Simon Heffer's new column on culture looks likely to be thoroughly tone-raising. But notice that he is no longer allowed to write about politics. Peter Hitchens now barely does so, really. Gerald Warner is on Not Very Breitbart. James Delingpole is about to leave even that. Peter Oborne does not have a regular column anywhere. The anti-Cameron Right has been silenced by the General Election. Still, this does look set to be a good, solid, edifying column:
On a Saturday we all ought to be refreshing, broadening and stimulating our minds. This column is designed to assist in that important process.
Few things are more dispiriting than to meet an intelligent person who claims to have no significant interests outside work.
Yet as society becomes more pressured, and our working lives increasingly intense, more of us seem incapable of turning our minds to anything cultural.
This is, as Sellar and Yeatman might have put it, a bad thing. Our minds were designed for far more than the day job.
Each week, this column will celebrate the joys of culture in its broadest sense – not just supposedly high culture such as opera, or some fancy bits of foreign cinema.
It will also look at those things that figure in our everyday lives that we take for granted but which, if we stopped to think about them, would give us new pleasure, and a greater understanding of the people who created them.
Perhaps, for example, on your way to work you pass a building that has become routine and familiar. But has it occurred to you what the style of architecture is? Or when it was built? Or why?
And whether it was part of a wider cultural movement – the Georgians, Arts and Crafts or Art Deco – that reflected not only the aims of the people who constituted it but also the social and political ideas of the time
Any part of our, or anybody else’s, culture has a story behind it: if you learn the story, you learn more about why we are who we are.
It does more than provide information, or help pass the time, or in the case of architecture put a roof over one’s head. It should be something that gives pleasure, or has an even more elevated meaning.
In less secular times, rich men and women patronised artists of all descriptions – painters, playwrights, sculptors, composers, poets, architects, even landscape gardeners – to create works that were dedicated to and amplified the glory of God.
But they funded these artists also to derive pleasure for themselves or their friends.
A century and a half ago, Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria found the money to provide Wagner with his opera house at Bayreuth and to stage, in the Ring Cycle, possibly the greatest work of art ever completed.
The exercise elevated Ludwig’s spirit and emptied his treasury: but it also created a new operatic and cultural tradition that, thanks to his initial support, has spread around the world.
We are supposedly – to judge from the numbers who attend universities and take degrees – a better-educated people than ever in our history.
Yet too many seem to believe that our education ends when we leave university, or school.
In fact, as many intelligent people who did not have the chance to attend university know, education for the truly enlightened only really begins when formal schooling ends.
Schools and universities train, or should train, us to use a gift that is in almost all of us, but which too few ever unwrap – the gift of intellectual curiosity.
In its simplest sense this is seen in our desire to read for pleasure. But it also comes when we start making links for ourselves in the chain of culture.
If Wagner wrote operas so different from those of Mozart and Rossini, isn’t it worth seeing what we make of those composers too – and asking how their works came about?
What was it, in the 16th century, that caused some Italian architects to break with the Gothic style and develop that classical form we now call the Renaissance?
What is it about contemporary French films – is it the script, the subject matter, or something less tangible – that makes them so much better than contemporary British ones? And is it ever possible to be objective?
This world requires constant exploration.
And as we explore – not just our own culture, so much of which we take for granted, but the cultures of others – we build that sense of wisdom that we call enlightenment.
We also develop a critical faculty – no bad thing to have for all sorts of reasons.
But, more than anything, through having a hinterland we find new richness in life: and that, above all, is what this column will try to project as it roams around our cultural universe on Saturdays to come.
On a Saturday we all ought to be refreshing, broadening and stimulating our minds. This column is designed to assist in that important process.
Few things are more dispiriting than to meet an intelligent person who claims to have no significant interests outside work.
Yet as society becomes more pressured, and our working lives increasingly intense, more of us seem incapable of turning our minds to anything cultural.
This is, as Sellar and Yeatman might have put it, a bad thing. Our minds were designed for far more than the day job.
Each week, this column will celebrate the joys of culture in its broadest sense – not just supposedly high culture such as opera, or some fancy bits of foreign cinema.
It will also look at those things that figure in our everyday lives that we take for granted but which, if we stopped to think about them, would give us new pleasure, and a greater understanding of the people who created them.
Perhaps, for example, on your way to work you pass a building that has become routine and familiar. But has it occurred to you what the style of architecture is? Or when it was built? Or why?
And whether it was part of a wider cultural movement – the Georgians, Arts and Crafts or Art Deco – that reflected not only the aims of the people who constituted it but also the social and political ideas of the time
Any part of our, or anybody else’s, culture has a story behind it: if you learn the story, you learn more about why we are who we are.
It does more than provide information, or help pass the time, or in the case of architecture put a roof over one’s head. It should be something that gives pleasure, or has an even more elevated meaning.
In less secular times, rich men and women patronised artists of all descriptions – painters, playwrights, sculptors, composers, poets, architects, even landscape gardeners – to create works that were dedicated to and amplified the glory of God.
But they funded these artists also to derive pleasure for themselves or their friends.
A century and a half ago, Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria found the money to provide Wagner with his opera house at Bayreuth and to stage, in the Ring Cycle, possibly the greatest work of art ever completed.
The exercise elevated Ludwig’s spirit and emptied his treasury: but it also created a new operatic and cultural tradition that, thanks to his initial support, has spread around the world.
We are supposedly – to judge from the numbers who attend universities and take degrees – a better-educated people than ever in our history.
Yet too many seem to believe that our education ends when we leave university, or school.
In fact, as many intelligent people who did not have the chance to attend university know, education for the truly enlightened only really begins when formal schooling ends.
Schools and universities train, or should train, us to use a gift that is in almost all of us, but which too few ever unwrap – the gift of intellectual curiosity.
In its simplest sense this is seen in our desire to read for pleasure. But it also comes when we start making links for ourselves in the chain of culture.
If Wagner wrote operas so different from those of Mozart and Rossini, isn’t it worth seeing what we make of those composers too – and asking how their works came about?
What was it, in the 16th century, that caused some Italian architects to break with the Gothic style and develop that classical form we now call the Renaissance?
What is it about contemporary French films – is it the script, the subject matter, or something less tangible – that makes them so much better than contemporary British ones? And is it ever possible to be objective?
This world requires constant exploration.
And as we explore – not just our own culture, so much of which we take for granted, but the cultures of others – we build that sense of wisdom that we call enlightenment.
We also develop a critical faculty – no bad thing to have for all sorts of reasons.
But, more than anything, through having a hinterland we find new richness in life: and that, above all, is what this column will try to project as it roams around our cultural universe on Saturdays to come.
It says a lot that when Heffer does write on politics it is the New Statesman that gives him an outlet. Oborne also writes book reviews and other things for that magazine now.
ReplyDeleteThey should both have Guardian columns. Why not?
DeleteBecause they oppose everything the Guardian stands for?
ReplyDeleteBut not everything that the New Statesman stands for?
Delete