by Clive James
I found those first airliners of my life, long before I had ever stepped aboard one, as purely beautiful as I now find a late Beethoven quartet. A very late Beethoven quartet, Opus 131 for instance, is practically a musical rendition of a medium-range British airliner called the Airspeed Ambassador, one of the loveliest things that ever flew. I got the same impression when I reached Italy in the early 1960s and hitched a ride in an Alfa Romeo along the beautifully engineered Autostrada del Sole, the Highway of the Sun.
It was the built world that Jeffrey Smart has always loved to paint. Just at the very time when I was writing my first bad poems about the modern Italian landscape, Jeffrey Smart was painting his first good canvases on that very subject. I have a right to my sadness that my poems failed to convey the joy I felt. But all the more reason now to insist on the intensity of the joy. Nature is wonderful but human creativity is part of nature and the two things aren’t necessarily at war.
Of course we can’t drive, fly and build anywhere and as often as we like. But not to be thrilled about what humanity can create is a kind of wilful sadness. I don’t really suffer from it and I shouldn’t allow it to be thought that I do. Perhaps I will just have to stand up more carefully under the open refrigerator door, just in case there is a young reporter waiting in the corridor whose world view will be irretrievably soured when I bleed all over him.
Postscript
Most of my earliest aesthetic thrills had been generated by machines, if that does not sound too sinister. I grew up surrounded by flowers but never noticed them until much later. When I was given a tin model of a Spitfire for Christmas I noticed its beauty immediately. I held it aloft to revel in its lines as I ran around the backyard trampling the flowers. Even now, in old age, one of my chief concerns as a critic is to find a rational basis for my lifelong feeling that planes, trains and automobiles, when viewed as human creations, are as interesting as poems, paintings and pieces of music. The subject is vast but the underlying impulse is quite simple: it is the impulse of appreciation, by which it is recognized that mankind has various ways, some of them too technical to register as art, of adding to the store of beautiful created things. In modern times, however, another impulse has shown up in the realm of intellectual affairs and grown steadily stronger: a much more complex impulse whose tendency is to wish that human achievement might be undone so that mankind’s existence could revert to something less pernicious.
This train of thought, in my opinion, would be worth opposing if only because its effects, if it could get its way, would be the opposite of benevolent. Many of the modern world’s problems undoubtedly do spring from human achievement: local overpopulation, for example, is partly the result of advances in medicine. But the answer lies in further achievement and more thoughtful advances. Nobody who has taken a look at Le Corbusier’s horrible plans for a modernized Paris could doubt that there are some advances which are too destructive to be allowed, but the question turns on the merits of the individual case, and not on the principle. On the whole, it is the built world that has made life bearable. The hankering for a return to nature is suicidal. Yet it is widely shared among people not otherwise unintelligent, and marks our time as surely as it marked Rousseau’s. Despair is in the air, even in the lands of plenty. But surely it is more sensible, and better manners, to examine the possible deficiencies of one’s own temperament than to start teaching nihilism to children. The urge to brainwash the next generation in its tender years is surely at the heart of the totalitarian impulse, whose depredations form the binding theme of Cultural Amnesia, the book I was not allowed to mention in the broadcast. The BBC’s rules are the same for everybody – no plugs – but like any author I couldn’t help dreaming of the sales that might have accrued if an exception had been made in my case.
REFLECTIONS ON A DIAMOND SKULL
Dates of show: 29 June and 1 July 2007
By now the momentous advent of Damien Hirst’s diamond skull is already retreating into the past, like the unveiling of the Millennium Dome and the archaeological discovery of Tracey Emin’s bed under the shards and remnants of a civilization. To avoid charges of timidity, I should give my own critical reaction to the diamond skull straight away. I find it a superior work of communication to the proposed logo for the 2012 London Olympics, because the logo, based on the figures composing the date 2012, fails to convey that information in immediately apprehensible form. You have to be told by some other means the very thing that the logo sets out to tell you, which is that the London Olympics will take place in 2012, or as near to that date as can be managed by the kind of people who can’t organize a successful T-shirt.
