'Art and Conservatism' - An Essay by Anna Sthetic
I thought of calling this essay "the cowardly music journalists". After all, there would be some justification in doing so. There they are, sitting behind their "Writers, living the high life with their free lunches, their free records and their famous celebrity friends. Free to write what they like, about whom they want, answerable to nobody. With vitriol dripping from my pen, I could write one savage paragraph after another. But that would make me no different to them ... and, to be fair, they aren't all bad. In fact, some of them are pretty damned good. Well, would YOU want to listen to records you don't like, go to gigs by people you can't stand, and attend tiresome show-business parties when you have more important things to do - like wallpapering the hall, mowing the lawn, or laying waste to the universe?
Like art itself,
critics are very conservative creatures. Art - conservative? Well
yes, I think it is very conservative. Take painting. The so-called
radical artist is no such thing at all. The motivation is almost
always money, lots and lots of it. The more the better! Of course,
the only way for an artist to get lots of money is by selling a
picture to someone who is rich. Selling paintings to penniless
refugees just ain't on! So, aim high! Aim at the rich and famous!
Appeal to their vanity! (and milk their vanity and foolishness ...
there's plenty of it, and it shows no sign whatever of running out)
But don't forget ... their eyesight isn't what it once was, so please
don't make your picture the size of a grain of sand. And, over the
coming years, you will want to sell them lots and lots more! So don't
make the first one so large that it covers the entire inner and outer
surface of their home, because they wouldn't have anywhere to hang
the next one. (unless you could persuade them to throw the first one
away, to make the next one even scarcer and more desirable; now that
really would be radical)
So what you do is
make your picture about the same size as every other painting. Maybe
a bit bigger than many, but not as big as those really enormous ones
you see in the famous art galleries, you know the ones I mean,
they're like a cathedral inside but much quieter. And the shape of
the masterpiece-to-be? Well, it could be round, or oval, or
irregular, or spherical ... but let's not get carried away! Good,
old-fashioned rectangular, that's perfect. Just like all the rest of
them. You can even buy the canvas or board for your ever-so-radical
work of art down in the shopping mall, along with the frozen
genetically- modified food and all the other crap. So very
convenient! You can even buy a nice frame to go round it. And some
brushes and paints. Just like all the other artists. A few of them
try to be really different. They use things like human blood and body
parts, dead animals, human waste etc. in their attempts to create
some exciting, radical, new work of art. But in truth they no more
radical than Mrs. Suburban Housewife, re-arranging her lounge
furniture in a slightly different layout.
True radicalism
isn't the province of the artist messing about with tubes of paint,
but of the poet and the philosopher. Do they devalue their message by
setting it to music, maybe in the key of Cm7?
Now that's a question ...
Now that's a question ...
‘Opus In Cm7’
WHERE DID YOU GO
KAREN SILKWOOD?
WHAT WAS THE PRICE
ON YOUR HEAD?
WHY DO OUR HEROES
ALL VANISH?
WHY ARE OUR HEROES
ALL DEAD?
IN THE DARK OF NIGHT
I HEAR THE VULTURES SCREAM
AND I JUST CAN'T
SEEM TO WAKE UP FROM THE DREAM
HOW MANY ARMIES MUST
YET PERISH?
HOW MANY YOUNG
PEOPLE DIE?
WHY ARE WE BREATHING
DIOXIN
WHILE IT RAINS ACID
RAIN FROM THE SKY?
