Events | 2009.12.12
Shorn of dissent, Britain's high culture is little different from The X Factor
Great writers used to pit themselves against the world. Today their successors fight for a glut of awards, fellowships and festival appearances and the result is creative bankruptcy
You might want to disown the shallow vulgarity of the Christmas season\'s celebrity-fest, but it\'s going to be difficult. Tonight, as The X Factor judders towards its climax, with Strictly… pirouetting in its slipstream, Ant and Dec having gibbered over their prisoners in the jungle, and piles of celeb memoirs and cookbooks hogging the front tables of bookshops, what newspaper can be immune to the danse macabre of self-exposure? Then roll out the hand-wringing commentary about a society cursed by the obsession with fame.
But old-fashioned anxiety about contemporary frivolity is not the whole story. The gorgeous chintz of celebrity-phobia conceals some strands of sheer condescension. One thread goes something like this: The X Factor is a pop-cultural phenomenon that appeals to 10-year-old girls. We, who are thankfully above such things, pressing our scented handkerchiefs to the nasal passages of exquisite good taste, can take comfort in the polar separation of elite and mass culture in all their manifestations.
That\'s where the trouble starts. Celebrities are not just for Christmas. And how separate, really, are high and low culture? On closer inspection, there are many aspects of posh culture that are, essentially, X Factor Redux . The imminent Costa prize, for example, is a literary event of some consequence. This year it will pit Hilary Mantel against Colm Tóibín. You might think you could hardly get more exalted. Yet the grammar of Costa\'s sponsorship and presentation would be utterly familiar to Cheryl Cole.
Something has happened to Britain\'s creative community and there\'s no better way to understand this than to go back to a speech that Graham Greene, one of the most admired novelists of his day, gave in Germany in 1969 "on the virtue of disloyalty".
Responding to being awarded the distinguished Shakespeare prize, Greene used the occasion to extol the writers and artists for whom he had the most respect, those who by their calling were "troublers of the poor world\'s peace". Pointedly, he identified that bourgeois Stratfordian, William Shakespeare, Gent, as an establishment poet for whom he had little sympathy. Instead, with perverse glee, he praised "the sulphurous anger of Dante, the self-disgust of Baudelaire, and the blasphemies of Villon", noting with approval that their fates involved traumatic exile, an obscenity trial and the threat of hanging.
From there, in the depths of the cold war, it was a short step to Dostoevsky before a firing squad, the persecution of Sinyavsky and the sufferings of Solzhenitsyn in the Gulag. Then he went back to Shakespeare. Two years before he wrote those complacent lines, "This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England", in Richard II , says Greene, Shakespeare\'s fellow poet, Southwell, had died on the scaffold after three years of torture. "If only Shakespeare had shared his disloyalty," Greene writes, "we could have loved him better as a man." Shakespeare had funked his obligation to challenge the state and was somehow diminished by his willingness to let "the state poison the psychological wells".
The storyteller\'s task, Greene declared, was "to act as the devil\'s advocate". Born in 1904, the son of a headmaster, Greene was a child of his generation. He distrusted authority, loathed the state and nurtured a visceral hatred of officialdom. His veneration of disloyalty was unique to his psyche, but it was shared by his contemporary, George Orwell. In Why I Write , Orwell declared: "When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, \'I am going to produce a work of art.\' I write it because there is some lie I want to expose."
Orwell was more of an artist than he liked to let on, but both he and Greene – not alone in the last century – saw the writer\'s vocation to be a protestant in a catholic society; to see the virtues of the communist in a capitalist state, and vice versa; above all, to elicit sympathy and understanding for those who lie outside the boundaries of conventional approval. The writer\'s duty, said Greene, was to be "a piece of grit in the state machinery". This vital contrarian instinct has deep roots in the English intellectual tradition. Tom Paine once wrote: "We must guard even our enemies against injustice."
To many writers and readers who have come of age in the past 10, or even 20, years such ideas of disloyalty will seem quaint, even outlandish. Many admired contemporary novelists would consider the conditions of isolation, penury and disdain that inspire the virtue of disloyalty as the evils of an ancien régime of creativity now properly dumped in the dustbin of history. They do not want to be part of some ill-kempt awkward squad whose default position is the saeva indignatio (savage indignation) of the Roman satirist Juvenal. In the same way, some journalists will aspire to be "public intellectuals" and some film stars will claim to be "goodwill ambassadors". In a word, everyone wants to join the system, not keep it at arm\'s length. This much is new.
