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Thursday 4 December 2008

How the West was won

Alexander Stoddart unravels the relationship between art and politics

I am inclined to ask if, in music, there is a type of sound that can disclose a conservative bent (or at least a non-leftist disposition). Take the struggle over ‘Jerusalem’. With its screwball verse — all that fighting and not ceasing, building and charioteering — it’s well known on the political hustings, yet Parry’s tune itself has a decided, retreating conservatism. Once it is orchestrated by Elgar, and that woodwind descant twists and climbs with those Arrows of Desire, the patience of your average hood-eyed Trotskyite finally runs out. This sound is surely, in itself, a form of class treason! For the rest of us, of course, those Arrows actually glimpse the truth.

The Left, early in the last century, failed to secure direct revolution in the West, so another tactic was adopted — to dismantle the institutions of the Occident in a long, piecemeal slog. The focus fell on the arts, and this explains why the high music and visual arts of today are so startlingly different from anything you might encounter in undeconstructed times. Where the family, say, was singled out as a sinister and coercive societal institution, so certain artistic forms likewise became suspect: the tune; the rhyme; the moulding; the plinth. Today they are half-heartedly trying to reconstruct the family; but the cultural institutions are proving harder to patch up and this can be attributed to something in the artistic forms of traditionalism that the newly barbarised human being deeply dreads. The Modernism of the last century has forged a sub-sensibility, where man is engineered to be a healthy kind of ignoramus — a Superman — unneedful of the analgesic mercies that art of the old sort delivered into the veins of suffering humanity. The pain is the gain — so let’s write poems that are merely chopped prose, boil our testicles to win the Turner prize, build houses that look like washing machines for living in and, if we make statues at all, make sure they are bolted down at pavement level, so we can ‘interact’ with them (usually with some vomit on a Saturday night).

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