The schlock of the new
For 40 years, my magazine has praised eternal art above showy trash
Have you noticed that, as a group, prophets tend to be a grumpy lot?
From Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Isaiah, right down to Carlyle, Ruskin, Spengler and beyond: gloominess and bad weather as far as the eye can see.
There are many reasons for this, beginning perhaps with what Kant called ‘the crooked timber of humanity’. The sun might be shining, but evil lurks in the heart of man and besides – haven’t you noticed? – standards are plummeting, evidence of maladies real and fabricated (racism, climate change and trans-, Islamo- and homophobia) are rife, and intolerance, ‘whiteness’ and a lack of ‘diversity’ are ubiquitous and need to be stamped out, hard, right now.
At The New Criterion, the American cultural review I have been editing since about the time John Stuart Mill’s maid tried to do the world a service by (accidentally) burning the manuscript of Carlyle’s book on the French Revolution (the wretch just sat down and rewrote it), I inaugurated a series called ‘Bright Spots’. It was a Johnny-merceresque endeavour to accentuate the positive by commenting on ‘promising things in our culture that have been unfairly neglected or are as yet insufficiently known’. I talk about artists like Jacob Collins (look him up) and pianists like Simone Dinnerstein (check out her Goldberg Variations).
The series didn’t last long, but that was my fault. There really are quite a number of such figures and initiatives, in the arts and culture anyway (the situation may be more dour in the corridors of public life).
In his essay Tradition and the Individual Talent, T S Eliot criticised
our tendency to insist, when we praise a poet, upon those aspects of his work in which he least resembles anyone else. In these aspects or parts of his work we pretend to find what is individual, what is the peculiar essence of the man.
We dwell with satisfaction upon the poet’s difference from his predecessors, especially his immediate predecessors; we endeavour to find something that can be isolated in order to be enjoyed. Whereas if we approach a poet without this prejudice, we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously.
The same argument goes for other arts. Perhaps the chief virtue of Eliot’s essay was in reminding us of how superficial and artistically limiting the Romantic cult of novelty can be. The pretence that the traditional is the enemy rather than the presupposition of originality devalues art’s chief source of pertinence: its continuity with the past.
Anyone looking for evidence of this does not have far to seek. A quick glance around our culture shows that the avant-garde assault on tradition has long since degenerated into a sclerotic orthodoxy. What established tastemakers now herald as cutting-edge turns out time and again to be a stale remainder of past impotence.
It is one of history’s ironies that Romantic fervour regularly declines.
Most of the really invigorating action in the art world today is a quiet affair. It takes place not at Tate Modern or the Museum of Modern Art, not in the Chelsea or Bushwick galleries in New York, but off to one side, out of the limelight. It tends to involve not the latest thing, but permanent things.
Permanent things can be new; they can be old; but their relevance is measured not by the buzz they create but by silences they inspire.
Again, something similar can be said about the other arts and about cultural endeavour generally. The core problem is often not the practice as such. For example, I doubt that the general level of musicianship has ever been higher than it is now – the world is awash with stunning pianists, violinists, singers etc.
But the problem is rather the legitimising institutions that grant or withhold the favour of their approbation.
My own view is that the time has come to create and nurture competing sources of legitimisation and approval. Who cares what the BBC or the Times thinks?
I hope you won’t mind if I offer The New Criterion as an example. Two things prompt me to do so.
One revolves around longevity. Serious cultural periodicals tend not to be long-lived. Ones that are as independentminded and outspoken as The New Criterion enjoy an especially parlous existence. But here we are in our 40th-anniversary season. Eliot’s Criterion, from which we took our name and whose critical ambitions we seek to emulate, had a run of 17 years, from 1922 to 1939.
Of course, mere longevity is one thing. Persistent critical vibrancy is something else. It is not for me to comment on our success in that department. Rather, I turn to the editor of The Oldie, Harry Mount, who some years ago in a dazzling burst of understated candour described The New Criterion as ‘America’s leading review of the arts and intellectual life’.
Who am I to disagree? I hope that you’ll want to join us on the journey. The next 40 years starts now.