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On Pride and Prejudice in the ArtsMr.Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen. I think I must warn you about the fact that I am addressing this meeting as a complete outsider. I am woefully ignorant of the issues that must be a concern to your Society. I don’t know whether our chairman would call it pride or prejudice, but I do not own a television set, although I would claim that it is really lack of time. I am an historian and I don’t know whether any of you have noticed how much longer the past is than the present, so much longer, that it demands most of my attention; even when the rumour of a contemporary situation penetrates into the ramshackle ivory tower which I inhabit in Hampstead. I am first of all tempted to trace it to its roots in the past, which is precisely what I shall try to do today. For however little I may know about your society and its aims, it is obvious that they originate in a deep malaise about the present situation in art and architecture and about their relationship. I shall try to explain what I see as the historical causes of this malaise and show why I am less optimistic than you may be about the remedies you propose. For ultimately I see it less as an institutional than as a moral problem. I remember reading somewhere that the percentage rule which you advocate, the setting aside of a small percentage of the cost of a building for art, was first introduced in Nazi Germany in the early thirties. This may well be true, for the Nazis set great store by the educative effect of the arts, in other words, by propaganda. Not that this abuse needs at all speak against the principle itself, but if true, which I cannot guarantee, it may highlight what seems to me a crucial issue: You cannot demand that certain sums of money should be spent on art unless you know what you expect of art. It is here of course, that our society is sadly divided and if I may say so, confused. The conviction has gained ground that anything an artist does is, ipso facto, art. I think it was Kurt Schwitters who said as much:
Now I can hardly imagine any one of you advocating that the next public building that goes up, should display near the entrance, a spittoon with Kurt Schwitter’s spittle. Even less would I think that you would wish to be branded as a philistine for not accepting this display as a gift from an enthusiastic sponsor. Naturally I have introduced this caricature to explain why I hope to bring the notion of pride and prejudice into this debate. If we desire a fruitful collaboration between the artist and the architect, we must first ask them both to swallow a bit of their pride and get rid of their ingrained prejudices, and that would be far from easy. Personally, I came across this problem not exactly in the context that concerns you, but in the germane context of the well being of the crafts today, when I was invited to Faenza last year, that great centre of Renaissance pottery that gave its name to the term ‘Fayence’.1 The occasion was an exhibition of contemporary pottery. A number of well known artists had been asked to collaborate with the local pottery workshops to produce new and contemporary designs as a development of these ancient traditions. I am not sure that the experiment was a total success, for though the dozens or more freelance artists who took part were obviously very willing to collaborate with these seasoned craftsmen not all of them were able to adjust their inventions to the unfamiliar medium; but what struck me in this laudable experiment, was precisely how daring it looked, a full century after William Morris, even to suggest that an artist should shed his pride and accept a commission of this kind which normally they might have considered to be below their dignity. It was then that I began to realise that we would be confronted with what I could call a moral problem, a question of ethics and I said so in a little speech for that occasion. Even in such a renowned centre of excellence as Faenza, the crafts always had to respond to the laws of demand and supply. Indeed, it was these laws that drove their workshops to emulate the choicest products of tableware and to surpass them in refinement and durability. The craftsman, the artisan, thus existed and only could exist in the social nexus of give and take and whatever his personal attitude, he had to practise the virtue of humility in his response to the market on which his livelihood depended, a humility, ready to learn from others and to accept the demands of the client without demur. It is here that I see the fateful gulf between the artisan and the artist. For the code of ethics adopted by artists rejects the virtue of humility as if it were the worst of all vices. The artist has to be a law unto himself. He has to cultivate his own personality, and if he makes what are called concessions to the taste of the client, he loses the respect of his fellow artists. Thus the gulf that began to open in certain periods of history between the artisan and the artist seems to me of a moral nature. Insisting to be the favourite of the muse, if not the mouthpiece of divine powers, the creative artist will have no truck with the common crowd. Remember the opening of the fourth ode by Horace: Odi profanum vulgus et arceo. - I hate the profane crowd and I keep them at bay.2 ‘Profanum vulgus’ are to us the uninitiated outside the precincts of the sanctuary whom the poet wants to keep at bay. Fair enough, but must he also hate them? What harm have they done him? Is any human being entitled to feel so superior over the majority of his fellow creatures? I suppose I should warn you that this is only the first of a good many texts I propose to refer to. Texts are the testimonies on which the historians have to rely, unless he prefers to deconstruct them, which I don’t. I want to remind you of a text that suggests that even during the middle ages, which our romantics so like to idealise, pride and arrogance was said to be the besetting sin of artists. I am referring to the episode in Dante’s ‘Divine Comedy’ where the poet is taken through purgatory to witness the penance of those who still have the hope of salvation.3 The souls of those who were guilty of the sin of pride are here seen carrying heavy loads on their backs which bend their proud necks. One of them is recognised by Dante, who addresses him:
But the penitent now knows better than to accept this compliment.
