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Salient. An Organ of Student Opinion at Victoria College, Wellington, N.Z. Vol. 14, No. 11. September 6, 1951

The Artist's Relation to his Audience ... — Is The Customer Always Right?

page 5

The Artist's Relation to his Audience ...

Is The Customer Always Right?

A man who writes a book thinks himself wiser or wittier than the rest of mankind; he supposes that he can instruct or amuse them. And the public to whom he appeals must, after all, be the judges of his pretensions." Thus Boswell quotes Johnson.

The remark seems to be very pertinent to a discussion of the relation of the artist and the writer to their audience—a problem which many embryonic university creators could well ponder on.

Others besides Stalin, we understand, insist on the public being brought into closer contact with the artist, and given a say in what they should hear and see and read. Discussing "Burns and Popular Poetry," Edwin Muir has written:

"It is good that there should be 'poetry for the people,' as it advocates call it. But there is another side of the question, and I found it illustrated while turning over an old number of Criterion the other day, and coming on an editorial note by Mr. T. S. Eliot. A letter by the Poet Laureate and his friends had appeared in The Times under the heading 'Act in the Inn.' Mr. Masefield proposed making use of the country public-house for 'verse-speaking, drama and reading of prose, and thus encouraging a wider appreciation of our language and literature in its highest forms.' Mr Eliot was disconcerted by this proposal, as a number of us would be; for he had always thought of the public-house as one of the few places to which one could escape from verse-speaking, drama and readings of prose. If the public-house is to fall into the hands of the English Association and the British Drama League, where, one must ask bluntly, is a man to go for a beer?'"

Popular Culture

Masefield believes that the people can and will appreciate the best of Britain's literature—if they get a chance. Eliot believes that they cannot. He expands his thesis in his "Notes Towards a Definition of Culture," stating that "the fundamental social processes . . . previously favoured the development of elites," but that now the opposite takes place, and culture degenerates "because wider sections of the population take an active part in cultural activities."

The degree of truth in Eliot's contention is that culture in our western world is, undeniably, degenerating. Cheap and nasty American productions are splashed all over the place—the French intelligentsias have dubbed it "Le Plan Marshall Cultural." There are comic-cuts and films full of brute worship and clerical nostalgia for a ghostly past; pulp magazines and Broadway plays full of sexual perversion, war propaganda, and racialism. Did you see "The Killers," "The Blue Dahlia?" Do you read "Life"—or Lillian Helman's later plays?

At the same time, It is true that here in the west "wider sections of the population take an active part in cultural activities"? Surely of recent years the vested ownership of "cultural" media—press, radio, screen—have become more and more subordinated to a constantly narrower group of interests. Even the B.B.C. is directed by a committee of businessmen, one of them tied directly to a U.S. press chain. Even in little New Zealand the 1949 Commission reported that the theatre business is effectively controlled by two chains—and beyond that, the whole process, from the scenario-writer's cerebellum to the box-office, is in the grasp of a ring of overseas film concerns, closely inter-related. Our daily press, privately-owned, is itself a vested interest with the additional gag of commercial advertising which [unclear: so] chokes the radio.

No. It is only at the receiving end that "wider sections of the population" indulge in "culture." As consumers, they may be accused of creating a demand for the shocking trash they are given. But in our society there is no room for an effective demand for anything by the consumer. He takes what he is given. A mind dulled by moronic rubbish develops a taste for moronic rubbish.

Hence Eliot's view, no doubt, that Shakespeare, Milton, and Shelley would be "caviar to the general." He seems to forget that Elizabethan artisans mobbed the pit of the Globe, that every Protestant weaver cherished—and read—his copy of "Paradise Lost," and that the Owenites and Chartists declaimed from "The Masque of Anarchy" and "Prometheus Unbound."

He also seems to forget that those barbaric Communists, although they notoriously lack any western culture, nevertheless manage to maintain a popular demand for high standard ballet, for Beethoven and Tchaikovsky, for Shakespeare, Goethe, Balzac, Cervantes, and Tolstoy—to such an extent that they are still best-selling commodities in every theatre and bookstall from Berlin to Shanghai. And here people really do take an active part in culture—every factory and farm village has its theatre, its library, its orchestra,—its writers, artists, musicians.

