You’ve got to smirk, haven’t you

The broadsheets have been dumbing down for some years, albeit in slightly different ways. So has the Daily Mail. The others I have less of a view on, since I read them less regularly.

The Telegraph has become a bit of a parody of itself, with the Hooray-Henry element coming to the fore, and there being a distinct tendency to emulate lads' mags. Ideologically, you get the feeling that they'd really like to throw in the towel, conservatism being so seriously uncool and all that.

The Guardian is the one which has embraced the blogosphere hardest, and been influenced by it the most, with the consequence that many of its articles are now more like blog rants — badly spelt, lazily written and sloppily thought out.

The Mail is the nearest to a paper defending bourgeois values, but it has gone downmarket-tabloid in recent years, and is not averse these days to a bit of leftist viciousness when it suits its book.

The Independent has perhaps dumbed down the least, though as mediocracy (i.e. bland, modern, facile, wishy-washy) was pretty much its selling point to begin with, there wasn't much need. It is also the one which has 'blogged out' least; perhaps there is a connection.

The current version of The Times in some ways represents the paradigm of mediocratisation. Most things in it now seem to be presented with a knowing archness, and a good deal of postmodern winking — rather like a pretentious intellectual version of the Sun. "We (the il-liberal elite) are so thoroughly proletarianised, you know, while of course maintaining our Chardonnay lifestyle. We are with the latest fads — rap music, swearing, The Sopranos, torture porn — it's all cool", it seems to be saying.

Take Caitlin Moran writing in last week’s Times about “vanilla sex”. Prima facie this was a piece trying to sound humorous about the current overemphasis on reproductive activities. Strip out the postmodern ‘irony’ and the sophisticated literary coating, however, and what you have left is really not that different from a saucy column in the Mirror.

... the best sex lasts 15 hours ... nine positions ... hammering dementedly away ... paradigmatic shag snack ... “Arrrr, that was smashing” ... no-frills act of jiggy-jiggy ... the “capsule poke” ... a lengthy rut ... Loving all night long would, surely, be equivalent to rubbing the tip of your nose between two pork chops for 19 hours ... coital sawing action ... a good old-fashioned mindless shag ... the one where I ended up being sick down the front of a Tudorbethan house in Aylesbury, and had to clean off the plasterwork with a broom soaked in hot Dettol, while the would-be lesbian's mum shouted at me.

Nudge nudge, wink wink.

I was a fan of Ms Moran in her original guise of young nerdy outsiderish cynic. A middle-aged mainstream version of the same is somehow not quite as appealing. Genuine counterculture is one thing, ‘counterculture’ turned into establishment values another.

Of course, there is a problem for those commentators who, having been cultural ‘revolutionaries’ in their youth, now have reservations about the trash-inducing effects of their earlier modernising zeal. Moral disapproval sits uneasily on the shoulders of someone who, only a few years previously, was shedding inhibitions like autumn leaves. So, turning to other examples from the Times stable, it can generate unpleasant cognitive dissonance to find former chick lit authors now railing against the irresponsibility of modern youth, and demanding that people pull their socks up.

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.

Sport shall be political

Mediocracy combines the demand that everyone should be regarded as identical — thus weight of numbers is the principal criterion — with a certain anti-intellectualism. (As an adjunct there is an official high culture, but it may only be performed by accredited operatives, and is not really intended for consumption outside its official spheres.)

Sport satisfies the requirement that culture provide pleasure for the masses but in a way that is relatively uncerebral and unthreatening. Like cookery, therefore, it has begun to take on the status of trivia-elevated-to-high-culture.

One might think that sport, which seems to dominate the public arena as never before, is already sufficiently mediocratic. The willingness of New Labour to pronounce on issues of sport, even when clearly outside its jurisdiction, provides a clue as to how the activity is now viewed. "We" (the mass, represented by our leaders) are encouraged to believe "we" own sport and have a right to determine what happens in it. I am thinking, for example, of Tony Blair and the Glenn Hoddle case.

It appears, however, that sport in some ways still falls foul of mediocratic standards. As I wrote here,

mediocracy is not about empowering the mass but about disempowering the individual. Mass taste is to be exploited in so far as it contributes to the agenda of degradation: encouraged where it does so, discouraged where it does not. ... The mass is not entirely to be trusted since its instincts are not always mediocratic. ... The mass is liable to be sceptical about the intellectual pretensions on which mediocratic ideology depends.

