continues to have a mildly nauseating effect.

What is the underlying ideology of sculptures that emphasise sexual mechanics or physiological decay? A kind of uber-realistic, in-yer-face grimness, intended to deflate bourgeois aesthetic preferences. At least Picasso had serious intentions; Britart just seems to want to say “nothing matters, everything is degraded”.

* attributed to Edmund Burke

Update
Tomma Abts won the 2006 Turner Prize.