Bolshevik Boots

One of the most infamous Soviet institutions is known to be the political censorship of literature, music, and art. Professor Rhodes' remarks on this matter were very valuable, for it was specifically to study the relations between writer and reader that he paid his brief visit to the Soviet Union last year. Speaking at the Wellington Training College in February, he said this so-called political censorship was precisely the effective control of the reader over the writer, the audience over the artist. The ordinary citizen reads (voraciously) every notable Soviet book that appears. They talk about it, write to their papers about it, and finally invite the writer to come down to their collective to discuss it with them.

"Imagine T. E. Eliot going and reading his poems to the London dockers," remarked the Professor without malice.

When the Soviet people don't like a novel or a poem or a ballet or a symphony, they say so, and they know enough to be able to criticise intelligently. They believe in social realism, condemn formalism, timelessness, decadence. When the controversy is at its height, it is the habit of responsible Russian political organs, following a lead from cultural organisations, to sum up the discussion and give a judgment.

The Soviet Communist Party's censure of Prokoviev and Shostakovich in 1947 was heralded by Just such a popular controversy. At the time of the dust-up that followed in the western Press, the British composer Christian Darnton wrote this in "Challenge":

"Music is produced and consumed. Has the customer no say in the kind of product put before him?

"I would not for a moment suggest that every Soviet citizen should aspire to make profound technical or Marxist criticisms of music. But I am convinced that every Soviet citizen has the Right to express an opinion on music. It would be a healthy thing for British music if our people lost their timidity and insisted on exercising their own rights in the matter."

At the same time the Scots authoress Naomi Mitchison wrote her remarks in "Glasgow Forward":

"Sometimes I am told by good liberals . . . that it is shocking and terrible that Russian artists of the caliber of Shostakovich should publicly state, at the behest of a committee, that they repent because their art is become out of touch with the people, and should then resolve to do better. But is it necessarily such a revolting spectacle of Communist terrorism and insincerity, or fear, as they make out? I wonder . . ."

She went on to state that the only standards by which a writer in the western world could judge his own work were his own standards or else that of economic return. "I do not say that the economic standard is bad in itself," she said. "It means that the writer writes (or the painter paints) work that can be understood by others. He has crossed the narrow threshold of individualism into the great shared world of man's experience."

That, of course, is precisely what Eliot and many of his "modern" cobbers have failed to do. The people cannot stomach their esoteric gibberings.

Social Obligation

Miss Mitchison continues: "Now let's have a look at the Soviet Union. The standard here is directly connected with economics. If you produce what measures up well by the standard, you get all kinds of direct privileges . . . But you can only qualify by interpreting the Zeit-Geist—the spirit of your time and place—and that intelligibly. That is the standard. Is it so unreasonable? It may be that some of us dislike that particular Zeit-Geist, but at the same time we wish we could do the same thing with a little more encouragement in this country ... I have caught myself wishing there was a committee I could go to, to whom I could talk about what I had in mind to write.

"I think myself that any creative artist is a kind of fiddle tuned to cry and sing at the touch of a bow. We have to pick up the whisper before it can be heard. We have to interpret. We have to undo the folded lie, and we have to do it so that people can understand.

"It seems to me possible that this is what the Soviet artists were accused of not doing: that this is what they felt themselves they should have done more, that this is what they have resolved to do in the future . . .

"The worker tends to think that the artist is not a real person like himself. He is afraid of the artist but despises him, and will not normally put himself out to listen or look or express himself. This is very unfair to the artist.

"Few know what la the present position in the U.S.S.R.—whether there are good direct relations between the manual worker of town and country, and the writer. I hope the relation is still a direct one—it certainly was 20 years ago—for I am inclined to think it is the only inspiring kind."

Rhodes tells us that the relation is still as direct, and still as inspiring.

So what?

The questions that arise are: Has the consumer got the right and duty to make direct demands on the artist, and to make individual and collective criticisms? Should art serve society? Does art composed purely for the personal soul-purging of the artist serve any useful purpose? And, finally, is there any effective means in a capitalist society by which the conscious customer can impress his views on the artist?

For it is certain that our present social system does not encourage social thinking about art. What is termed popular and what is apparently sophisticated are so only by conditioning of the audience. Without choice, the long-hairs talk lengthily about one parcel of degeneracy; the unshaven look glumly on at another. Both pay their money,—but whether or not the customer is always right, or what he really thinks (if he was encouraged to think—is quite outside the cares of the culture-kings. For our way of life has strange values. They are based, not on human minds and souls, but on hard, dirty dollars.

—N.G.