Have we lost the power to tell good art from bad?
During the past year, the damage to the arts has been greater than at any other time in recent history. We have seen vast job losses at institutions such as the National Theatre; all major events cancelled; freelancers in every discipline consigned to living on the breadline. Our cultural life has been put on hiatus.
And so have our critical faculties. Recently, as the live arts prepare to return, I have been struck, and rather worried, by whether my standards of discernment have dropped dramatically. Perhaps I’ve felt that I should be kind to those struggling to make art in incredibly difficult circumstances. Partly, however, I’ve been desperate to watch something, anything. Would all those Wigmore Hall recitals that I sat through, or that denuded Last Night of the Proms, or the Barn Theatre’s innovative adaptation of Jonathan Coe’s What a Carve Up!, have seemed so thrilling in a normal year? I suspect not.
My cultural hunger – for live events in particular – has meant that I now look at anything pre-2020 with a prelapsarian glow. But the reality is that I always hated as many operas and concerts and plays and exhibitions as I loved, and the majority were just average. Nor do I see a problem with a cultural landscape that has varying degrees of success; in fact, it’s crucial that the arts, particularly in subsidised sectors, are given the latitude to experiment and even fail.
One worry, post-pandemic, is that in a leaner, more commercially anxious world, organisations will not be willing to take risks, and we will be served a succession of “bankers” that will calcify the British arts scene. I was thinking recently that I would rather see something flawed but fascinating, such as Lucy Prebble’s A Very Expensive Poison (staged at the Old Vic in the autumn before lockdown), than another revival of Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit with another pukka cast. Part of the joy of the cultural experience is in picking holes in something, trying to articulate why it doesn’t work, which can increase our understanding of art – and perhaps of the world at large.
I know I’m not alone in having a wonky radar. The mass entertainment offered via television and streaming services during lockdown has proved that we’re satisfied with any old rubbish. Netflix has exploited our sudden free time, our capacity to binge, meaning that programmes such as Tiger King and Emily in Paris (both dire, in my opinion) have been given a cultural significance that they don’t deserve. The situation reached fever pitch in recent weeks with Jed Mercurio’s Line of Duty, which was discussed in such awed tones that you’d think it rivalled King Lear. It doesn’t. The plotting may be smart, but we’ve been too forgiving about the sub-soap dialogue and ho-hum acting (bar the peerless Anna Maxwell Martin as Patricia Carmichael). Of course, I watched it, too. What can I say? My diary has been empty recently.
You can’t blame people for lapping up whatever culture they’re given in such arid times, and the success of Line of Duty has at least proven that we need entertainment. But as we escape from the cultural darkness, we must not lose sight of what makes good art. The “make do and mend” approach has understandably predominated over the past year, resulting in hit shows such as Grayson’s Art Club, on Channel 4, in which the potter and his psychotherapist wife, Philippa, asked viewers to submit their works on a weekly theme. The majority were terrible but, while I couldn’t do any better, that isn’t the point: there’s danger in us championing the mediocre because we feel we’re obliged to be supportive. The need to criticise constructively has been lost, and must resume for the sake of the industry.
Another problem, following from this, is that many in the cultural sector have failed to make productive use of their energies. Too many debates have been hijacked by those content, instead, to look inward and hustle for their own agendas. The devil makes work for idle hands, and over the past year there has been a lot of navelgazing and posturing about who the arts should be for, who should be “cancelled” and what cultural criteria should be met. A number of subsidised organisations, terrified that they might lose the grants dished out by Arts Council England, have not – as they once would have – ignored the braying of a minority on social media. Rather, they’ve embraced them, or at least paid lip-service for fear of attracting bad publicity.
One of the last things I saw before the theatres were closed last year was the Royal Court’s wonderful Poet in Da Corner, a super-tolerant play by Debris Stevenson; this autobiographical piece showed how grime (and specifically Dizzee Rascal) proved the salvation of an Essex teenager cast adrift by her dyslexia and her sexuality. It remains the most sensible take I’ve seen on the culture wars and I wish we could turn the clock back to that.
This summer, once we’ve got over the initial excitement of the live experience, I hope that we can return to the reasoned judgment offered by Stevenson and the Royal Court, and, above all, that we in Britain’s auditoria, galleries and living-rooms will judge things on their own individual merit once more.
‘Line of Duty’ was discussed in such awed tones, you’d think it rivalled ‘Lear’
Culture Newsletter
For the latest art, theatre, book and music reviews, direct to your inbox, sign up for our weekly Culture newsletter
telegraph.co.uk/culturenewsletter