zeitgeist - TL:DR (That's Long, DID Read)

dancing about architecture: the non-art and non-science of music reviews

On the rare occasions that anyone asks me anything about my writing, it’s usually about music reviews. The consensus seems to be that a good review (I don’t mean a positive one) should either be ‘listen to the music and say if it’s good or bad’, or ‘listen to the music and describe it so that other people can decide whether it’s their cup of tea, but keep your opinion out of it’. As it happens, I’ve given this subject a lot of thought, not only because I write a lot of reviews, but I also because I read a lot of reviews, and some of my favourite writers (Charles Shaar Murray is the classic example) manage to make me enjoy reading about music even when it’s music that I either already know I don’t like, or that I can be fairly certain from reading about it that I won’t like. Because reading a good article about music is first and foremost ‘reading a good article’.

Anyway, over the course of pondering music reviews I have come to several (possibly erroneous) conclusions:

* “star ratings” HAVE TO BE relative and all stars don’t have the same value. For instance, one might give a lesser album by a great artist 3 stars, but those are not the same 3 stars one would give a surprisingly okay album by a generally crappy artist.

* Musical taste is, as everyone knows, entirely subjective, but reviewing (for me at least) has to try be a balance between objective and subjective; just listening to something and saying what you think of it is also valid of course.

* Objective factors alone (see fun pie chart below) can never make an otherwise bad album good, but subjective factors can.

* ‘Classic’ albums make a nonsense of all other rules.

Let’s examine in more detail, with graphs! (are pie charts graphs?):

Objective factors:

factors that objectively might contribute to the quality of an album

Objective factors (see fun pie chart) are really only very important when the reviewer doesn’t like the music: when you love a song, whether or not the people performing it are technically talented musicians/pitch perfect singers etc is entirely irrelevant.

But, when an album or song (or movie, book etc) is dull or just blatantly abysmal, some comfort (or conversely, some outrage and annoyance) can be gained from the knowledge that at least the participants were good at the technical aspects of what they were doing, even if they are ultimately using those skills for evil.

Subjective Factors:

the true gauge of how highly you rate a piece of music; not a very helpful chart though

Although there are many subjective factors that may be relevant; nostalgia for the artist/period, personal associations, all of these really amount to either you like it or you don’t; simple but not necessarily straightforward.

The positive subjective feeling ‘I like it!’ can override all else, so that an album which is badly played, unoriginal, poorly recorded and awful even by the artist’s own standards can receive a favourable review (though the reviewer will hopefully want to point out those things)

Meanwhile the negative subjective feeling ‘I don’t like it’ can’t help but affect a review, but should hopefully be tempered by technical concerns if (an important point) the reviewer feels like being charitable. They may not.

Ideally, to me a review should be something like 50% objective / 50% subjective (as in the examples somewhere below) but in practice it rarely happens.

“Classic” status:

The reviewing of reissued classics can be awkward, as ‘classic’ status in a sense negates reviewing altogether; it is completely separate from all other concerns, therefore said classic status can affect ratings just because the album is iconic and everyone knows it. Reviews of new editions of acknowledged classics usual become either a review of what’s new (remastered sound, extra tracks etc) or a debunking of the classic status itself; which as far as I know has never toppled a classic album from its pedestal yet.

Classic album status is normally determined by popularity as much as any critical factors, but popularity itself shouldn’t play a part in the reviewer’s verdict; just because 30,000,000 people are cloth-eared faeces-consumers, it doesn’t mean the reviewer should respect their opinion, but they should probably acknowledge it, even if incredulously. Sometimes or often, classic status is attained for cultural, rather than (or as well as) musical reasons*, and it should be remembered that albums (is this still true in 2020? I don’t know) are as much a ‘cultural artefact’ (in the sense of being a mirror and/or record of their times) as cinema, TV, magazines or any other zeitgeist-capturing phenomenon.

* in their very different ways, Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Thriller and The Spice Girls’ Spice were all as much ‘cultural phenomena’ as collections of songs

SO ANYWAY; how does this all work? Some examples:

I once offended a Tina Turner fan with an ambivalent review of the 30th anniversary edition of Ms Turner’s 1984 opus Private Dancer.

As a breakdown (of ‘out of 10’s, for simplicity) it would look something like this:

TINA TURNER: PRIVATE DANCER (3OTH ANNIVERSARY EDITION)

Objective factors
* musicianship – 9/10 – hard to fault the adaptability or technical skill of her band
* songwriting – 6/10 – in terms of catchy, verse-chorus-verse efficiency & memorableness these are perfectly good songs, if a bit cheesy & shallow & therefore a waste of Tina Turner
* production – 9/10 – no expense was spared in making the album sound good in its extremely shiny, 80s way
* originality – 0/10 – as an album designed to make TT into a successful 80s artist, it wasn’t really supposed to be original, so hard to actually fault it in that respect
* by the standards of the artist – 2/10 – in the 60s/70s Tina Turner made some great, emotionally forceful, musically adventurous and just great records. In 1984 she didn’t.