From a different angle, then, big sports presents a serious problem for mediocracy, because it represents power of a kind that is still relatively uncontrolled by the state or the mediocratic elite. Although there seems little likelihood that a stadium full of football spectators might rise up against the phoney ideology of its masters, you can never be entirely sure.

This may explain an article in December's Prospect, by David Goldblatt, demanding that sport become more politicised.

sport should be ... judged by the same standards of transparency, sustainability and democracy that we expect elsewhere in public life ... How are we to police the line between the realms of power and play, economic space and social space?

Specifically, we are given a number of recommendations for policing:

Michel Platini's UEFA and the EU have [made] proposals for salary restrictions, limits on foreign players, spreading Champions League money more evenly and enshrining sport's distinct status in EU legalisation. But we also need to re-examine the whole question of ownership in sport. We should consider placing stricter limits on private investment in clubs (as in France and Germany) or making it easier to experiment with other forms of ownership, such as the fan-owned model in Spain, where senior club officials are elected.

... at a time when no aspect of social or political life can absent itself from the debate on climate change, sport needs to take a lead. The prevalence and low cost of air transport has been a key factor in the geographical expansion of sporting competition. ... Governments generally should be making more effort to hold the aviation industry to account, but surely a slice of the €500m income that the Champions League generates, or the billions that flow to FIFA, should be spent on some kind of offset.

Given the article is written by a former Labour adviser, we should perhaps not be surprised that it is a classic example of Marxist/mediocratic cultural analysis, which typically works as follows. (1) Private human activity is reinterpreted from a collective social perspective. This is not exactly uninteresting in itself, though you can take it or leave it. (2) It soon becomes obvious that the theoretical perspective has a practical political purpose, i.e. to justify collective interference.

Sport's ... apparatus of challenges, contests, competitions, unknown outcomes and final results is like a vast polymorphous machine for generating improvised and compressed stories.

the crowd is unquestionably the chorus, not only supplying ambience, commentary and income, but actively shaping the tone and the course of the game. The opportunity that this provides for the collective dramatisation of identities and social relationships, both spontaneous and organised, is without parallel ...

organised sport illustrates one of the central insights of classical social theory, from Tönnie's distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gescellschaft* to Weber's theory of rationalisation: that the modern world is founded on an institutional separation of the realms of instrumental reason and value-driven action. The separation of state and civil society [... continues in this vein]

'Stories', 'identities', 'relationships', 'instrumental reason' — the vocabulary of the left wing sociologist: strong on resonance and ideological implication, not so strong on testable hypotheses.

Whose fault is it that we have so far failed to treat sport with sufficient socio-political respect? Goldblatt manages, by various sleights-of-hand, to point the finger at the usual suspects: Victorians, the upper class, men, Britain.

This absence of politics has apparently affected histories of sport, with undesirable consequences.

All modern sports revel in their own histories and use them to manufacture contemporary meanings and pleasures ... Narratives of clubs, tournaments and traditions of styles of play provide a rich seam of interest in sporting competition. However, in both official and popular idioms, it has been mainly ersatz history that we have been offered: deracinated, concocted myth, hermetically sealed from the wider economic social and political context in which it has occurred.

What gives Arsenal continuity is the accumulated social capital amassed by generations who have attached significance to the narratives generated by the team's performances. This network of memories, meanings, identities and rituals constitute a precious form of value which cannot be owned by anyone and should not have its fortunes exclusively linked to the vagaries of private capital ...

Fortunately (Goldblatt writes) "a few rare sportswriters, such as Simon Barnes at the Times, have broadened their horizons, geographically and contextually, and looked for something more than the same old narratives and vocabulary." Is this the same Simon Barnes who appears regularly in Private Eye's 'Pseuds Corner'?

At the end of the article, Goldblatt makes a number of interesting counterpoints, but seems unwilling to let them affect his thesis.

I recently heard David James, Portsmouth's politically aware goalkeeper, ask a football punter whether he thought environmental issues should be a priority for his club. In reply, he received a groan of irritation.

(Despite the majority always being right in theory, the mass's scepticism about ideology arises from having insufficiently tutored minds, and must therefore be rejected.)

one of the strongest arguments against taking sport seriously is the dismal record of those ideologies that have sought to do so in the past: muscular Christianity in the service of imperialism; varieties of social Darwinism and ultra-nationalism bent on hardening the nation for war; the ludicrous bread and circuses of fascism, Latin American populist authoritarianism and European communism ... But abandoning politics or pretending it doesn't matter is not an effective response.

