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Brown 'Kulturkampf'? Dale, Heffer, Vaizey Philistines?
Sorry to obsess people. But I can't let Mr Dale's easy recourse to lazy epithets pass without ... joining in.
Funnily enough it is often the "modernity" that Heffer, Vaizey and Dale label as Stalinist or Kulturkamph and actively affect to despise - rather as Stalin and Hitler did with their demands for fascist realism - that washes its own face. Artists like Gormley, Emin and Hirst are doing fine thank you very much - and the traditional figurative and "high arts" conservatives like - such as Wagner's Ring which Hitler famously kissed - that needs the public gravy.
A huge proportion of the funding from the public purse goes to those high arts and very little relatively to the new expression that is the lifeblood of our world beating creative industries. Not lifeblood directly necessarily. But through a perfectly invidious inspiration for those industries. Including architecture, advertising, music, film and television.
Personally as someone with an interest and some appreciation across the full gamut from high to low and old to new and popular to unpopular I don't think the balance is too bad at the moment but that if anything the "old school" arts are getting too much.
Heffer is a porcine Philistine and probably has little idea of where the balance of funding is these days. Are Dale and Vaizey Philistines too?
6 comments:
You talk a load of Bollocks. Don`t you ever wonder why nobody, just nobody writes about your silly rants, give it up boy and get a proper job.
I am glad that you have noticed that I am doing fine as a blog artist...
On Yer Bike: Dale's comment, Vaizey's comment, Heffer's comment - all risible. Your comment ditto. The hilarious thing is that these Tories simply do not know what they are on about. they do not have a clue. Yet so pompous, so certain, so Philistine. Vote Dave, vote Boris, vote George - wave bye bye to the Arts. Is that it?
Kulturkamph? Stalinism? Pathetic!
What strikes me is the way this trio of cretins throw around Stalinist and Nazi jibes without having any understanding of what they mean - and in most cases the behaviour they are complaining of is the opposite of the approach adopted by Stalin/Nazis.
Imagine the fuss if were to start to call Thatcher a Nazi (but that would be as equally infantile).
One point that Heffer et al ought to dwell on however is that their views on what constitutes art (Radio 3, opera, ballet, classical theatre and music) and an a visceral intolerance of all things modern may actually bear more than a passing similarity to the artistic views pursued by A Hitler and J Stalin.
Exactly my point TBNGU. They know what they like these Tory boys, and bugger me as Dale would say, it's much the same as their anti-heroes.
Yes but Thatcher was always being called a Nazi despite the fact that the Conservative Party were indefatigably against fascism .Reserves of national loyalty ( not class warfare or weak pooled sovereignty ) beat Hitler , Conservative values despised by the left . The left had a poor war in which strikes continued including at factories making fighter planes and their love of Stalin and apology for that regime continues nearly to this day . You cannot say the same thing about the Conservative Party and the fascists ….although I daresay you will..
A better parallel is the way that any worry about immigration is immediately called racist and has been for years. Quite wrongly and allusions to the 20th century experience of genocide are constantly and quite wrongly present . You Chris Paul are always banging this childish tin drum accussing most of the Labour vote , by the way ,. of racism in the process. The Stalinist jibe is really semi serious anyway and makes a point the subtlety of which ahs clearly eluded you about “plans” employing bathos .
Simian leftists will at this point scratch their arses and move their lower jaws …
I think you may have a point about funding of high art( so called) but it is equally true that the left are in general uncomprehending of creativity which as an essentially individual and free act is dangerous to the control their ‘Stalinist’ dreams of battery chicken life requires. The arts could be enormously encouraged by a bracing atmosphere of self reliance and low tax . Perhaps then we would escape from the Channel Four drivel that passes for drama , the odd kerplunks that are (strangely) called classical music and the rest of the parochial babble . While the Nazis hated moderne art , the Reds, at first were supported by the renaissance of modernism and then enlisted its support . Artists were keen to fake smile on the faces of slaves and art was actively employed by the state in way the Nazis never did from some residual respect. They were mostly dead pretty soon either way. The Nazis did not respect \radio and cinema and used this as Stalin did .
Conservatives value tradition and so tend to be more alive to with cultural nuance . The left regard the past as a trick to keep power and their criticism and appreciation of everything from Austen to Shakespeare has literally taken this Marxist hammer off to catch butterflies . You surely cannot now deny the years and years and years in which it was left orthodoxy that almost every cultural expression was in some way designed to imprison someone or other ?
I am quite clear that the leftists domination of the arts establishment has lead to the enfeebled state of British output compared to the giant US achievements and nothing good can come of Brown sticking his grubby fingers so far into the nations soul…..
Perhaps you can point me to the great state sponsored art you enjoy?
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