Don't mention the A wordWhen Tony Blair delivers his speech this afternoon, spare a thought for the one interest group whose concerns he will not be addressing. The artists and arts professionals who hold his government responsible for the crisis in British culture are pretty low down on the list of people he needs to impress. I think it's fairly safe to assume that if he did lose any sleep last night it wasn't over whether VS Naipaul could be wooed back to the big tent.
I've never understood exactly what David Hockney, John Tusa and all the rest of them mean when they say Blairism is to blame for dumbing down. Even presuming that such a thing exists, can it really be a product of the actions of a couple of ministers? Isn't the relationship between government and the culture it interacts with a bit more complex than that? The idea that a change in the cultural climate can be traced back to a single source, whether it's the "new establishment" or some self- appointed liberal "elite", is quite patently silly.
As little as the Blairites may care about Culture, it is fanciful to suggest that "democratisation", meaning populism, is in any sense a crusade. If anything, it is a response to what's happening - an attempt to swim with the tide rather than some Canutish effort to change its direction. A populist, by nature, is a sycophant, not an opinion former. The bandwagons he jumps on are already there so maybe, instead of focusing on his reaction, this debate should shift its attention to the people who create the things he latches onto.
Blairite contempt for culture is based, very soundly, on a trend for artists and writers to revel in their own limitations. If an artist is saying that the idea of art as art constitutes an intolerable "restriction" on his work and practice, it isn't suprising that people take him at his word.
Nobody values art less these days than the people paid to produce it. For some, this runs so deep that they can hardly bring themselves to use the A word - either as a description of what they are doing or a definition of themselves. Chris Cunningham, one of the exhibitors at the Royal Academy's Apocalypse exhibition, recently said that he doesn't think of what he is doing as art. Rather it is "work", a word which makes you think of production lines and a way of life rather more wholesome than Cunningham - whose contribution to the exhibition is a pornographic video of a couple having sex after beating each other up - has the right to imagine.
While sympathising with his embarrassment at the poncey connotations of "artist", it pains me to think that he should try to borrow some street cred from workers whose occupations give them rather less leeway than his.
It seems that the old system, where a person might get a crappy job to pay the bills and fund their dreams of being an artist, has been inverted. The artist as graphic worker thinks of his output as just something he does for the money; he doesn't need to dream about anything as the market tells him what to produce.
It isn't just artists who don't value what they are doing; writers too are desperate to reassure us that literature is not within their remit. In the authors' biographies of All Hail the New Puritans, a book of short stories by young writers, Nicholas Blincoe, one of the editors, describes himself thus: "Nicholas Blincoe is the pseudonym of a workers' collective active in journalism, publishing and related industries." I'd think this was meant as a joke if I hadn't read the editor's "manifesto" - a 10-point programme the aim of which, as far as I can tell, is to redefine a writer as someone who can use a computer.
Every one of their bullet points warns the aspiring young Amis to for swear all the tricks of his trade. "4. We believe in textual simplicity and vow to avoid all devices of voice: rhetoric, authorial aside." Having already vowed to "shun poetic licence in all its forms", it's hard to see what a budding new puritan writer would have left at his disposal. The trick, it seems, is to do as you did as a seven-year-old on the first day after the summer break: "Their bungalow was called Sea-View Cottage. It was located on the Suffolk coast, about seven miles south of Southwold. The walls of the bungalow were whitewash white."
I don't want to sound facetious and yes, I can see the point of paring down prose to the bone if there's a good reason for doing so. However, as another of the New Puritans, Toby Litt, shows in his opening sentences, there's little to be gained from this tactic if it doesn't bring you closer to the content. I know what they think it sounds like and why they are mistaking it for something when really, it's just the leftovers.
Apart from being a formal exercise, as pretentious as the fussy stuff they've set themselves up against, the "manifesto" is a celebration of artistic inhibition. The contributors to the book clearly think less is more, whatever the circumstances and however little you have to start off with. If you're building skyscrapers I guess you can get away with it. If you're writing tiny vignettes about people who use Hoovers very pointedly instead of vacuum cleaners ("8. All products, places, artists and objects named are real."), you're probably going to need all the tools you can lay your hands on.
Whatever you think of of the work of Blincoe et al, the message sent by their brutal self- assessment is clear: art doesn't matter. If the people who are doing it think that it must be OK to wish nothing better for it than its present function as spectacle.
Liam was so lovely
A young friend showed me his most treasured possessions when I helped him move into a flat. In a box with a cigarette packet and a tea-stained concert programme were holiday photographs taken a couple of years ago on one of the Greek islands. He wouldn't have kept them - he loses everything - had it not been for the four flash frames of a red-eyed younger him sitting at a bar-room table with a man doing straight-faced V-signs at the camera.
It was strange, looking at these photos of James with his hero. Liam Gallagher had been lovely, he said. So down to earth. So unlike a celebrity. They'd had a drink, he'd moaned about Patsy and then later, they danced to Paul Weller. When an Oasis song came on, Liam would leave the floor because he said only twats would dance to their own records.
I'd heard this story before and yet weirdly, it seemed more implausible now that I could see the proof. The fact that Liam looks so much like Liam in these shots somehow deprived the scene of its reality. If Liam was there, you felt, the others couldn't be, and vice versa. Clearly, the shots had been taken in one of those novelty photobooths where your image is dropped into a picture of your pop-idol's, and you appear, say, as the sixth member of Steps.
It's difficult to believe in celebrities. They come from another dimension and any reminder of their mortality makes us feel vaguely discomfited. At least, that's what everyone was saying about Paula Yates. In the London Evening Standard, Allison Pearson said her death had served as a shock reminder that Paula was a "real person too".
I can't think of many real persons who would like to be laid to rest in a white mink bikini, but there you go. The obituarists were keen to tell us that Geldof's tasteful funeral arrangements gave Paula back the dignity she had lacked in life. How could it when celebrity funerals just look like celebrity weddings with different hats? If Bono's there, one feels, nothing bad can have happened. Even death can't compete with fame's photospread unreality.