You don’t have to be told by anything except the skull that the skull is a skull, studded with small glittering objects. You do have to be told that these small glittering objects are real diamonds, because fake diamonds look exactly like real diamonds to anyone but an expert, and that many diamonds all in the one place are almost always fake, unless they were once used to weigh the combined tonnage of the old Aga Khan or appliquéd to the doorknob of Saddam Hussein’s eleventh gold bathroom in palace number 17.
It’s a matter of context. A knock-off designer bag looks exactly like the original but its presence on the arm of a downmarket female sex worker leads you to believe that it might not be genuine. When she produces the receipt, however, the evidence begins to accumulate that she has made an investment purchase.
Back with the skull: once you have been told that the diamonds are real even though they look phoney because of their context, it’s easy to believe that the materials of this otherwise unremarkable bibelot cost somewhere above ten million sterling and that the selling price will be nowhere below fifty million, which sounds like a profit for somebody. We can only hope that the artisans who put the diamonds into position with tweezers – presuming that Mr Hirst didn’t do this himself – were being paid better than the workers who build the hotels in Dubai. Those workers get fifteen minutes for lunch. But the skull isn’t out to pose satirical questions to corporate capitalism. The skull takes corporate capitalism for granted.
In fact the skull exists in order to make corporate capitalism feel artistic. It’s unlikely that any single individual, no matter how well off, will be in the market to buy the diamond skull. Not even Madonna, who might like the skull to go with her Frida Kahlo paintings, which it rivals in its kitsch shock value – although the skull, unlike a Frida Kahlo open-heart self-portrait, has no moustache – not even Madonna would be able to pay the tab without feeling the pinch.
There is an Indian zillionaire who regards the Hinduja brothers as poverty-stricken. He could afford the skull, but it would cut into the fund he keeps for getting a flying-saucer pilot to defect. What he wants is an operational flying saucer, not a tarted-up prop from the Ghost Train. Damien Hirst’s manager, who knows an awful lot about money, has deliberately priced the diamond skull out at the dizzy limit where individual wealth must bow to the wealth of institutions.
Even if Michael Jackson buys the thing for a paperweight, I’ll be surprised if it isn’t soon passed on at yet another huge mark-up to its true destination, the area between the atrium and the boardroom of the London or New York headquarters of some organization with a name like Merrill Stanley Morgan Lynch. Shining like a compressed constellation on its marble plinth, the skull will have the task of being talked about by the board members as they make their stately progress into a meeting and do a bit of international bonding before getting down to business.
The director from Oslo, in English, points out to the directors from Lima and Kuala Lumpur that the skull is the product of the same English artist who cut a shark in half. The Japanese interpreter points out to the director from Tokyo that the skull is the product of the English artist who was cut in half by a shark.
Everybody has relaxed. They have talked about art. The diamond skull has fulfilled its destiny, which is to be a talking point, what used to be miscalled a conversation piece: a way of chattering ab
out art for people who know nothing about it. And that gives us a clue.
Because even if you do know about art, you can’t talk about it socially. You don’t talk about that bit in Botticelli’s Primavera where the Medici prince reaches up for the orange or that bit in the Birth of Venus where her neck would look wrong if her shoulders weren’t wrong too. It would be a conversation killer if you did, except among a gathering of Botticelli experts. That level of art is a different kind of event, and a much slower one. In the early nineteenth century a Botticelli could be bought for peanuts. The painter’s commercial value, which is infinite, took a long time to catch up with the value placed on him by those who understood him.
