For the love of a dead artist…

My thought on art for the day. Don't worry there will be more.

I suppose it is both a wonderful thing and a terrible thing that art (The Arts) is so entirely subjective.

Wonderful because when we experience art that appeals to us we are filled with joy and fascination. Maybe even inspiration. When I first walked into the Turner Room at the Tate Britain I fell in love with a dead artist. Where, I wondered had JMW Turner been all my life? Why had my high school art education spent so much time talking about bicycle wheels, urinals, paintings of the Cahill Expressway, artists who suspend themselves from the ceiling by putting hooks through their flesh, appropriation (that curse to all 16 year olds who still believed in the myth of genius , originality and authenticity) and the delights of the Heidelberg School (for the record I really do quite admire Streeton, and Roberts and the rest, and I admired them with fresh eyes when I returned to sunny Sydney after a short stint in London). Turner’s work left me feeling like I needed to get painting, making, doing, composing, writing – it didn’t really matter, I merely sensed there was a creative realm of possibility out there that I had never witnessed. I’d been missing out.

On leaving the Tate Britain I was struck by the fact that Turner was in many ways much like the other dead artist I am simply enamoured with. Dear JMW, thought I, you are Mozart with a paint brush.

Loving dead artists, Mozart, Turner, Handel, Austen makes me one of those people who likes that thing called High Art, or (which I think is meant to be more insulting) Elite Art. I’m not exactly sure when being Elite, or aspiring to be Elite became such a bad thing. Why did women ever complain about not being able to go to Oxford, why did working class men ever form unions and demand fair pay or the right to be represented by a government they had elected if it was not that they wished for an enhanced quality of life, which aspired to equality with the Elite? But perhaps this is just me being blissfully (wilfully?) naïve. I’ve been to uni now, I’ve sat through lectures run by media and cultural studies departments and bit my tongue (or not), as I’ve heard people who love dead artists being ridiculed and cut down, because we lack sub-cultural capital.

And this is why it’s a terrible thing that art is so subjective. Because when we don’t like something we often fear it, and those who like it. So we call each other names, elitist and snob, oh yes, snobbery. There is an awful lot of snobbery involved, but it goes both ways, and sometimes I think the sub-cultural capitalists are bigger snobs than the historic snobs, but maybe that’s just because no-one likes to be the minority. Its very easy to get caught up in promoting what we like. I like Opera, and I think it’s a worthy cause. I don’t like some other forms of music, for instance, I don’t particularly like the music my own brother writes and plays in clubs, I don’t find it as enjoyable or intellectually stimulating as a baroque masterpiece of counterpoint, but, I respect that what my brother does is actually very time consuming, very skilled, and much enjoyed by people who spend the early hours of Sunday mornings in Kings Cross. I would never choose to play this sort of music or to buy it, and why should I? However, sometimes my brother succeeds in getting me to come sit by his computer and listen to something he has written, or he gets me out late on a Saturday night and after a while a strange thing happens and I have to dance. See my ears don’t receive the same audible pleasure they do when I hear an aria by Mozart or Handel, but by exposure and by learned experience, I dance, because I enjoy it. I see other people enjoying it and I know that this music is good for them, it is encouraging and uplifting, it is creative just the same, but entirely different to Mozart and Handel.

So I don’t really see the point in a bunch of artists who love Hip Hop or House, or Rap saying ‘you shouldn’t get funding because you think Bach is the only real composer’ or in an Opera composer saying ‘you shouldn’t get funding because you wrote that piece of music on a keyboard and couldn’t even notate a perfect cadence to save yourself’.

I don’t know how to make funding be distributed more fairly. Should it be per capita for the amount of artists involved in a project? Or perhaps as a flat percentage of the operational budget (a problem if you have no budget, obviously)? Should it be on audience size? I’m really, really not sure. I’m only just starting to poke my nose in to the world of arts policy. What I am really, really sure about is that as diverse as the cultural industries are, fighting each other really isn’t a good idea. We should be happy when an arts project receives funding, even if its not an art form we like. Because once we’re dealing with likes and dislikes we’re on very shaky ground.

I stand by my original objection to Westbury’s article, I don’t think a criticism of arts funding or the decisions of the Australia Council should be equated with a criticism of Opera Australia. But I do want to make it clear that I am passionate about the arts and theatre in general. I am passionate to see a government that cares about the arts. I am passionate to see a society that cares about the arts, all of the arts, and recognises the value and worth of the entire creative spectrum.

I love my dead artists. I do believe that Turner and Mozart were particularly and uniquely gifted. I am grateful for the curators at the Tate Britain who have kept Turners innovative and revolutionary artworks on display, and I am hugely indebted to a whole host of singers and musicians who have kept Mozart alive these 250 years, because without them I could never have this nerdy, elitist love affair.