Oliver Kamm

Politics and art

Daniel Finkelstein comments: "I am now going to recommend a book that a large proportion of you wouldn't dream even of picking up in a bookshop to scan its contents. But you should read it anyway. Even you, Oliver Kamm."

I see what he means. The book is Revolution in the Head by Ian MacDonald. As Daniel describes it: "It is a song by song account of the Beatles' recording career. And on the surface of it, that is all it is. But I think it is really a very profound book indeed." Among its profound characteristics is "the light it sheds on a very old controversy. Is the personal behaviour and political view of an artist relevant when assessing their artistic output? MacDonald answers in the affirmative and goes on to make his case song by song."

Now, there are issues on which my knowledge is minimal; and there are issues on which my ignorance is so expansive that not even the most rudimentary general knowledge may be assumed on my part. Among this second group of issues, football and popular music are prominent. These are particular interests of Daniel's (he writes a weekly football column for The Times), and I'm grateful for his efforts at expanding my reading. And indeed, I haven't read Revolution in the Head.

But oddly, I do recognise the argument and I have views on it, for I have read another book by the same author. The late Ian MacDonald was a music journalist of eclectic taste and range, and he wrote an influential biography nearly twenty years ago entitled The New Shostakovich. MacDonald was much infuenced by the picture of Dmitri Shostakovich that emerged from what purported to be the great Soviet composer's memoirs, published under the title Testimony and edited by Solomon Volkov. The controversy over these memoirs is long and convoluted. They show a man deeply disaffected with the regime, and expressing his protest in his music. (There is also an impressive film based on these memoirs, in which Ben Kingsley takes the part of Shostakovich.) Yet the evidence is now beyond serious dispute that the work is spurious. The musicologist Laurel Fay has demonstrated that large sections of the work were lifted from previously published articles.

MacDonald's book starts from the premise that, whatever the problems of authenticity of Volkov's document, the picture of the tormented composer is essentially true. MacDonald then goes on to find evidence substantiating this picture of Shostakovich in the music itself (such as the bombastic Fifth Symphony, which MacDonald interprets as intentional irony). It is a misconceived way of approaching the subject, and the book is a failure as a result. As one reviewer put it (Malcolm Hamrick Brown, "Ian MacDonald's The New Shostakovich", Notes, March 1993, and republished in A Shostakovich Casebook, edited by the same author, 2004, pp. 257-64): "MacDonald seems not to know that creative artists like common folk wear masks appropriate to the occasion, disguising parts of a 'whole' personality, not always with the intention to deceive so much as to facilitate."

The connection between an artist's political views and his output is indeed a vexed question. I have had exactly this argument with Daniel's and my common friend Stephen Pollard, who cited Shostakovich as an example of a composer whose work is illuminated by what we can infer from his biography. It is a bad example and a flawed case - a fallacy, in fact, because we can't gain direct knowledge of an artist's intentions, and even if we could then it still wouldn't necessarily be a reliable guide to the art. Art is independent of politics; we can make sense of a work of art only in its own terms, and not by inferring from it the intentions of the composer, author or artist.

Caliban's return

The Observer carries an article by one Jonah Albert, who asks rhetorically: "Where are the black visitors in my gallery?" His gallery is, it turns out, our gallery: the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square, where Mr Albert is a curatorial fellow. He writes:

The Inspire scheme, which I am part of, was initiated by the Arts Council two years ago in an attempt to get more black and Asian people into curatorial positions in London and help rectify the imbalance. Let's face it; there are very few from black or ethnic minority backgrounds - they account for less than 5 per cent of full-time curatorial staff....

An obvious culprit hides in the nature of the National Gallery's collection: Western European painting from 1200 to the turn of 19th century was the remit it was given when it was established in the early 19th century. Other institutions would collect and display Eastern and African Art; the National Gallery was set up to focus on old master paintings.

To the minds of those who choose not to engage with the place, it's little more than the work of some dead men - well, mainly dead white men.

I greatly desire a full integration of black and Asian British into all fields of national life. It is a pity that on the evidence of this article there is one black British man too many in the field of arts administration, namely Mr Albert, who should immediately be relieved of his responsibilities on the grounds that he has no idea what the arts are for. His incomprehension is merely compounded by this truism:

You don't need a black face in a painting for it to hold stories relevant to black people. The paintings in the National Gallery deal with major life themes: love, loss, death, jealousy, betrayal, war, peace, power and many more ideas, all of which are just as relevant to black people as anyone else.

