By Janan GANESH
“For 30 years in Italy, under the Borgias, there was war, terror, murder and bloodshed. But they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love. They had 500 years of democracy and peace. And what did they produce? The cuckoo clock” – The Third Man. This is harsh on Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Le Corbusier, I have always thought. But let’s accept this premise for a moment. Shouldn’t the world be experiencing an artistic boom right now? If there is a connection between social conflict and creative explosions, then we have had enough of the former – Brexit, Donald Trump, Covid, Ukraine, Iran – to fuel the latter. Original ideas should be filling screens, bookshelves and concert stages.
Instead, once again the summer’s big movies – The Odyssey and Spider-Man, this time – are reworkings of existing material. It’s been a while since a completely new genre of pop music emerged.
Even if you believe in a “Golden Age of Television,” it began when the world was moving along normally in the 2000s, so it can’t be attributed to the chaos of recent years. And who was the last contemporary artist to resonate with the general public? Has there been one in Britain since Tracey Emin? It’s strange to live in the most turbulent period since the war and then see the return of Oasis – a band that was conservative in its views when it first came out – become the cultural event of the day. Not just strange, but in a way, irritating.
If we’re going to have to live with such turbulent politics, can’t we at least get some cultural benefit from it? Turmoil in real life, orthodoxy in art: it seems like the worst of both worlds.
As this decade unfolds, it is being compared to the 1970s. Indeed, even then there was an oil crisis, a failed American war, a Britain that was not functioning as it should, and an important Iran on the international stage.
But all this was accompanied by a creative boom. We had the New Hollywood of Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, a new musical genre almost every year – prog, disco, punk – and the New Journalism, which presented facts through novelistic prose. Of course, it’s hard to establish a cause-and-effect relationship here. But we can imagine how chaos in the real world might spur an artist. First, there is direct material to work with. Without Vietnam, there would be no Apocalypse Now. Most importantly, when the status quo fails, authorities are no longer able to control subversive ideas. Their moral authority is gone.
Marcel Duchamp’s urinal was not about the catastrophe of the Great War, but it is impossible to imagine it without war. And yet, for a decade now, I have been reading that the experts, authorities, and “gatekeepers” of culture have lost all legitimacy. If that is the case, then the public must be drowning in artistic experimentation right now.
One explanation is that The Third Man speech is nonsense: an Orson Welles improvisation that intellectually inclined middle-class people have taken far too seriously. Artistic leaps happen for reasons no one understands. There is no correlation, much less causality, between events and art. You wouldn’t know from the conventional, almost geometric order of Mozart’s music that violent revolutions and counterrevolutions were taking place at the time. But I prefer another answer. In fact, we don’t live in interesting times. Only historical ignorance leads us to believe that this is an age of unusual chaos.
The inflation rate in 2022 was about half what it was in the early 1980s. Today’s wars are localized and without a clear end. Technocrats have become masters at mitigating disasters that would otherwise be widespread, whether financial or biomedical, with a bailout here and a paid vacation there. A visitor in 2026, arriving from two or three generations ago, would notice the low levels of violent crime, the general material comfort, and the racial peace, before he noticed the “joker” in the White House or even the talk of war.
Welles was right. Riots are a catalyst for creativity. There’s just less rioting than people are able to perceive. The fact that the 38th film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe is still a cultural event is embarrassing and, in a sense, our greatest achievement.
(Taken from the Financial Times)