After which the miniature painter launches on to a little sermon about the futility of ambition and the vanity of human glory. The passage has remained famous because it states as his example, none other than his contemporary - Giotto. Cimabue thought he was the best painter, but who remembers him now? Everybody talks of Giotto. What matter? Human glory is no better than a puff of wind that blows from one side and then from another and changes names as it changes direction.’ It is a strange irony of fate that this sermon against the vanity of earthly fame became the source and origin of Giotto’s fame, who is still not forgotten, however often the wind changes direction. A generation after Dante, Giovanni Boccaccio4 also gave reasons for Giotto’s enduring fame by linking him with what we now call ‘The Renaissance’, the rebirth of the Arts. It was Giotto, he claimed, who bought back to life the art of painting that had been lost, lost because of the error of those who preferred to feast the eye of the ignorant rather than to do justice to reason. So if Dante introduces us to the sin of pride among artists, Boccaccio helps me to focus on the prejudice with which Western civilization has had to contend ever since: Pleasure, which means of course sensual pleasure, is corrupting. For an artist to try to please the ignorant is the road to perdition. Soon afterwards a Florentine chronicler5 assures us that Giotto never descended so low. He always preferred fame to gain. Mark what this formula implies that has remained a cliché in our tradition: to strive for gain, for filthy lucre as we say, is unworthy of the artist, for he can only make money if he pleases the ignorant multitude. In trying to do so, he will lose the right to be remembered by posterity, his claim to fame. This conviction may be called the foundation stone of Western artistic ethics. It was probably the first thing a young apprentice artist learnt on entering an academy and it may still be haunting our art schools today. I need hardly remind you of the presence of this tradition in the Discourses of Sir Joshua Reynolds to which I also had to refer when giving the Reynolds lecture at the Royal Academy in 1990. I like to read in these discourses because of the good sense they contain, but also for the constant reminder of how things have changed. They have changed because Reynolds is never plagued by doubts. He is convinced of the hierarchy of values he has inherited, the very hierarchy for which the pleasure which art can give, stands lowest on the scales. It stands low because it appeals to the groundlings, to the vulgar who have no better criterion than pleasure. But let me quote a passage that illustrates both the prejudice and the pride
He is referring to Dutch seventeenth century painting.
But the first President of the Academy was too worldly-wise not to see the dangers of the doctrine he preached. It is all right, he knew, to refrain from flattering the senses, but the artist must not be tempted by pride to go to the other extreme. I quote:
Now I am sure that the academic doctrine of the true road to fame would not have had such an appeal if it had been entirely illogical. It was not. Given the premise that the majority of people are ignorant of the arts, it follows indeed that you must compromise your art if you want to make a living. If you refuse to make concessions to vulgarity, your only hope must be posterity. Not because posterity has fewer ignorant people, but for the simple statistical reason that there are bound to be enough people of understanding in any generation to appreciate your work, and in the fullness of time, these minorities will add up to a majority, so that your work will be seen to have stood what is called the test of time. Note that this reasoning rests on the conviction that there are objective standards in the Arts, which few may understand, but which are bound ultimately to prevail. But this version of artistic pride and prejudice was to undergo a decisive change which takes us closer to the problem of our own time. I refer to the belief in progress that animated Western mankind after the American and French Revolutions and undermined the old certainties. Now it was taken for granted that the future would be better than the past and that the artist worthy of his calling had to be ahead of his time. This is the doctrine of the avant-garde which I have belaboured so often in my writings and which I still consider totally vacuous. In this doctrine, Reynolds’ pyramid of values is put on its side as it were. Instead of an increase from bottom to top, from vulgarity to nobility, you have a steady flow from the benighted past to the glorious future. Of course, I am not so crazy as to deny that there was progress, practical progress in science, technology and social organisation and that these thorough-going changes affected the whole of Western society. And whatever it may mean to speak of progress also in the arts it is obvious that one can observe progress in the production of artifacts. Vasari, in the sixteenth century, paid his age the doubtful compliment, that where earlier painters took six years to produce one picture, his contemporaries could paint six in one year.8 What would he have said of productivity in the nineteenth century in painting, sculpture, prints and building; look how many paintings obviously the owner of this house (Lord Leighton) was able to produce. The effects of machine production on the crafts are notorious and have been debated and deplored since Victorian times. The effects of what may be called high art were less direct, but I think equally decisive. For if there was any substance in the old charge that ‘the vulgar’, in other words, the majority, were lacking in taste, in artistic discernment, they were now offered the opportunity to satisfy this low taste to their hearts’ content. I am speaking of the manufacture of what might be called ‘substitute’ art or what is best described with the German term ‘kitsch’. However we may want to define or describe kitsch it is certainly aimed to give pleasure to the eye and sentiment to the hearts of the naive. Whatever varieties you think of, the souvenir kitsch with its atrocious ashtrays and trinkets that disfigure stalls of all tourist spots or the cute ornaments for the mantelpiece with simpering girls on swings or cheerful shepherds or the devotional kitsch that invaded the churches, or the graveyard kitsch: they all combine a reasonably refined technique with an unrefined taste for the gaudy, the sentimental, the vulgar. Not long ago the French