(Mediocracy has the right to ignore the lessons of history.)

The world of sport is ... a social space that is dependent on the state and the market but knows how to hold them both at arm's length.

Clearly, for Mr Goldblatt, the world of sport needs to start being a little less effective at keeping the state at a distance.

* sic; correct spelling is "Gesellschaft".

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?

Disaster socialism

The modern Western state has grown exponentially since World War Two. In 1940, UK tax revenue (for example) was about $100 billion in today’s money; now it is getting on for $1 trillion per annum. Some right-wing politicians have attempted to reduce the size and power of the state by trying to cut back on public expenditure. Often, given the political difficulty of doing so, they have resorted to selling off assets from the public sector.

Left-wing politicians have appealed to voters by promising them more, or better, public services. Some electors realise — though many do not — that increased government spending comes at the cost of higher taxes even if this fact isn't advertised. As a result, Western democracies have experienced fairly regular oscillations between governments of the left, and governments with some free-market sympathies.

This pattern lasted until a number of left-wing academics, and radical leftist journalists such as Will Hutton and Naomi Klein, came along. Academics and activists have spent the latter half of the 20th century developing a strategy for overcoming public resistance to overt left-wing agendas. This strategy, which has been called 'disaster socialism', involves waiting for a health scare, child abuse scandal, terrorist attack, climate-related catastrophe, banking crisis, or similar disaster. The upheaval throws citizens into a state of shock and fear, providing a window of opportunity for far-reaching changes in legislation, increases in the power of 'social workers' or other arms of the state apparatus, the lifting of restrictions on police and other interventionist agencies, and the proliferation of bureaucratic red tape.

Legions of philosophers and sociologists, trained in the ideology of leftist intellectuals such as John Rawls, Michel Foucault and Noam Chomsky, have travelled the world, offering intellectual support to politicians seeking to exploit opportunities for increased statism. Temporarily overwhelmed citizenships have been pressured into exchanging their liberties in return for ‘protection’ from the state. Important rights bought painfully over centuries with the sweat and blood of freedom fighters, such as habeas corpus and the right to a jury trial, are being sold off at fire-sale prices.

Certain elements of the left-wing intelligentsia openly praise crises and upheavals as conducive to 'progressive' (i.e. pro-state) social change — although their agenda is often kept more covert than this. Will Hutton, for example, has written that

No state has been able to recast its society to the extent that Britain must do, without suffering defeat in war, economic collapse or revolution ... *

clearly implying that crises might be the only way to achieve significant change in a left-wing direction. Other left-wing writers stress the need for radical transformation, referring scathingly to 'capitalism' or 'markets', when what is really meant is the freedom of individuals to engage in commercial exchange without interference. Al Gore, for example, has argued that

Minor shifts or moderate improvements — these are forms of appeasement, designed to satisfy people’s desire to believe that a wrenching transformation of society will not be necessary. **

Initially, the focus of disaster socialism was on the specific emergencies of war and dealing with terrorist threats. More recently, leftist intellectuals have realised that similar opportunities arise as a consequence of less extreme problems such as health scares (e.g. AIDS, smoking, obesity), the failures of the state education system, and the violence and chaos fostered by a pseudo-proletarianised culture that encourages yobbishness and irresponsibility.

A 'corporatist' alliance has emerged between social-democratic governments and mega-corporations catering for an economically empowered but culturally impoverished mass. This alliance has now moved on to its final frontiers: the world outside the Western ideological system, where a similar philosophy combining mass consumerism with state-sponsored reductionist education and culture is to be introduced as the new hegemony.

Disaster socialism succeeds only by deliberately stupefying and brainwashing hundreds of millions of innocent people. Among the victims may be counted, for example, the 50 million Britons forced to rely on inadequate state medical and educational services, which leave many of them iller and stupider than before.

The novel and important concept of 'disaster socialism' calls for a fuller treatment, in the form of a research thesis or book. However, given the hegemony of the left-wing viewpoint in academia and other cultural institutions, such a treatment is highly unlikely to be forthcoming.

(with apologies to the Vancouver Sun)

* The State We’re In, p.319
** Earth in the Balance, p.274

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.

"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