Wherefore Art Thou ART?

When we think about art, where are we going? Are we

• trying to look at things afresh within a familiar framework?


• discovering a new insight thanks to an alien interpretation of the familiar?


• probing our own psyches to discover fundamentals about our own perspectives?


• beating a drum to those who live around us, either for support or subversion of the those structures around us?


• marrying what we know of our reality with what we can only speculate or wonder about?


• making comment or observation?


• establishing precedents to shape the future?


• build the defining visions of where our system wants us to be?


• saying 'I love you' or 'I worship you' or 'This is you'?


• giving free reign to expression without any intent or target?

I guess art has been all of these things, and conversely each of these things has a detractor who would say that this is not art, but is irrelevant or a mugger pretending to be art.

This the kind of blog that is not a researched essay with reference to everyone else's collected wisdom, and anyone reading this will have to guess what is me and what isn't in what I am writing, I am not trying to figure that out myself.

For the sake of my 10¢ I have this blog, and there are so many 10¢ out there...

... so I guesss I had better get to the point! But not until I have juxtaposed another list of statements...

1. H.G. Wells is a barely appreciated author in the United Kingdom, yet he was a very active, prominent political writer. Go check out the Wikipedia summary. I believe Jules Verne is far more celebrated in his own land.
   
2. For 400 years (yes, 400 years, that, by the way is double the 200 being 'celebrated' by the establishment this year) Christopher Marlowe was demonised as a conjuror of devils or marginalised as a twee precursor of Shakespeare.
3. TS Eliot was taken seriously.
4. Kipling is largely ignored in schools.
5. Britain has no industry.
6. Submarines built out of tyres are considered controversial.
7. The Church of England has no say in national affairs, yet every prime minister claims s/he worships God. British people generally I believe have no real feeling that their own parliament serves their own interests at all. Yet Muslims in this country have a parliament that represents their interests. Click on the link and see for yourself.
8. There is no industry in the United Kingdom any more, and the government seems to want to socially engineer the SUBJECTS (not citizens) of this country into filling the unskilled service work that remains (lets all be call centre operatives, and then give up our jobs to foreign cheaper centres), while cheap labour comes in from Europe and former colonies to perform the (often skilled) manual tasks that we are no longer trained to do. It seems these workers are the new 'niggers and navvies' that this scept/red/ic isle has used throughout the ages to build its structures: workers it then ignores in the reckoning of its own greatness. Difference is these guys have the choice of going back home. Or maybe I have gotten it wrong? I don't think so. Cool Britannia was stillborn, Long Live Same Old Same Old.
9. Have you ever noticed that the island Britain looks like a Hogarthian stooped seated old hag?
   

So where is the radical art that might bring the book to our faces and make us think critically about our native land, when even the shape of the land mass mocks its history?

Tweetie birds on poles, formaldehyde beasties? Another Place, much as I like it, only achieves a radical interpretation in the mind of the beholder.

Versus Picasso, Goya, Da Vinci, Mozart, Soyinka. Like I said, 400 years since we as a nation even tried.

But Let's not forget, when do we as a nation even bother to think of art?

Its all very well having Alan Yentob, Brian Sewell, Melvyn Bragg, but what is going on when the very media that produces programs by them only discusses art in the public domain beyond 'art programs' in the vein of a mad hatter's look at what the Laputians are up to.

Is my own lack of faith a product of this environment?

Last List before I stop: I think I am getting confused and developing a bipolar approach to the whole subject:

1. Does this country fail to educate us adequately in the capabilities of our own brains?


2. Brilliant though our artists may be, their relevance to our predicaments here is somewhat encoded.


3. Britain does not want to use the intellectual capacity of its subjects beyond the sustenance of its own status quo.

I know this entry is confused - I am confused. I am sure I will revisit it and tidy it up, again!