The Turner Prize is justly celebrated for raising all sorts of questions in the public ind about art and its place in our lives. Unfortunately, however, the intellectual climate surrounding the fine arts is so vaporous and self-satisfied that few of these questions are ever actually addressed, let alone answered.
Why is it that all of us here--presumably members of the arts community--probably know more about the currents of thought in contemporary science than those in contemporary art? Why have the sciences yielded great explainers like Richard Dawkins and Stephen Gould, while the arts routinely produce some of the loosest thinking and worst writing known to history? Why has the art world been unable to articulate any kind of useful paradigm for what it is doing now?
I'm not saying that artists should have to "explain" their work, or that writers exist to explain it for them, but that there could and should be a comprehensible public discussion about what art does for us, what is being learned from it, what it might enable us to do or think or feel that we couldn't before.
Most of the public criticism of the arts is really an attempt to ask exactly such questions, and, instead of just priding ourselves on creating controversy by raising them, trying to answer a few might not be such a bad idea. The sciences rose to this challenge, and the book sales those authors enjoy indicate a surprising public appetite for complex issues, the result of which has been a broadening social dialogue about the power and beauty and limits of science. There's been almost no equivalent in the arts. The making of new culture is, given our performance in the fine and popular arts, just about our only growth industry aside from heritage cream teas and land-mines, but the lack of a clear connection between all that creative activity and the intellectual life of the society leaves the whole project poorly understood, poorly supported and poorly exploited.
If we're going to expect people to help fund the arts, whether through taxation or lotteries, then surely we owe them an attempt at an explanation of what value we think the arts might be to them.
And if I had another two minutes of your time I'd have a go.
--Brian Eno, from a speech in 1995 for a major (or perhaps the major--I don't know anything about it) British art prize
What fun I can have
With a pen from Asacol
And an empty room
A notebook's blank page
Filled with haste, filled with scribbles
As I wait for him
Tell me it's all right
Nothing to worry about
I won't believe you
As it appeared in this month's Playback St. Louis :
Ray Charles: Genius Loves Company (Concord)
Imagine how frightening it’d be to record a duet with a singer known as “The Genius.” The latest and last Ray Charles CD finds him in the company of such high-caliber vocalists across the musical spectrum as James Taylor, Bonnie Raitt, and Gladys Knight. It’s fun to play “How do they measure up?” as you listen—who can provide worthy counterpoint to that iconic growl? But let’s be fair and say the deck was stacked against success. A duet with Charles when his voice is rough with age, hardened with discipline, shadowed with mortality, luminous with soul? Why not make today’s presidential candidates debate a resurrected Abe Lincoln?
That said, Elton John tries too hard and Natalie Cole is outclassed, but Norah Jones doesn’t break a sweat. Her youthful grace matched with Charles’ maturity on “Here We Go Again” conjures images of a granddaughter dancing with Grandpa at a family wedding.
When Brother Ray is paired with peers, there’s no nailbiting, no feeling it could go right or very, very wrong. Come on—who wouldn’t want to hear Charles and B.B. King testify with their “Sinner’s Prayer”? Lucille takes the first verse, her guitarist takes the next, then comes the single greatest moment on the disc: Charles breaks in with a “Know what, B.B.?” and B.B. defers with a “Yeah?” Two hard-lived old guys sitting around being old guys together, and it’s recorded—what an unimaginable privilege for the listener.
The arrangements rely too often on sickly-sweet strings or other overcooked elements, and some of the song choices could have been better. But the best duets come leaping out of their settings into a place far beyond criticism. There is a near-unimaginable poignancy in hearing Johnny Mathis—Johnny Mathis!—still gifting us with that silk. He and Charles may not be able to hold the last note of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” for a whole count, but it just doesn’t matter.