The pedagogic power of art lies not in its being "relevant" - though it is obviously, and trivially, true that the subjects cited by Mr Albert are of universal rather than parochial significance - but in its broadening our experience and appreciation of enduring human concerns. Race and racism are important themes in human history, and some great artists and writers have illuminated them. (All my readers will know Othello. Many may not know a magnificent play by the writer of the German Enlightenment Gotthold Ephraim Lessing called Nathan der Weise, or Nathan the Wise. It is, in European literature, one of the great attacks on racism.) But they remain nonetheless a partial way of approaching art.

Albert cites "the buried story" behind portraits in the National Gallery - the history of slavery and colonial plantations. The history is important in itself, but to invoke it as the reason for being interested in paintings is to diminish the content of art. It may be interesting background, and the paintings themselves may tell us something about that history; but to reduce your artistic appreciation to one issue is merely an indication that Albert isn't interested in art to start with.

Albert states: "If that history is not enough to entice minorities into our museums, there are all the other issues which affect attendance - class, education, the immigrant mentality, employment status." All the other issues? How can you be a curatorial fellow of one of the greatest art galleries in the world and say nothing about the enjoyment and elevation that art provides? How can you have any role connected with arts administration and not regard the love of art as a sufficient - or even a possible - reason for looking at paintings? In my view, you can't or at least shouldn't. If Jonah Albert is representative of the Arts Council's "Inspire" scheme, then the Council should put a stop to it with alacrity. (You can read more about the programme in this article from Time Out.) In any event, Mr Albert's article is more than reason enough for the Council and the National Gallery to dispense with his services.

A quiet smile at absolute folly

This article appears in The Times tomorrow.

“AS A country we produced such greats as Dickens, Elgar and Constable. Yet our knowledge of the arts is plumbing new depths of ignorance,” exclaimed The Daily Telegraph at the weekend.

Jeremiads about the state of cultural education are a staple of journalism. This one was a large inference from limited information. A poll for the Artsworld television channel had revealed scant public knowledge of classical music. It is a shame that fewer than half the respondents knew that Elgar was British, and more thought Puccini had composed The Marriage of Figaro than Mozart. But the usual expedient of lamenting the neglect of music in schools nicely absolves the media and arts establishment of their share of the blame.

Arts coverage by these sources is often reduced to straw polls of the greatest historical figures, and the annual ritual of scouring the almanacs (and now the internet) to find more or less obscure cultural anniversaries to “celebrate”. Intended to stimulate interest in the arts, they produce a lethal cocktail of lowbrow populism conveyed with earnest didacticism. The BBC’s poll for composer of the last millennium notoriously produced Sir Paul McCartney. While this year ’s 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth is a historical event in its own right, last year’s celebration of the centenary of Sir Michael Tippett, a composer simultaneously portentous and trite, was a marketing device born of some desperation.

Musical appreciation in this country is not poor, but it is ill-formed, and must to some extent reflect the relative weakness of the English contribution to music between Purcell and Elgar. In the other arts, though, where the English contribution is greater and the names more publicly recognisable, there is an essential wisdom that ought to be made more of. A possible way of doing it would be to use one arts-related cliché to dispel another.

Of all the cultural anniversaries touted in the newspaper supplements since the new year, the most risible is the coupling of the 50th anniversary of the deaths of Bertolt Brecht and Max Beerbohm. Brecht is a giant of modern drama. Beerbohm was a quintessentially Edwardian satirist and caricaturist who worked on a minor scale. He is now best — and perhaps only — remembered for his satirical novel Zuleika Dobson. Yet of the two, Beerbohm is far the more worthy of celebration. I modestly suggest, even at this late stage, a series of events to celebrate the one and damn the other. Doing so would not only reintroduce into the public realm the work of a real craftsman, but also underline the merits of an essentially English suspicion of the power of all-embracing ideas.

The last century was big on absolutist ideas, and Brecht was a big propagandist for one of the worst: an orthodox Communism that followed every twist of Stalin’s whims. Brecht’s best plays transcend his political vision to speak to the human condition. In The Good Woman of Setzuan (1943), he movingly depicts a prostitute corrupted by her struggle for survival. In Mother Courage (1941), his heroine is unaware of the role of her original moral compromises in her troubles. But these are exceptions to an exhortatory theatre that mirrored Brecht’s corrosive political obsessions. The philosopher Sidney Hook recorded in his memoirs that Brecht, when visiting him in New York in 1935, had remarked of the victims of Stalin’s show trials: “The more innocent they are, the more they deserve to be shot.” Hook gave him his hat and coat, and showed him the door.

Brecht’s biographer, John Fuegi, records that in Prague in 1952 a show trial reminiscent of the 1930s took place, when Brecht’s friend Otto Katz and ten others were hanged. Brecht, having a privileged status in a fellow Communist State, “made no note of the death of his friend and failed to protest in any way”. While some compliant authors of Communist East Germany speedily lost their reputations after the collapse of Communism (Christa Wolf most notably), Brecht ’s reputation remains too high. The lure of the encompassing ideology debased the man, and he in turn helped to corrupt the political culture.

