Observing the Detail
Posted on February 24, 2008
Filed Under What's New |
We used to be an Observer household. I mean as children that’s what the parents bought. I have my problems with the Irish Times - yesterday the paper began a six part investigation of the relationship between the Arts and society.
“… there is a parallel argument that the future of the arts is in fact being enhanced by a more practical engagement with these varied social contexts. That this is creating a greater interest in and audience for the arts, which in turn creates a greater argument for public support, and thus a stronger indication for art’s continued survival.”
Yawn. Who can write “art’s continued survival”. Not a lot of thought gone into that and that’s my problem with the IT, the lack of real intellect, the lack of self-reflective writing.
The problem with the arts at the moment is the I word. Wherever you go in Ireland people’s view of art is conditioned by investibility. One gallerist told me recently, it used to be people would buy a piece at 1,000 Euro and regard it as decoration. Now when they go over 300 Euro they want to know everything about the artist’s background and whether or not they’ll make money out of the piece.
And up in Dublin last week when I was talking to insiders in the Dublin art scene they bemoaned the presence of the investor in place of the collector. Irish people are bringing to art precisely those skills they brought to property. In fact it’s something of a transfer of allegiance.
Back to the Observer. Today’s edition has seperate stories on wild women drinkers and male erectile dysfunction. I doubt it was planned that way - the contrast I mean but I think it betrays a blind moral stance at the heart of the now Guardian-owned newspaper. Women are liberated and sad to say they are given over to…. excess. High Anglican anguish all round. Men were given a lifeline for their penises 10 years ago - Viagra. And what do they go and do? Divorce their wives and start bedding younger models.
Worse than running the two stories was running them together and worse than running them together was running them without self-awareness. This kind of story juxtaposition is risible and a major reason why readers are turning off. Gawd alone knows why the IT readership is up.
When we were an Observer household we were influenced by the intelligent left wing politics of the editorial, even under Lonhro. The paper had a realistic view of how viable left wing politics were - and being run by sons of the Second World War it was aspirational for the majority of people (they’d earned it), critical of greed, and censorious when it came to the inefficiencies of Government at redistributing wealth and opportunity.
Now the Guardian is run by the British public schools, men who by and large see the Government as poorly performing prefects who should never have been given the tie. Rather sad to see the Observer in its wake become censorious about erections and the uses to which men will put them or equally lacking in insight into why women drink too much.
They should have read the other Observer article on the constructive role that depression plays in society. Excess drinking by our middle age is all about loss and regret, our own and society’s. Not least the loss of intelligent newspapers that could really nail down an argument.
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