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The Greatest
Irony
by
Miles Mathis
2005
In
my response to John Carey’s new book What Good are the Arts?
the subject of the “common man” was a central concern.
Neither he nor I were very precise in our definition of the
common man. Some contemporary writers have called this
statistical or theoretical person the man on the street, others
have created a group called the masses. In the recent past
the common man has been given both to the bourgeoisie and the
proletariat. This paper is not about a precise definition,
but I do want to fine-tune my grouping a bit before I get
started.
Mr. Carey and his biographers
take some pains to remind us that he grew up working class.
This is only partly to the point, since we are not told if he
ever held any jobs that were working class. He may have
outgrown his “humble” origins by the time he was 18,
graduating directly into the privileged existence he now has,
where he can keep bees and ice-dance and, one supposes, drink
expensive sherry.
I did not grow up in the slums
or even the factories. My parents were and are white-collar
(accountants) and we were even members of the country club in my
little town in North Texas. But I have held quite a few
jobs that were not white collar—that were very working class.
In fact I consider my current profession to be blue-collar since
I don’t work in an office—I work with my hands and produce
things directly.
I have waited tables, done
light construction, done petty clerical work, watered plants in a
tree nursery, bagged groceries, been a disc jockey, dusted
pictures in a gallery, and so on. Even after I began
selling paintings, I never existed in any rarefied atmosphere
(except when I created it myself). I have never been
set up at a university or a company or a consortium or any other
group. For the most part, the people I have talked to and
interacted with have been “common people.” Meaning that
they were not rich or powerful, they did not have exciting jobs,
they were not from any cultural elite. And even in the few
instances that they were, they did not have extensive educations
in art. They had a common American art education, which is
to say, almost no education at all. Being who I am, I
talked art with most or all of them anyway. I still
talk art with almost everyone I meet, and almost all of them are
common people when it comes to art. Most rich and
privileged people are common people when it comes to art, since
their money or other elevation did not come from the field of
art. Most of them, rich or poor, educated or not, don’t
know much about art and admit it cheerfully. For the most
part it is because they just aren’t too interested. They
tell me what they like and I tell them what I like, and beyond
that there isn’t much to say, since if I go off their eyes
glaze over and I quickly realize I am boring the pants off them.
What all this means is that I
have some experience with what Mr. Carey calls the common person,
maybe more than he does. I have hung out in the pool halls
and all-night diners and shady bars, the truckstop coffeeshops
and foodcourts at the mall and the loud danceclubs. I have
some respect for the people there, but no more than they
deserve. I don’t glorify them. I don’t think they
are especially pure or vital or any of that. Some of them
are, most of them aren’t, just like anywhere. But one
thing I have discovered that may shock Mr. Carey is that these
common people don’t agree with him about art. That is the
greatest irony. He has allied himself to a people and
thinks he is taking their part in some debate, when in fact he is
simply making himself look foolish, especially
to them. For the fact is that most people who are not “in
the arts” in some monetary way don’t like Modernism or the
avant garde or the trend by any other name. Not only that,
but they don’t want to call a can of excrement art. They
do not feel like they are being granted any creative freedoms by
being able to call excrement art. They feel the same way
about train tickets and Brillo boxes and commodes and all the
rest. They really don’t see how they can benefit from the
death of art or from its illogical infinite expansion. If
anything they are a bit nostalgic. If they are going to
take the time to look at art, they would just as soon look at
something impressive, like the David
or The Birth
of Venus.
Not one of the common people wants the hierarchy of art to be
dismantled, because if they are impressed by anything it is this
hierarchy. If artists aren’t going to show them great
things, they would just as soon go to the movies, where the
directors will give them hierarchies in spades.