sociologist Pierre Bourdieu devoted a famous study to the social
stratifications of taste under the name of ‘La
Distinction’9 in which he spotted and analysed the role of
the self image in the habitual choices and references of social groups and
classes. His book came too early to tell us of the social background of
all the thousands who flocked to the opening of Disneyland in Paris. But
interesting as I find this sociological dimension I am anxious in my
present context to put it to you that in its effect the existence of
kitsch has a more immediate bearing on your quest. Imagine a meeting of a
tenement committee that has been told that a certain sum has been made
available for embellishment. Would it not be more likely that the
representative of the majority would vote for the purchase of garden
gnomes, preferably after Walt Disney, while the advocate of a piece of
modern art, in the shape of spiky ironmongery, would find himself or
herself in a minority and would have to resort to bullying to secure
acceptance. I do not think it would do to analyse the resulting division
only in sociological terms. We must look at it again from the side of the
psychology of taste. It is psychology alone that can explain why feelings
in that imaginary meeting would run so high and why what appeals to one
side positively disgusts the other. What surprises and intrigues Cicero remains indeed an interesting puzzle. We may call it the ambivalence of first impressions. There are impressions or sensations to which we are psychologically programmed to respond. Light, glitter, bright colours, softness, tinkling sounds, no less than certain scents, they are likely to delight children and even naive adults. But strangely enough this pleasure can turn into disgust. Indeed what we call a sophisticated taste will find them repellent and look for more subtle gratification. How should we explain this negative reaction to stimuli that so immediately gratify? I sometimes wonder whether we do not have to draw on psycho-analytical insights to illuminate this phenomenon. Could not our disgust originate in what Freudians call a defence - a defence against seduction at the forbidden pleasure of regression? If these biological pleasures would merely leave us cold because we have matured enough to seek for the subtle nuance, why would we find kitsch so nauseating? This is a wide field and merely on the margin of my topic today, but I would like to propose that the emergence of kitsch in the nineteenth century mobilised these psychological reactions of defence. Indeed I am tempted to speak of a ‘kitsch neurosis’ which dominated a long period, though I believe it is on its way out. One point you may wish me to clarify: why does sophisticated taste not also react against folk art or the art of children which also frequently revels in the gaudy and the crude? I think the answer must be that we never look at any human artifact with an innocent eye. In folk art the unskilled technique signals to us that this work is naive and we feel disarmed if not patronising. In kitsch the discrepancy between technical sophistication and naive gratification grates on our nerves. We call it meretricious, dishonest, although these charges may sometimes be unjust. A straight tear-jerker may be more honest than an experiment in perversion. However, what matters to me is that the same desire, to move beyond vulgar taste that you remember from Reynolds and that indeed animated so much of the academic tradition, was never reinforced by the ubiquity of cheap products successfully contrived to appeal to the uninformed taste of the philistines or the bourgeois. No wonder the drive towards ‘la distinction’ raised the cry of épatez le bourgeois that accompanied the movement or movements of what we call modern art.11 The pride of the artist who prefers to be rejected rather than praised, culminated in such notorious provocations and pranks of Duchamp or the Dadaists. Alas, history also tells us of the bitter revenge taken by the philistines in Russia and in Germany. I believe that today we are the heirs of a situation that is not of our making and that confronts us with very real dilemmas. Could it not be that spiky ironmongery and indeed Kurt Schwitters’ spittoon are more closely connected with a taste for garden gnomes than we are inclined to believe? Are we not often compelled by the logic of the situation to champion the unpleasing, the disturbing, if not the disgusting, to remain on the right side of the fence, a fence by the way, that may be crumbling at last? In architecture of course, the cracks in the fence have long become apparent. We have lost the certainties that still informed Nikolaus Pevsner in 1936 when he published his epoch making book Pioneers of Modern Design from William Morris to Walter Gropius. I was very fond of Nikolaus Pevsner as a person and I have come to regret the brickbats that he has recently received for his enthusiasm and the strength of his convictions, without which his truly fantastic achievements could never have come to pass. This said however, the very significance of his contribution makes him a useful point of entry into the problems that concern you in architecture. You may remember the opening pages of the book in which he tells a story of the new British Government offices in Whitehall erected by George Gilbert Scott between 1868 and 1873. The gist of the story is that the architect was compelled by Palmerston to change the style of the project. Scott had intended the building to be in Italian Gothic but Palmerston would have none of it and insisted on a Renaissance design, so Sir George decided to swallow his pride, bought some costly books on Italian architecture and in the end he satisfied his client and we see his building in fine form today. For Pevsner, of course, this episode was a symptom of the utter degradation into which architecture had fallen and though we all know that he later shed his prejudice against Victorian architecture, I am not sure that he came to appreciate the other side of the story. I suppose Palmerston knew that Gothic was associated on the continent with the romantic allure of the feudal age. In other words with political reaction while the Renaissance stood for progress, liberalism and rationalism. It was surely for the sake of these associations that he insisted for his Foreign Office to be in the same style which Barry had recently used for the Reform Club.