Brecht was a caricaturist when he intended something greater. Beerbohm drew cartoons when he intended nothing else. His caricatures were affectionate but not obsequious representations of the great and the good. He was, said The Times, the greatest of English comic artists. His genius can be seen in, among many others, his cartoon of H. G. Wells, with whom he was friendly but whose utopianism he was repelled by. The cartoon shows a wide-eyed Wells conjuring up “the darling future”, a severe-looking bespectacled lady clutching a scientific instrument in one arm and an even more severe-looking baby in the other.

Beerbohm had little interest in politics but he had a social conscience. While strongly supporting the war effort in two world wars, he was opposed to the Boer War and drew a series of cartoons about it. He lent his name shortly before his death to a petition opposing atomic weapons.

Above all, Beerbohm’s sparkling Zuleika Dobson shows the devastating effects of single-mindedness. Beauty, in the form of the eponymous heroine, descends on Oxford and wreaks havoc among the aesthetes of the undergraduate population, who collectively commit suicide. The satire here is most particularly on a Romanticism represented by a brooding young aristocrat. It might have foreshadowed the selfabsorbed European culture that two decades later could not perceive till too late the deadliness of movements that seemed to promise a real historical dynamic.

There is much in modern British society that can be decried. The state of musical appreciation goes uncomfortably with a lack of interest in things European that continues to afflict our culture. But English culture also has a distinctive awareness of scale, proportion and humour. This is as good a time as any to celebrate it.

"Knitting as a positive social force"

Earlier this month I wrote a brief column about the Knit 2 Together exhibition that opens today at the Crafts Council Gallery. The curators kindly sent me an invitation to a private view of the exhibition last night, along with a note suggesting that I might like to attend as it had provided me with “my column inches” in the previous day’s newspaper (I assume this was a double-entendre alluding to the “knitted willy with realistic head and veins” that I referred to in the original article, but cannot be sure).

In the circumstances it would have been churlish to decline, especially as my scepticism about “the reclamation of knitting as a positive social force” appears not to be widely shared. (I was listening to the lunchtime news yesterday and looked up at the mention of this exhibition, to hear one of the curators explain that only “some buffoon called Oliver Kamm in The Times” had written a harsh word.)

Having seen it, I am none the wiser and got no drink. One of the constants is that the political sentiments the exhibits depict are striking only in their banality. An American knitter called Andy Diaz Hope has an exhibit called Everybody is Somebody’s Terrorist. It is:

… a topical expose of the fear propagated by the blanket label of terrorism – a term that may mean different things to different people.

It accomplishes this by means of “a series of hand-knitted balaclavas representing a variety of socioeconomic or political groups that someone might consider terrorist”. The series in fact comprises only two: one in the form of a monk's habit and cowl, and one depicting a pin-striped business suit and tie. The point, I guess – though it doesn’t take a great deal of guesswork to infer the artist’s train of thought – is that the oppressive forces of clericalism and big business are as - or possibly more - real a terrorist phenomenon than those conventionally understood to be terrorists.

What can you say, except that the crudeness of the reasoning is more than matched by the ineptitude of the artefact? It isn’t even a surprising thought, but a cliché from a collection that includes “institutional violence” and “root causes”. The pinstripes (I was the only person in the gallery wearing such a garb, so perhaps was over-sensitive) in particular will be familiar to readers of The New Statesman, whose editorial line after 9/11 concentrated on the culpability of … the bond traders murdered in the Twin Towers.

Kelly Jenkins (Knit Uncensored, 2003) is concerned with “the politics behind and the history of knitting”. So she says, anyway. I think she has her mind on other things:

My work transforms knitting from a domestic hobby into a naughty, but thrilling, erotic “must-have”.

A must-have you never knew you must have, in fact. The exhibition continues to 8 May, and if you’re in the area of the Crafts Council Gallery on Pentonville Road in Islington I recommend you hurry straight on past it.

Arthur Miller

As a playwright Arthur Miller, who died yesterday, has always been something of a blind spot for me. His most celebrated works are recognisably in the tradition of the socialist realism favoured by radical Jewish writers of the 1920s, who in turn found their own inspiration in the diffuse romanticism of Walt Whitman. A playwright does not necessarily speak through his characters, but the 'attention, attention must be paid' oration in Death of a Salesman is nonetheless a didactic device - attacking American consumerism - that grates. The Crucible is a one-idea political allegory - likening the anti-Communist investigations of the late 1940s and early 1950s to the Salem witch trials - that is hobbled by political earnestness. Allegory can work as a literary form, but it needs to illuminate an idea in an original and surprising way (as Orwell's Animal Farm imaginatively depicts the Bolshevik coup d'etat). The Crucible is a laboured and one-dimensional treatment of a far more subtle political reality. McCarthyism's essence was gross and irresponsible exaggeration of a claim that we now know - from the VENONA decrypts of Soviet cables, among other sources - was true. Soviet infiltration at senior levels of US government, media and civil society really did take place; Alger Hiss was a spy; Julius Rosenberg ran an atomic-espionage ring.