Eventually the big Botticelli pictures were so identified with the soul of their country’s heritage that Hitler buried them in a salt-mine with orders to destroy them if he lost the war. The pictures were saved by some Nazi officer who loved them more than his ideology. But when it comes to art, we don’t talk about serious matters like that at the dinner table unless we know each other well enough to risk being boring. Instead, we talk about the nonsense. Salvador Dalí became a celebrity because he was more than half talking point. He could paint, but he was serious mainly about publicity. Tracey’s bed was all talking point. I’m not sure who has it now. I think it burned down, unless I’ve got my stories mixed up. What I am sure of is that I have inhabited beds in far worse condition than Tracey’s. But Tracey’s bed is the one we all know.
This is where the mass media come in, as they once came in for Morecambe and Wise when everybody watched their Christmas show on television and every newspaper talked about it afterwards. For a certain period, the mass media give subjects of common speech even to people who fancy themselves above the mass media. Damien Hirst’s shark was a common talking point for a time, and so will the diamond skull be: for a little more time, perhaps, but not for ever. The Botticelli paintings are for ever because they aren’t talking points. The difference is absolute. For the diamond skull to be immortal, the culture it expresses will have to become immortal, and that culture is the celebrity culture. It might happen. I’m being positive in this series, and I have to admit that lately I’ve begun to feel uneasy about the low view I’ve always taken of celebrity claptrap.
The guilt I started to feel about questioning the achievements of Posh Spice or Britney Spears should have tipped me off. The secret of criticism is to know what your real feelings are before you try to express them. My real feelings were crystallized by that delicious comic moment when Paris Hilton emerged from the slammer to pronounce herself grateful for what she called her ‘learning experience’. At last I realized that I didn’t really disapprove of her at all. She’s too valuable. She’s our example, today, of the person who exists to prove that wealth for its own sake is utterly pointless.
And that’s the very culture that the diamond skull expresses. Most of the Aztec crystal skulls that were once so popular in the world’s major museums have by now turned out to be fake, but when they drew crowds it was because the Aztecs, though horrible, lived long ago, and the skulls were therefore thought to express a vanished culture, if nothing else. But the diamond skull expresses a culture all our own: the celebrity culture. Glittering, hollow and perfectly brainless, it reflects spendthrift emptiness with its every facet.
As with the culture itself, so with this brilliant symbol, we are left with almost nothing to say, but we can all say something. We might say that all the skull needs is Snoop Dogg’s shades, David Beckham’s earring and a wig styled like whatever that is on top of Donald Trump’s head, and then it would reflect our whole existence. But that wouldn’t be quite right, because one of the things we want is art for all.
The diamond skull wants that too. You can tell by the device on its forehead: a kind of cartoon cartouche with a touching subtext saying: this isn’t just a skull covered in diamonds in your bog-standard manner, a certain amount of contrivance went into it as well. And even though that touch of decoration is actually no more subtle than the bogus coat of arms on a 1950s Cadillac, it sends out a message to every viewer. The diamond skull wants you to know that art isn’t just money after all. I’m delighted to agree, just as I’m sure that the merry miners all over the world who dug out the original diamonds have now realized the pettiness of any thoughts about a rise in salary.
Postscript
Damien Hirst’s occasional appearances on television, in his role as the rough-hewn chap being pitilessly questioned about what it is like to be a genius, are enough to prove that he has his charms. Similarly, I was pleased to exchange an air-kiss with Tracey Emin when I met her at a reception, and for those who know her better she must be fun to talk to: her celebrated description of herself (‘Body from Baywatch, face from Crimewatch’) is a true epigram. But the key word is ‘celebrated’. These are famous artists, but their art is a commodity before it is a creation. The painter Sarah Raphael, who was lost to us tragically early in what was already a great career, made works of art. There was a reason why people paid high prices for them: because they didn’t want to live without them. People who pay a high price for a diamond skull just don’t want to live without the visible proof that they can afford the tab. By the time of this broadcast, the air was starting to hiss out of the notion that international corporate greed might have a beneficial collective effect in patronage for the arts. It was not yet seen that the collective effect of corporate greed was going to be a hard lesson for the world’s financial system, but the bloom was off the rose. Or to put it another way, the shine was off the skull, which proved to be Hirst’s last venture in the field of the impossibly priced no-no. After that he went back to repairing his own sharks, which, to the disappointment of their injudicious owners, were proving more resistant than Lenin and Chairman Mao to the preservative properties of formaldehyde.