Overall: 26/50 = 5.2/10

Subjective Factors

* I don’t like it: 1/10 (but not 0, because Tina Turner is a legend and it would be wrong to deny that somehow)

Overall 5.2/10 + 1/10 = 6.2/20 = 3.1/10 = 1.55/5 (round up rather than down, out of respect for Tina) = 2 stars

and in fact I did give the album two stars, though I didn’t actually do any of the calculations above; but it’s pleasing to find out that the instinctive two stars is justified by fake science.

by way of contrast, a favourite that seems to be an acquired taste at best:

VENUSIAN DEATH CELL: HONEY GIRL (2014)

Objective factors
* musicianship – 1/10 – David Vora’s guitar playing is not very good, plus the guitar is out of tune anyway, and his drumming is oddly rhythm-free
* songwriting – 2/10 – the songs on Honey Girl are not really songs, they may be improvised, they don’t have actual tunes as such
* production – 0/10 – David pressed ‘record’ on his tape recorder
* originality – 10/10 – Vora doesn’t sound like anyone else, his songs are mostly not about things other people sing about
* by the standards of the artist – 9/10 – I like all of Venusian Death Cell’s albums, they are mostly kind of interchangeable, but Honey Girl is one of the better ones (chosen here over the equally great Abandonned Race only because of the uncanny similarities between the cover art of Honey Girl and Private Dancer).

Overall: 22/50 = 4.4/10

Subjective Factors

* I like it: 9/10 (but not 10, because if encouraged too much David Vora might give up and rest on his laurels. Though if he did that I’d like to “curate” a box set of his works)

Overall 4.4/10 + 9/10 = 13.4/20 = 6.7/10 = 3.35/5 (round up rather than down, out of sheer fandom) = 4 stars

And in fact I did give Honey Girl four stars, but I’ve yet to hear of anyone else who likes it. Which is of course fuel for the reviewer’s elitist snobbery; win/win

Star Ratings

I’ve used scoring systems above, but the writers I like best rarely use scores or ‘star ratings’. I don’t think anybody (artists least of all) really likes star ratings or scores because they immediately cause problems; if, for instance, I give the Beach Boys’s Pet Sounds four stars (and the critical consensus says you have to; also, I do love it), then what do I give Wild Honey or Sunflower, two Beach Boys albums that are probably demonstrably ‘less good’, but which I still like more? But at the same time, I suppose scores are handy, especially for people who want to know if something is worth buying but don’t want an essay about it – and who trust the reviewer. The best ‘score’ system I’ve ever seen is in the early 2000s (but may still be going?) fanzine Kentucky Fried Afterbirth, in which the genius who writes the whole thing, Grey, gives albums ratings out of ten ‘cups of tea’ for how much they are or aren’t his cup of tea; This may be the fairest way of grading a subjective art form that there can possibly be.

Critical Consensus

I mentioned the critical consensus above, and there are times when it seems that music critics seem to all think the same thing, which is how come there’s so much crossover between books like 1000 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die (I always feel like there’s an implied threat in those titles) and The Top 100 Albums of the Sixties etc. I’m not sure exactly how this works, because like most people I know who love music, my favourite albums and songs aren’t always (or even usually) the most highly regarded ones. My favourite Beatles album isn’t the ‘best’ one (Revolver, seems to be the consensus now); Songs in the Key of Life is the Stevie Wonder album, but it’s probably my third or fourth favourite Stevie Wonder album; I agree that Bruce Dickinson is a metal icon but I kind of prefer Iron Maiden with Paul Di’anno (granted PD wouldn’t be as good as Bruce at things like Rime of the Ancient Mariner but it’s less often mentioned that Bruce is definitely not as good at singing Wrathchild etc as Paul was.) Much as I genuinely love The Velvet Underground and Nico, I genuinely love the critically un-acclaimed Loaded just as much; there are so many examples of this that the idea of an actual critical consensus that means anything seems like nonsense.