But as a novelist, Miller was deft and subtle. There is a beautiful novella, written late in his life, called Plain Girl (1995), which covers his political themes succinctly and without overkill. It depicts in retrospective the long quest for personal fulfilment of a New York Jewess, Janice Sessions, who eventually finds happiness for 14 years with a good and wise man, Charles, who is blind. Charles - who clearly is the authorial voice in this case - says, as Janice reflects on the character of political radicals:

People have to believe in goodness.... And memories of one's naivety are always painful. But so what? Would you rather have had no beliefs at all?

This is well put. What Miller in his political criticism never quite understood was that, against secular or theocratic totalitarianism, some of us believe in Enlightenment values so strongly that we subsume every other political question to defending the societies that, however imperfectly, embody them.

Put a sock in it, Katie

This comment appears in The Times today.

AN EXHIBITION called Knit 2 Together opens this month at the Crafts Council Gallery. It comprises the work of “15 international artists who are pushing perceived boundaries within knitting”, and its curator, Katie Bevan, makes expansive claims for its timeliness: “There’s a sort of Zeitgeist. . . Everyone just wants to go home and knit socks.”

I know that Ms Bevan’s assertion is not literally true, but I can still admire the enthusiastic promotion even of a decorative art in which I am uninterested. Things become more contentious when artists venture judgments beyond the aesthetic. Ominously, The Guardian notes that the artists in Knit 2 Together — whose exhibits include representations of prostitutes’ calling cards and a text by the literary semiologist Roland Barthes — seek “ the reclamation of knitting as a positive social force”. For them, knitting is a statement of resistance to capitalism and war.

“It’s about making objects, but it is also about sharing stories, an oral tradition,” says one knitter. “If more people knitted, the world would be a more peaceful place.”

It is easy to parody these sentiments, but the notion of a pre- or non-capitalist tradition of simplicity, harmony and collective wisdom is an enduring theme of Western thought, through Rousseau and Herder. The only problems with the notion are that it is historically bogus and politically pernicious.

The history of knitting in the British Isles, especially after the mechanisation of the garment industry ensured that only coarser work was available to its craftsmen, is one of necessity and bare subsistence, not Arcadian creativity. Excepting a longstanding trade in the Shetlands and a few other remote areas, periodic revivals — as in Donegal in 1887 — have been largely an expedient for the relief of desperate poverty.

There is, in fact, a genuine radical political tradition in needlework, exemplified by William Morris and his early association with the Royal School of Needlework, founded in 1872. But Morris celebrated art, not folk wisdom. His protest against industrialism was that it foreclosed the cultivation of beauty, which he looked forward to becoming “a necessary part of the labour of every man who produces”. Today’s radical knitting, by contrast, extends to patterns for “a knitted willy with realistic head and veins”. Clearly, we have the philistines always with us, after all.

A thing of beauty...

This looks an exhibit well worth visiting if you happen to be in New York, and I shall certainly try to get there. Some areas of the decorative arts – textiles, principally – strike me as excruciating in their worthy dullness, but silver is different. Simon Pantin, whose work is pictured, was one of the French Huguenot craftsmen who settled in London after Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, the instrument by which the Huguenot Protestants had gained religious liberty. I find the picture a thing of beauty: perfect proportion and clean straight lines, till the table legs have just enough decoration without degenerating into the swirling Rococo scrolls that became altogether too exuberant later in the 18th century.

Other Huguenot silversmiths – Pierre Platel, Paul Crespin, Paul de Lamarie – produced similarly fine work that only became publicly accessible in London when the Gilbert Collection opened in Somerset House a few years ago. Before visiting it for the first time I was greatly impressed by the scathing judgement of Brian Sewell in The Standard, who bemoaned the ostentation and vulgarity of the exhibits. Surely if this professional snob and aesthete – who incidentally (and it is incidental, for political judgements have no bearing on aesthetic criteria) lionised the traitor Anthony Blunt and loudly damns a certain embattled democracy in the Middle East – had been so offended by the Collection, then I would be enthused by it. And so it proved. The Huguenot silver of 18th century London is a testament to enduring qualities of form and beauty, and also – when you consider the history of these objects and their creators – to religious toleration and the welcoming of immigrants.