Talking dirty

Attached to the ménage of every artistic outfit these days will be an employee who believes there is a magic formula which,  once found, will bring in millions of everything: fans, column inches, money. Perhaps all artists secretly believe that what we do must have universal appeal: our insights are simply too significant to be overlooked. The only reason why other people don’t come to our concerts, buy our discs, or otherwise frequent our places of high culture is that it hasn’t yet got through to them that we exist. They only have to be drawn in by the right kind of publicity and everybody will love what we do.

To find this publicity is the job of expensive professionals who spend their lives identifying the perfect image or coining the irresistible slogan. I notice that little thought is given to the possibility that the chosen image or slogan might have a counterproductive effect: that the great unwashed ignore the whole exercise no matter how thrillingly they are talked down to, while those who are already interested may rapidly go off the idea if the publicity is too trashy. Remember the cringeworthy series of advertisements that Radio Three put out when Nicholas Kenyon first took over? I wonder how many were converted to the station by the sight of a lorry driver leaning out of his cab and grinning toothily over the caption ‘Ludwig Van’. My guess is that an already small number of listeners dipped, at least for a few months. History does not relate whether they ever came back.

Such exercises aim for unlimited success: the publicity material is designed to appeal to everybody, which means going in at a populist level even though everyone knows the actual yield will never be in the millions, but at best be in the thousands.