SPECTATOR OR
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CENTURY OF NO EROICA
The month of the 50th anniversary of Britain's greatest arts festival, and the knowledge that the century has only three years to go, is a good moment to reflect that time is running out. Time, that is, in which the century can make a contribution to the arts comparable in size, grandeur and heroism with that of the preceding four or five. With only three years to go, it is no risk to predict that it will not. It is also interesting to ask: why not?
Edinburgh is full of art this month, but it is safe to say that that which will stir the soul will not be of the 20th century. For heroic art, the century has been, to under- state it, disappointing. Most people, outside the 'arts community', know this perfectly well. But many dare not say so for fear of being accused of philistinism or of being reactionary. The arts community, where a dated modernism rules, will demand of them: what about Picasso, or whoever?
But we do not have to be reactionaries to find Picasso less inspiring than Turner. We can enjoy Picasso, even accept him as a genius, while at the same time know that he cannot touch our souls. Some modernists might retort that this is not the function of art in the 20th century. In our century, art's function is to enable us to look into our souls, and bring out what is hidden within them, rather than to inspire them.
Twentieth-century art has indeed added to our knowledge of our inner selves. But, for that reason, it has seldom taken us out of ourselves, as an inspiring symphony or picture did in previous centuries. In 20th- century art, there have been high peaks, but they have tended to be high peaks which did not form a whole mountain range. A leading article such as this is no place for judgment of individual works. But many would think it fair of us to generalise that Joyce's Ulysses, Frank Lloyd Wright's larger creations, the Vienna school of Schoen- berg, Berg and Webern proved to be dead ends. They were followed by the formless novels, joyless buildings and dissonances of lesser novelists, architects and composers. But 19th-century works such as Beethoven's symphonies revolutionised the symphony without making it a dead end, enabling it to be continued by Brahms, Bruckner, Mahler and beyond. This is not to deny that the 20th century has thrown up a handful of composers who would have been accept- able to a non-arts community public in any age: a Janacek, a Bartok, a Britten. But they had their roots in the 19th century just as Beethoven had his in the 18th. Centuries take a long time to make their mark and produce their own. Since 1950, ours had been doing so. Since then, it has been the defunct modernism of 1920s Vienna, plus electronics, which inspire the mass of mod- ern music commissioned by publicly sub- sidised institutions.
Today, most of the traditional arts, with the possible exception of the theatre, amount to what the arts community tells us they should not be: a museum. Compact discs, photographic printing and modern scholarship give the average citizen greater access to, and knowledge of, the arts of pre- vious centuries than those centuries had themselves. There is nothing wrong with museums. But it would have been good to live in a century, as in previous ones, in which the latest serious novel, symphony, opera or picture was of interest to a broad mass of our fellow citizens.
Why this is not so remains a mystery. It would have surprised 19th-century and early 20th-century pioneers of art for the masses and public subsidies for the artist. They thought that, spared the struggle for food and shelter, the artist would be free to create to a higher level than ever before. Instead, the subsidised arts bureaucracy sometimes imposes a style far more rigidly than did the old aristocratic patrons who subsidised, say, Beethoven's revolution. We do not know the answer to these questions but, unlike much of the arts bureaucracy, at least we know the questions.
Tories attack Mr Chris Smith and his party for wanting to give lottery money to athletics, rather than to cricket, soccer and rugby. Politically correct people such as the minister do not like team games because they are competitive. But surely individual athletes embody competitiveness far more than teams do since, by definition, a race or a pole vault can only be won by one person. If anything, it is the team which is the socialist, Old Labour sort of institution: its members must subordinate their individual- ity for the common good. Someone must pass the ball to the goal scorer. Provided there is some system of positive discrimina- tion — by which, when playing whites, players from ethnic minorities are awarded goals without actually having to score them — team games should be fine by Mr Smith. So we do not understand what the Tories are complaining about.
A better critique might be one which questions whether we want to be a country in which the state pumps money into sport because victory on track or field is that state's idea of prestige. East Germany did it, and its former leaders were this week on trial for shooting people trying to escape from the place.
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