The sure test of this proposition is to ask: whatever happened to the avant-garde? Once upon a time, it was respectable, even essential, to nurture one\'s art free from the taint of conventional taste. Now what ? Well, there is no avant-garde to speak of and even the experimental and the outré generally takes place within the matrix of the establishment. The "habit of art" has become the "addiction of charm".
Where, I wonder, did this change in mood come from ? The short answer is: the market, a booming global economy, combined with the internet, in which every semi-articulate voice has become enfranchised into the kind of creative marketplace that would have Greene spinning in his grave. In the 40 years since Greene was speaking, artists of all sorts – writers, musicians, film-makers, painters and sculptors – have been showered with rewards and approbation to an unprecedented degree.
State patronage, and before that, aristocratic sponsorship, has always been present, but the really corrosive rust in the creative imagination has been the money and attention lavished on good and bad alike. For the first time in the history of British (though not American) culture, it has become possible for mediocrity to sustain an above-average living as a freelance dunce. The panic-stricken search for a voice of one\'s own has been overtaken by an equally urgent quest for belonging.
At the same time, occasional episodes suggest that a belief in the power and responsibility of art to make trouble has not been completely squashed by consumerism. The Salman Rushdie affair of 1989 was about many things, but an important part of the frisson that it inspired was the prospect of a lone writer bravely risking his life for his creative integrity.
Apart from the passionate démarches of the late Harold Pinter, there have been precious few equivalent moments of risk since the burning of The Satanic Verses in Bradford. Rushdie himself has become reintegrated into a literary community notable for its indifference to illegal wars, clandestine torture and the state-sponsored oppression of human rights. Until the recession of 2008-09, the creative community, like the world at large, gorged itself on a diet of unsustained credit, merrily cashing the blank cheques of intellectual bankruptcy.
This cascade of money has brought with it a dismal retinue of lesser evils: prizes, fellowships, conferences, festivals and, worst of all, the fatal seduction of unfettered applause. Success is all very well, no doubt, and maybe it does, in the words of the cliché, breed success. But it also sponsors complacency and an appetite for entertainment, sapping the instinct to ask awkward questions of the status quo. It\'s surely no accident that this past generation, roughly 1980 to 2010, has seen more distinguished artists of all stripes accept peerages, knighthoods and other establishment baubles, from (Sir) William Golding (1988) to (Sir) Stephen Spender (1983), whose celebrated line "I think continually of those who were truly great" now has a rather hollow ring to it.
In the arts, the appetite for true greatness is never satisfied. The hunger for an authentic and original vision does not fade. In this X Factor season, you will find many intelligent people, good readers and passionate theatregoers, complaining about the curse of celebrity and its shameful triviality. What they overlook is that, in the creative community at large, this now exhibits itself as vanity. On all sides, in books, plays, contemporary music and painting, from Alan Bennett to Damien Hirst, the corrosive effects of artistic vanity are all too visible. Never mind Greene\'s "virtue of disloyalty", we are now confronted with its polar opposite: the vice of complicity.
The paradoxes of complicity are, happily, not without irony. Poor reviews of Hirst\'s recent exhibition at the Wallace Collection no doubt gave him the satisfaction of being a pariah, but they were an unintended consequence: the space had been bought and lavishly restored by the artist.
In conclusion, the dreadful cultural cost of complicity is simply stated. If disloyalty encourages the writer to roam at will through human hearts and minds, and gives the novelist a fourth dimension of sympathy and intuition, then complicity just narrows the creative arteries. It propagates a me-too-ism in the community that works against originality and promotes a wannabe mentality that has nothing to do with Ezra Pound\'s famous injunction to "make it new".
Such lowered standards extend to the media, too: journalists following other journalists, like sheep; reviewers schmoozed by PRs; the newspaper commentariat looking over its shoulder, as it did in the run-up to the Iraq war. The complicity of all artists makes them fearful of risk, vulnerable to propaganda, and the prisoners of conventional wisdom. Disloyalty liberates, complicity enslaves.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2009/d[...]igh-culture-different-x-factor