GLIDER SHOES
Dates of show: 6 and 8 July 2007
The youngsters who wear them call them wheelies or Heelys, but to avoid any evocation of the dreaded wheelie bin I prefer to call them glider shoes. I saw my first pair of glider shoes several weeks ago on a slightly sloping stretch of brick pavement beside London’s City Hall, which is not far up river from my office. Or rather I saw the small boy wearing the glider shoes. I noticed him before I noticed the shoes, which is the whole idea.
Like anyone in the vicinity of the City Hall building at any time, I am always on the lookout for something pleasant to look at instead. Ken Livingstone works in City Hall and I would almost rather look at him than look at his building. As I recall, he had a similar opinion to mine about the appearance of that building before he was obliged to move into it, but after he was, his opinion abruptly changed: a measure of his pragmatism.
Anyway, less of that for now, because I want to be positive in this series. Let’s just say that there I was, walking up past City Hall towards my favoured branch of a certain famous coffee-bar chain where I get my morning grande decaff skinny latte to stay – the same establishment is patronized also by Ken, but he never stays, he always goes – and as I walked I was looking around trying to avoid any view that included City Hall, which for now I will deliberately avoid describing as a magnified flounder’s eye in lonely search of its missing twin, when suddenly, or rather gradually, this child glided into view.
Not yet an adolescent but bigger than an infant, in the Victorian era he would have been described as an urchin. But the Victorian era never produced an urchin who could glide forward without moving his feet. This kid moved silently past me and on down the very slight incline as I stopped, swivelled, and marvelled. It was a dream come true.
About fifty years ago when I first saw Jean Cocteau’s film about Orpheus, I had been especially taken by the way the characters, on their way into the underworld, glided forward without moving their feet. But I knew that to be film trickery. This was real life. The slope of the pavement was just detectable enough to suggest that gravity was doing the job of propelling this little bloke across the e
arth’s surface, but even more startling than the absence of motion from his shoes was the absence of noise.
If there were a hundred ball-bearings under each shoe, they must be of a new kind. I would have liked to ask him, but at my age you don’t want to be seen breaking into a run in pursuit of a strange child, or you can end up on a police register. So I contained my curiosity until I was among my family a few days later. Among my family there are sources for all knowledge. Knowledge, for example, of how to save the earth by separating compostable and non-compostable waste matter into dedicated wheelie bins. Knowledge beyond my ken, and, I suspect, beyond Ken’s ken.
But it soon became apparent that on the subject of glider shoes they were merely guessing. They hadn’t seen underneath a pair, although they could report numerous sightings of tots going eerily past without any obvious outlay of power: the ideal means of locomotion at last, emissions nil, the zero footprint. There were various guesses as to the means, from multiple nylon wheels to a caterpillar track suspended on liquid-filled tungsten bearings. One suggestion involved two tiny hovercraft connected electronically to travel side by side, but the proponent of that theory was at a loss to explain the absence of dust or indeed any measurable impact on the environment.
All were agreed that this latter characteristic was a good thing and the sooner that the President of the United States and his entire entourage could travel from the White House to Andrews Air Force Base by glider shoe instead of motorcade the better for mankind. But this consensus had yielded more emotion than information, and I resolved to arrange things in the near future so that I could find out how a glider shoe worked.
While waiting, I had ample time to review my life and decide that one of the many things that had gone wrong with it was that I have never managed to realize this very dream of frictionless, effortless motion despite many attempts. Early in my career, at about the age of ten, I was bought a pair of roller skates by my mother, but they were not very satisfactory. I could go down our street at a fair clip in my feeble pram-wheeled billycart, but on the skates I might as well have been going up the street as down.