Christopher Gordon raises an eyebrow at recent trends in the English language.
George Orwell drew attention in his essay Politics and the English Language (1946) to what he saw as an alarming decline in the precise use of language, in part ascribing this to an underlying half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.
Heaven knows what the inventor of Newspeak might have had to say about todays post-modernist relativism, rampant political correctness and the widespread illiteracy evident in the print and broadcast media and publishing, which seems increasingly to be dispensing with copy editors as an unnecessary optional extra. The Oldspeak language aka meaningful English you may recall from Nineteen Eighty-Four is supposed to have disappeared altogether by the year 2050. A cursory glance at current pronouncements of government and its cultural quangos shows that were well on the way. Meaning massage is one of Blairs legacies which doesnt yet seem to have made it onto his self-generated list of achievements.
Respect for language and truthfulness in meaning go hand in hand. Perhaps the most damaging feature of language abuse by government and public bodies currently is its dishonesty whether intentional or just sloppy. This unthinking relativism and lack of authenticity accelerate the downward spiral. I can try to illustrate what I mean by reference to two specialised areas of public comment in the media.
The uses of illiteracy
Example 1. The Observer on 8 October carried a story by a journalist who had just been verbally abused and personally insulted throughout a rapidly terminated five-minute visit to the studio of the studiously boorish Chapman brothers (in connection with the London Frieze Art Fair). The offending phrase which seems to have triggered her ejection was, I find the ponciness of the language which surrounds the art world a bit frustrating. She was clearly referring to the clumsily expressed, wilfully obscure verbiage so beloved of curators in the incestuous contemporary art world. She obviously hit a raw nerve.
This incident sent me back to what one of the rent-a-grunt Chapmans had to say a couple of years ago after Sir Simon Rattles attempt to initiate a rational debate about rising levels of cultural illiteracy in the UK: Simon Rattle? his music is all crap... He believes that if something is new, it must be crap... as far as Im concerned he shouldnt bother buying a return ticket back from Berlin. We dont know, of course, if Dinos Chapman thinks Rattle is a composer or a xylophone player, let alone whether he had actually taken the trouble to check his discography and programming record on new music.
John Fowles in The Aristos (1965) was already deploring the emergence of self-obsession and style as the principal gauge of artistic worth with concomitant downgrading of content and loss of any real understanding of culture. Fowles contrasted this trend with the tradition of anonymity in those crafts (he mentions pottery and furniture making) that are least susceptible to exploitation by the artists ego.
Rattles crime had been to criticise (in an interview for Die Zeit) the UKs post-modernist anything goes climate, provocatively adding much of this English, very biographically-oriented art, is bullshit. He also expressed and substantiated a view that the media were now tolerating levels of illiteracy about serious music which went largely unquestioned, but which if applied to literature, film or the visual arts would either be regarded as an automatic disqualification from commenting, or else its perpetrators ridiculed. However, since the jackals of the Visual Art world hunt in packs, Rattle was duly savaged by senior curator figures who should really have known better than to defend gratuitous idiocy. It is hardly Rattles fault if we live in a society which mistakenly perceives orchestral music as a bourgeois irrelevance but applauds the vandalising of original Goya etchings as something clever and witty.
John Holdens influential Demos pamphlet Cultural Value and the Crisis of Legitimacy published earlier this year has a short chapter dealing with the role of the media, contrasting the differing ways in which the broadsheets and the tabloids deal with cultural matters. A clear analysis of the dysfunctional relationships between the public, the professionals in the sector, and the politicians and policy-makers, and how this is variously reflected in the media, leads the author to conclude there is a tabloid assault on the arts. What then is one to make of artists who, for their own celebrity advantage, as they might see it, play along with these tabloid tendencies ironically, but in an insufficiently ironic way? I dont myself think it is a straight divide between tabloids and quality newspapers.
For whom the bell tolls
Example 2. I have reached an age when I check out the obituary columns before the cricket scores. I really like and appreciate APe-mails democratically alphabetical roll call. Its akin to the sobering dignity of a Commonwealth war cemetery. Practice in the broadsheets is much less predictable. Here I am thinking more about authenticity of tone and consistency of practice although Im not against ironic inconsistency. On 18 August The Guardian carried a three-quarter page obituary and photograph of one of the greatest sculptors of the 20th century, Ian Walters. Erm... sorry? Yes, thats what it said. Mr Walters was a sculptor whose work included statues of Nelson Mandela and Harold Wilson... He was a deeply committed socialist. Ah, now I begin to understand. The obituarist goes on: Ian was a great artist a lovely man... I sat for him 20 years ago. OK, now I really do get it. The author was one Tony Benn. No doubt Mr Walters was a lovely man and clearly a very competent professional maker of statues and reliefs of political events and figures. Since he sounds as if he was modest and sincere, he would probably have been immensely embarrassed had he known of the ludicrous hyperbole to be applied to his work by the vain Mr Benn.
Two weeks later, The Guardian featured the obituary of another artist who was much more internationally celebrated if thats the right word. The heading stated: Lime green and lurid the trademarks of an artist the public loved and the critics hated. This was about Vladimir Tretchikoff, a man who once described all art critical practice as bullshit. The obituarist in this case was Michael McNay, for many years an arts correspondent and Assistant Editor of the newspaper. In between these two obituaries was another, also by McNay, of the abstract painter Sandra Blow, this time more respectful and absolutely factual. This sits alongside the growing current practice of space being given to submitted obituaries (i.e. of individuals whom the newspaper did not have on file). All of which is fine, but an interesting change in what used to be more uniform and coded practice in the press.
Christopher Gordon has 35 years experience as an arts professional in the public sector, and is now an independent consultant in cultural policy.
e: christophergordon@compuserve.com