I’m content to like it even if you don’t

I’ve been writing music reviews for many years now, but my own involvement with ‘the consensus’ is rare and the only solid example I can think of is a negative one. I thought – and I still think – that Land, the fourth album by Faroese progressive metal band Týr, is the best thing they’ve ever done. I gave it a good review, not realising that the critical tide was turning against the band, and, for whatever reason (fun to speculate but lack of space is as likely as anything), my positive review never appeared in print. It wouldn’t have made any real difference to the band or to the album’s reception in general, but it did make me feel differently about albums that are notoriously bad (or good). Who is deciding these things? I’m a music critic and I’m not. And although I – like, I think everyone – take reviews with a pinch of salt anyway (someone else liking something is a strange criteria for getting it, when you think about it), I have to admit if I hadn’t had to listen to Land (which I still listen to every now & then, over a decade later), I wouldn’t have been in a hurry to check out the album after reading again and again that it was dull and boring.

Throughout this whole article the elephant in the room is that, at this point, the whole system of reviewing is out of date. You can almost always just listen to pretty much anything for free and decided yourself whether you like it, rather than acting on someone else’s opinion of it. But in a way that makes the writing more important; again, like most people, I often check things out and stop listening at the intro, or half way through the first song if I just don’t like it – except when I’m reviewing. Reviewers have to listen to the whole thing, they have to think about it and say something relevant or contextual or entertaining.* And if the reviewer is a good writer (Lester Bangs is the most famous example, though I prefer Jon Savage or the aforementioned CSM and various nowadays people), their thoughts will entertain you even if the music ultimately doesn’t.

*worth a footnote as an exception which proves the rule is a notorious Charles Shaar Murray one-word review for the Lee Hazlewood album Poet, Fool or Bum: “Bum.”

a conflict of ghosts

2019 is (to me at least) one of those times when the zeitgeist feels like an actual entity, less the ‘spirit of the age’ and more an actual ‘time ghost’, a baleful Lovecraftian presence whose unseen influence poisons the atmosphere of the era, insidiously affecting the minds of influential people.

A silly conceit perhaps (although few ancient civilisations would have thought so), but a handy one; great swathes of history can be explained by it; ages of empire and revolution and war and faith and enlightenment and (ambiguous word) “progress” of various kinds.
Looked at as a succession of identifiable ages, the idea of zeitgeist (as entity, or in the usual usage) has pluses and minuses. On the one hand it gives us history in a usefully linear, easy-to-summarise/teach/learn kind of way, (too) neatly summarising otherwise amorphous stretches of time. On the other, it removes to an extent the sense of individual and group responsibility at the heart of all human activity and ventures.

This is almost fair, insofar as asking people to act other than as products of their time and environment is pointless; mostly it’s unfair though, since, whatever time people come from, ideas of good/bad (extreme ones anyway) remain somewhat static: people generally do know when they are acting badly. But then again, one has to admit that even rational and enlightened human beings can be counted on to do irrational things like firing missiles at people who they don’t know and have no personal disagreement with, or voting for political parties which it is not in their own interest to have in power, or protesting by destroying the neighbourhoods they live in, when logic would dictate that they should attack those of the people who cause their woes etc etc. Being swept up in the zeitgeist is a thing, and in a way the proof that it is, is that it can be hard to justify afterwards.

Currently, being drunk on bigotry and self-interest seems to be what the zeitgeist desires. The hangover from this kind of a binge we already know; bulldozing piles of bodies into pits and swearing it’ll never happen again. Only the next time, we (or they, depending on how events play out) may have to dirty our/themselves by doing the ‘bulldozing’ by hand, since ignoring ecological disaster in favour of increased profit (as I write, commercial whaling has been resumed after a thirty year cessation) is part of the whole bigotry/self-interest worldview.

In the UK, the two main political parties – theoretically irreconcilably different in almost every respect – are facing what, however it works out, is one of the biggest political challenges since World War Two (I mean Brexit, I suppose I’d better name it for reasons of clarity, much as I hate to) in exactly the same way. Not – as might be expected (or reasonably, demanded) – by taking steps to prevent the problems that are inevitably to arise, or even (as might be reassuring, if perhaps comical) by plotting some utopian alternative Britain which will blossom in the aftermath of the upheaval, but instead by wringing their hands over the future of the parties themselves in the aftermath of the divisiveness they have helped to fuel, or at best not tried to heal. Oh well.

