In the autumn, everybody wonders what’s going to happen next in the arts. This is a natural feeling, a good feeling. Optimism is in the air. But if you’ve already spent your fair share of autumns waiting to see what comes next, you probably cannot avoid the echoes of seasons past, a sense, alternately exhilarating and depressing, that we are always returning to places we’ve been before. The other day, looking through a box of magazines from the 1930s and 1940s, I was astonished by a critique of the mass marketing of art offered by Kenneth Clark, the art historian who was director of the National Gallery in London, in an essay on “Art and Democracy” in the July 1945 issue of The Cornhill Magazine. “Market research, Listener research, and all the other means of measuring mass desires,” Clark announces, “these are instructions in the destruction of civilization as potent as the flying bomb and the tank.” I had not realized that the quantification of cultural experience was already a threat 65 years ago—a threat that Clark compares to “the flying bomb and the tank,” an analogy not to be taken lightly, considering that the war was barely over. I find Clark’s words inspiriting; I’ve discovered a new (but also old) ally in an ongoing controversy.
What follows, you may or may not be surprised to learn, has absolutely nothing to do with market research, Kenneth Clark, nor the flying bomb and tank. And, anyway, I think I lost my point here. Still, I hope you are thinking about what’s going to happen next in the arts. Because if you aren’t, Jed Perl will, in all probability, provide you with a sound boot up the ass. And if you have any boxes full of back issues of “Cornhill,” don’t send them to me.
Afterwords
I find it more than piquant that Jed feels he has to explain who Kenny Boy is. He used to be huge.
