Art and Politics

When David Frost asked Tracy Emin on his TV show why her bed was a work of art, she replied 'because I say it is'. He didn't then ask her, as he could have done, 'But who says you're an artist?'. Artists don't, by any means, hold all the cards. They are free to try to be artists, but others are also free to decide for themselves whether they have achieved this goal.

An interesting quote from an article over at Spiked that otherwise seems to be under the impression that it's still 1999:

There is a cynicism in the heart of much that passes for art today, which sits oddly with its claim to be art. After all, art has to be positive, even when it deals with the most depressing aspects of experience, because if it isn't what is the point of making it? But far from seeking a positive response to its work, the establishment art of today actually stimulates a negative reaction.

New Labour cannot be accused of doing that, but there is a cynicism in its thinking too, because where can one go if one wants to oppose it? You are either with New Labour, or nowhere, and that is not a healthy state of affairs for either politics or art.

OK, maybe I'm overstating things a little (I'm not really engaged enough with modern art to judge its value), but whilst I think that the above may have been an accurate representation of the state of politics three or four years ago, I'm not convinced it's true now - if only because of the spectacular and prolonged New Labour implosion of the last six months.

Heatwave

In the Times today:

The heatwave is now forecast to last for another two weeks and the summer of 2003 is set to outsizzle even 1976. Most remarkably of all, the summer of '03 may also be the most agreeable. Unlike 1976, there are no wild fires, no water rationing and no need for a 'Minister of Drought'. While temperatures have soared, the rain has come in the right quantities at the right time - often at night.

I just think it's interesting that for once we're seeing a climactic extreme that is (if this is not a contradiction in terms) stable and balanced. And on a shallow level, I'm glad it's still forecast to be good weather when I'm down at the Eden Project.

Weird Again

Remember the New Weird? This month's issue of The Third Alternative comes with a tub-thumping guest editorial by China Mieville:

Something is happening in the literature of the fantastic. A slippage. A freeing-up. The quality is astounding. Notions are sputtering and bleeding across internal and external boundaries. Particularly in Britain, where we are being reviewed in the papers, of all things, and selling copies, and being read and riffed off by yer actual proper literary writers. We are writing books which cheerfully ignore the boundaries between SF, fantasy and horror. Justina Robson, M. John Harrison, Steve Cockayne, Al Reynolds, Steph Swainston and too many others to mention, despite all our differences, share something. And our furniture has invaded their headspace. From outside the field, writers like Toby Litt and David Mitchell use the trappings of SF with a respect and facility that has long been missing in the clodhopping condescension of the literati.

The longer this goes on, the less clearly I understand it. I can see that there's something going on within fantasy that simply amounts to the fact that there's good fantasy being written, not just sword and sorcery, and lots of it. I can't see such a clear renaissance within science fiction. Light, and Natural History, and what I've read of Reynolds - I don't see these works as the sort of break from the pack that Perdido Street Station and The Light Ages and Wanderers and Islanders represent for fantasy.