Admittedly Burckhardt continues having described some of them
For all his scepticism Burckhardt expected these commissions to be a boon for the arts because he disliked the advancing realism which he noticed with displeasure in the art of painting; but in a sense, as you noticed, he had already written them off. Can we wonder at their demise? I suppose there may be many members of this audience who have familiarised themselves with these cycles in London, Paris or elsewhere. I must plead guilty of finding them next to invisible, indeed I find all the men and women of bronze and marble surrounded by personifications which litter the streets of our capital as hard to recall as are the pediments of Academies or the figured porches of gothic revival churches. These creations are surely among the least known or noticed works in the whole history of art. I suppose there must be a reason for this vanishing act, which may be found in the psychology of perception. There is a difference between seeing and looking. We see much more in our environment than we can ever look at. Our perception must be selective and governed by our interest and our intentions. When we go to an exhibition or a museum we mobilise our attention but when we walk through the streets of a town, we have to be prodded to look at a monument we so often passed by and have come to take for granted. Art is often described as a form of communication, but it is the common place of any theory of communication that the message only makes sense to a primed receiver or recipient who finds his previous doubts resolved or his expectation adjusted. Of course, go through any building and observe how you deal with the written messages that you find everywhere. If you want to get out, the word EXIT will leap into prominence. If you want to smoke, the word NO SMOKING may intrude unpleasantly on your awareness. But you may never read the name of the founder or the pious tribute paid to him in large letters. It is different with designers. Design, so it seems, affects us more or less subliminally by playing on our associations as Horace Walpole had noticed. You also know of course, that this response demands previous knowledge. You can surely test this assertion here and now in this environment. Few of you have had to analyse the various elements of this Victorian interior because they form part of our visual culture. It would be quite wrong to maintain that a modern functional design could not also serve as a mood setter, evoking perhaps the aspirations of a brave new world of efficiency, rationality and progress. Surely it is the reaction against these certainties that has led to the crisis of which we are all aware. I wonder though whether the Post Moderns with their historical pastiches are offering us a way out. Do they not suffer from a déformation professionelle when they expect the public to share their associations? Have they taken sufficient account of Horace Walpole’s warning that such associations can only be expected of a few? What is to be done? I have no rabbit to pull out of a hat, for I am sure that the situation cannot be changed overnight. What would be needed, I think, would be a change of heart, a lifting of the taboo against beauty, against giving pleasure to the eye. This, as I said, has always been the concern of the artisan, the craftsman. Think for a moment of the glories of oriental rugs, of Chinese ceramics, of English silver; where would we be if these masters had worried about making concessions to the taste of their customers? I realise that in my talk I have only selected one aspect of our traditional artistic creed, but an aspect that will always appeal to the young for its heroic defiance of majority opinion. Yet precisely because the young are so easily tempted to identify with these alleged martyrs I would wish them to learn that this is not the only possible stance or attitude. Many of our greatest classical composers were still sufficiently close to the ethics of the artisan to have preserved their humanity and their humility. I am thinking of Joseph Haydn who was not ashamed of making concessions to the ears of his listeners. In his manuscript score of his 42nd symphony of 1771 he crossed out a few bars and added:
Master of modulation as he was, he had taken the violins as far as B Sharp but thought better of it, because he did not think his listeners would be able to follow. He did receive the reward of fame in the whole of civilised Europe, but it never deprived him of his touching humility. If there is a document I wish our young artists should ponder it is a letter Haydn addressed to a group of musicians in North Germany who had written to him in 1802 after a performance of his Creation. Let me close with it:
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