In my experience, the people
who like to talk about modernism and postmodernism and the avant
garde and poststructualism and all the rest are not common people
but what one might call mid-level intellectuals. People who
have just enough cultural education to turn them into blithering
idiots. They have taken a course on 20th
century art or on the Bauhaus or on Derrida or something and they
are now flush with new-found power. They have discovered
the key to the inner sanctum. They rush home to
psychoanalyze the children and to redecorate the doghouse in
primary colors. Some of these people subsequently get a lot
more “education.” They read lots of recent books
with lots of pictures in them and memorize a vast list of names.
But none of it does them any good. They can better browbeat
the common people who haven’t read these ridiculous books, but
they have not found any wisdom. They have only found
critical elevation. This elevation allows them to see
clearly the artists below them who are working away grubbily.
The most ambitious among them become critics or museum directors,
and they can lecture to artists on art. Not one of them has
the intellectual honesty to see how ridiculous this is, but the
common people do.
The common people think it is
all a great joke. Art is not their sacred cow. If the
artists will not entertain them with art, then sometimes it is
worth a chuckle or two to see a group of fools biting their own
butts and scratching in public and drooling. It is like
watching One
Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
or like going to the circus back in the ‘20’s: “Come see
the Freaks! Pay a dime and see the rich and privileged
people acting like cretins! They will say anything no
matter how asinine! Step right up! An Oxford don who
thinks shit is art. Step right up! Freakish
behavior! Compost in a museum! What will they do next
folks? Look, the rich man is paying $20 million for a
cigarette butt! Beautiful. You get your dime’s
worth here, ladies and gentlemen! I couldn’t script it
better myself!”
And the rich man and the
Oxford don keep posing and primping and scratching, with one eye
to the public. They love the attention. They could
never draw a crowd any other way. They have no talents
beyond being freaks. How could they ever have existed
before the circus came to town? And the show is even richer
for them, for look, across the way. The doors of the old
museum have closed. The crowds are all here, laughing and
pointing. The Punch and Judy show has bankrupted the opera
house. Joy of joys! All is accomplished. And
the rich man and the Oxford don smile at eachother. “We
have won,” they say to themselves. “The artists have
left town and the crowd is forever ours! Just think of the
money we will make. Now if we can just get rid of those
elitist Jewish bastards in Hollywood. Those old-world
hierarchists selling that horrible kitsch.”
It is never the common people
who say this. It is never the common people who want
everything watered down and mediocritized and squashed into a
strict egalitarianism. The philosophy of non-distinction
always comes from the political specialists at the university—the
art history experts and cultural studies experts. And it
comes from the institutions that these experts seed—the museums
and foundations and cultural centers.
The
common people have never been that impressed by equal
achievement. They like equal opportunity of course, what
unprivileged person wouldn’t? But the whole point of
democracy and egalite was for them not mainly to pull the
lords down but the raise the lower classes. It may be a
temporary thrill to see the prince groveling in the mud at your
side, but common people, like everyone else, are more selfish
than that. The main point is for them to get into the
castle and to sit in the plush chairs themselves and to drink the
fine wines themselves and to wear the pretty clothes themselves.
The prince can rot or not, but the common person is worried about
his own hide, is concerned mainly about elevating
himself.
This is because the common
person is usually clever enough to see that equal opportunity is
an empty ark unless there is some ladder to climb.
Equal opportunity is not as much about equality as it is about
opportunity.
In that term, "equal" is just the adjective;
"opportunity" is the important word—it is the noun.
Consider this parable: “Everyone has just won a chance to climb
to the top of the Empire State Building! No one is denied
entry. Come see the beautiful view. You are close to the
clouds and the eagles, close to the very gods! Climb as
high as your lungs can take you. Oh the freedom. Oh
the bliss.” You can substitute the Eiffel Tower or Mount
Ararat or Mt. Fuji for the Empire State building if you like.
And then you arrive with your
ticket, only to find that the Empire State building or the holy
mountain has been demolished overnight, and in its place is a
two-story brownstone with an elevator. A sign on the front
says that the mayor and the city council felt that many people
would not have the lung capacity to make it to the top. It
was unfair to them not to have an elevator. And besides, it
is dangerous up there! Some people might jump. Others
might get dizzy and faint. A few at least would get a
queasy stomach. That is risky and unfair. And think
of the lawsuits.
