ARTS
Television
Opportunities missed
hen I read Bryan Appleyard's con- sidered howl-down of the Late Show in the pages of this magazine it prompted me to reflect on my own feelings, in the role both of listener and occasional participant, about broadcast programmes which deal with the visual arts. In the former capacity, I would put many of my experiences rough- ly on a par with visits to the dentist: half hours to be endured with fortitude or the help of a stiff, alcoholic analgesic. Television and radio programmes which deal with the visual arts fall into two main categories: those that treat some aspect of art as a news item or subject for unin- formed discussion and those perennials like Kaleidoscope, The Late Show and Without Walls which aspire to something more in- depth, illuminating and serious. Yet easily the best material I have encountered falls into neither category: for instance a filmic examination made some years ago of the life of the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch or The Shock of the New, an eight- part series written and narrated by Robert Hughes. The latter series, which is 15 years downstream now, made a worthy successor to Kenneth Clark's equally excellent Civili- sation. Since then we have experienced Sandy Nairne's muddled and all but incom- prehensible series The State of the Art which attempted to come to terms with the complex issues of Post-Modernism — but that was ten years ago. Not too much mate- rial about art has imposed itself on my con- sciousness since then unless simply through its triviality or tendentiousness. A strong contender for honours under the latter heading must be Channel Four's pro- grammes about the Turner Prize, an award the station has sponsored for the past two years. Here are professionally-made art programmes which make little pretence at objectivity or balance. Channel Four, as we know, champions the radical and the alter- native in all forms of life but possibly with particular emphasis on the arts and sexual orientations.
I fell asleep once in front of my televi- sion to be awakened by a young woman recounting how she had developed an unpleasant facial rash as a consequence of having her pubic hair shaved off by her female lover. But would similarly intimate information have been considered accept- able or of interest if it had stemmed from a heterosexual source? Heterosexuals were probably deemed utterly irrelevant by those who devised Channel Four's series of nocturnal emissions entitled Out except, perhaps, for their seemingly unimportant roles in siring or giving birth to the pro- gramme's participants.
Often the interests of a conventional majority tend to be ignored, in much the same way, by those who make programmes about the visual arts. Nor is an ordinary audience addressed constructively by those who make news or current affairs pro- grammes in which art occasionally features. Critics who consent to appear to discuss sensationalist news items about living art risk death through tedium simply by answering the same unoriginal questions posed time and time again. How much would the critics pay for a dead cow, fish or sheep immersed in a tankful of preserva- tive? And would they wish to import such supposed items of art into their own drawing-rooms?
Unfortunately broadcast material which trivialises the concerns of radical art by such means plays into the hands of the lat- ter's opportunists and propagandists. Strong arguments exist against the unjust prominence given to would-be radical art within our subsidised art galleries but these are unlikely to be brought out or even known about by non-specialist presenters. The populace has as much right to be interested in how public money is spent on art as it does on any other area of public spending. But those who watch the average programme made on the subject probably end up more confused and frustrated than ever.
The visual arts has become an area in which the paying customer is not just wrong but likely to be ridiculed into the bargain. In the words of C. S. Lewis who wrote on the subject 35 years ago, 'In the highest aes- thetic circles one now hears nothing about the artist's duty to us. It is all about our duty to him. He owes us nothing; we owe him "recognition" even though he has never paid the slightest attention to our tastes, interests or habits. If we don't give it to him, our name is mud. In this shop, the customer is always wrong.' This is just as true today.
I have often characterised those who make regular programmes about living art as being an essential part of the apparatus of modernist domination. Generally their sympathies and naive premises support the continuing myth of an unjustly neglected avant-garde. Their collective rationale used to be summed up admirably some years ago by the artist Bryan Wynter as attempts `to pay for Van Gogh's ear'. In short, missionary zeal and muddled thinking meld with feelings of social guilt to form a lethal cocktail. Many who make costly and widely-seen programmes about visual art seem to have a limited grasp of actual realities or historical perspective. Usually they are too ignorant or arrogant to ask anyone better informed. In consequence, television programmes continue to be made about the state of art which, taking their cue from Nairne's eponymous series, are the reverse of illuminating. Year in, year out, marvellous opportunities to use one visual medium — television — to help explain another are lost or passed up. Here, it probably goes without saying that opinions such as those expressed regularly in this column are too painful for most pro- gramme-makers even to contemplate, let alone use or try to understand. That said, I had lunch a few years ago with a prolific maker of visual arts programmes for British television. We exchanged ideas enthusiastically through the first two courses. Suddenly my host threw his hands in the air. 'I see it all,' he exclaimed. 'We will make this regular programme with you in a striped cricket blazer sitting at a cock- tail bar and saying the kind of outrageous things you write in your column.'
How could I resist a starring role as an aesthetic Bertie Wooster or latter-day Terry Thomas? The answer is: very easily. To give only one reason, I think and write about art as though it is a subject that mat- ters. The idea of addressing a large new audience through television is not without appeal. There are any number of interest- ing issues which never get aired. But why must the whole thing take place in fancy dress? It seems to me the tendency even of supposedly serious television programmes to caricature or trivialise reveals a basic contempt for the audience.
What about radio? Recently I was the subject of a 25 minute interview for Aus- tralian Broadcasting Corporation's Art Today programme. My interviewer was kind enough to say he found my thoughts interesting and clear. Surely I must do plenty of radio work for the arts in Britain? The truth is I must have done all of 25 min- utes during the ten years I have been writ- ing for this magazine. But I should explain here that an average even of two and a half minutes a year is rather more than a num- ber of my more experienced critical col- leagues ever get. If your face doesn't fit among the massed ranks of Marxist, femi- nists, politically correct young persons or others who are equally incapable of ques- tioning the absolute rightness of their views, forget it. Try listening to Open Uni- versity art programmes if you want to catch the general drift. But don't have a gun handy; you may want to shoot yourself or your set.
My Australian interviewer explained to me that they, by contrast, do not practise `censorship by omission', on Australian radio programmes about art — as yet, at any rate. Those with strong views are encouraged to express them — whether these coincide with prevailing orthodoxies `There's £750,000 in used notes here. Welcome to Britain!' or not. No doubt the idea of censorship of art programmes is deeply abhorrent to good liberals at the BBC and other stations.
But are these folk aware of the consistent bias of their programmes or of the deliberate blocking of alternative opin- ions? Given their inability to grasp other important issues central to living art in our time, it would be most unwise to suppose so.
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