Suddenly your ticket isn’t
worth so much is it? You might ask why you killed off all
the aristocrats for this. You could get a view from a
second story window in the slums. And your dreams!
You used to see the rich and polished man sitting up there in the
clouds, eating his sweetmeats, and you thought, Ah, one day that
could be me! I will climb that lofty tower and breath that
fresh crisp air. I will have his library, I will know what
he knows, I will impress the girls with my great knowledge and my
high white collar and the world will swoon. I will have
time to learn the violin, or to take up watercolors, or to learn
polo by god.
All
gone. The dreams of the ignorant masses gone. You may
get rich, you ignorant plebe, but you will still be ignorant.
Some of us in the world are capitalists and we will grant you
your polo pony and your cars, if you are lucky. But the
library and the violin and the watercolors and all that
upperclass claptrap, forget it. That is just pretension.
Theoretically, we can’t allow it. And as for fresh air,
get serious.
Well,
OK, you can read books if you have to. But for heaven’s
sake don’t pretend to learn anything. Collect facts only
to further dismantle pretension and hierarchy. If you
claim to know more about anything important than the most
ignorant person you will be ostracized from the fraternite.
We don’t want anymore snobbish long-fingered lily-white effete
atavisms. Oh, and don’t use big words either, unless they
were invented recently. That is just annoying.
I
said earlier that I considered myself blue-collar. That was
from no desire to ally myself to the common person or the workers
or anyone else. I can fight my own battles, and the common
people can agree with me or not, it won’t change a thing.
I don’t need a thumbs-up from anyone with any collar or no
collar. I am blue collar simply because I think I am closer
to the dictionary definition and I like to state things the way
they are. I don’t honestly think I have a lot in
common with “common people” or with rich people or with
anyone else. Art is my sacred cow, and that makes me
an oddity these days, no matter what company I am keeping.
I have a hard time respecting the critics and rich people and
“educated” people who think it is poignant and progressive to
call shit art. And I have a hard time respecting those of
the masses who find amusement in watching art history
deconstruct. The people who put sharks in tanks, the people
who display sharks in tanks, the people who write about sharks in
tanks, and the people who pay to see sharks in tanks are all
about equally lost, in my estimation.
A dot of education to all the
people above: a shark in a tank may be a bit fascinating, but it
is not art. It is a science project. It should be a
display at the aquarium, not the art museum. In fact, there
are several displays at various aquariums and natural history
museums around the world that are similar to Hirst’s display.
There is a very good reason that the creators of these displays
are not famous artists and are not getting paid millions.
The reason is because they are not artists and because the work
they did is not worth millions.
In
conclusion, there is no alliance between the avant garde and the
masses. The Oxford don has almost no constituency among the
common people. He made it up. The choir he is
preaching to is mostly with him at the universities and in those
uppity institutions that run the arts. It is made up,
ironically, of privileged people. Privileged people who
want more privilege without having to do anything to earn it.
They want the field of art to be theirs, but they don’t want to
have to paint or sculpt anything or learn to play an instrument
or design a building or learn ballet or practice singing or write
any decent novels or poems or even screenplays. They just
want to administrate. With real artists around, that isn’t
so easy, since real artists don’t like to take orders or be
subordinate to self-appointed administrators. So the
administrators have hired stand-ins. That is what all those
Turner Prize people are. The administrators have taken the
van down to the psychiatric ward, rounded up a few people who are
still partially mobile, and glued their hands to various
tinker-toy projects. Then the stand-ins can go on BBC2 and
stutter and mumble and drool and it is great fun for everyone.
Who needs Monty Python when we can get a belly laugh from these
unfortunate wretches who are the poster people of the avant
garde? What a big-hearted people we are, to be sure.
After all, we are
paying them to be our fools.
go
to first essay on Carey
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