In 1826, William Hazlitt wrote (not in The Spirit of the Age, though that would have been neater:

…hating, like a poisonous mineral, eats into the heart of religion, and turns it to rankling spleen and bigotry; it makes patriotism an excuse for carrying fire, pestilence and famine into other lands: it leaves to virtue nothing but the spirit of censoriousness, and a narrow, jealous, inquisitorial watchfulness over the actions and motives of others. On The Pleasure of Hating from The Plain Speaker (1826) in Selected Writings, p. 400-1, Penguin Classics, 1982

The extent to which this is still a demonstrably true and relevant statement is depressing, suggesting that while ages may each have their own spirit, the ghost at the heart of them is humanity itself. Like businessmen (and they usually are men) polluting their own land and rioters destroying their own neighbourhoods, it suggests that, if catastrophe comes, it will be human nature that facilitates it, while at every stage, offering apparently valid reasons for doing so; as Hazlitt also noted, ‘Reason, with most people, means their own opinion’ (Ibid, p. 439)*

*he wrote ‘It is always easier to quote an authority than to carry on a chain of reasoning’(ibid; p. 449) too, which is perhaps even more relevant here, as I do it

Having said all that, although “the” zeitgeist is talked and written about, there never is only one spirit of any age. Against Adam Smith’s definitive statements of the Scottish Enlightenment like ‘Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition’. (The Weath of Nations, 1776), you have to set Byron’s memories of childhood in Aberdeenshire at the end of that same century: “I remember a Methodist preacher who on perceiving a profane grin on the faces of part of his congregation – exclaimed ‘no hopes for them as laughs.’”
(Lord Byron Selected Letters & Journals ed. Leslie A Marchand, Pimlico, 1993, p.352.

Two of my favourite books, Cyril Connolly’s The Rock Pool and George Orwell’s The Road To Wigan Pier were published a year apart from each other (in 1936 and 1937 respectively (more about the former here), by people who were not only contemporaries, but who knew each other and went to school together; a narrow focus you’d think, but they perfectly exemplify very different currents in European society of the time. Which brings up the question (because I’m bringing it up) of hierarchies of zeitgeist. The Great Depression and conditions of working class people (Orwell), and the dying years of ‘jazz age’ decadence and the ennui of the moneyed class (Connolly) are almost opposites, but both were to fuel the coming war; are these two zeitgeists or one? The mass of unemployed or poverty stricken working classes for whom the Depression meant starvation and the need for change in order to survive, and the differently disaffected upper class, products of and heirs to decaying empires, but with little desire to deal with the running of them in the aftermath of the seemingly hollow victory (or disastrous defeat) of World War One are the yin and yang of interwar Europe, but are yin and yang one entity, or two? (both, inevitably)

Closer to our own time, what could be more 80s than yuppie culture, racism, Thatcherism and Reaganomics? But also, what could be more 80s than “alternative comedy”, Rock Against Racism and the miner’s strike? In the early 90s, rave culture peaked around the same time as Guns ‘n’ Roses; a disappointingly sturdy beast as it turned out; zeitgeist lore would have you believe that a pincer movement of dance music and Nirvana’s Nevermind swept away cheesy trad rock and its stylings, but in fact “Slash” was miming a solo on an unplugged Les Paul in the desert in the video to a hit single just months after Smells Like Teen Spirit had apparently rendered such things obsolete. So it goes; Mull Of Kintyre was the song that topped the charts as the year of punk came to an end for Christ’s sake. As with empires and revolutions, eras of whatever kind are rarely as neat as we’d like them to be retrospectively; and I say that as someone who owned, without any feeling of incongruity, albums by Nirvana and Guns ‘n’ Roses and the The Shamen.

in 2019, 80s nostalgia is at an all-time (or time to date) high; but, even in the western world, there was more than one 1980s

But away (partly) from music, the ways in which apparently opposed forces come together to define an era is always fascinating to look at. When they are violently opposed, as in the case of something like the hippies putting flowers in guns and then being shot at Kent State in 1970, it’s pretty black and white. Whether or not you think the hippies were ‘the good guys’, shooting unarmed protesters will always make you ‘the bad guys’. The two sides of the conflict were clear. On the other hand, once you remove the life-and-death struggle, things become more ambiguous. To cite a trivial example; the founding of the extremely successful label Earache Records in 1985 as part of a government sponsored enterprise scheme (essentially rebranding unemployed teenagers as entrepreneurs) is often celebrated as a kind of ironic victory of the anarcho-punk-crusty underground over nasty old Thatcherism – label founder Digby Pearson:

“… in the 80s, when you were unemployed in the UK, you had to go to visit the unemployment office every two weeks, and I didn’t fancy doing that. If you start a company, you get the same amount of money and you don’t have to visit the unemployment office every two weeks. You’re not unemployed anymore, so it’s a method for the government to reduce the unemployment figures…They didn’t care what business you did, as long as you did something… it was an excuse to say ‘Wow! I’m a record company!’ But the truth is I had no plans, nothing really.”
quoted in Albert Mudrian, Choosing Death – The Improbable History of Death Metal and Grindcore, Feral House, 2004 p.121

Much as one applauds any victory over Thatcherism, isn’t the success of Earache Records (going strong over 30 years later, with offices in London and New York), for all its rebellious, anti-Thatcher stance, just what the government wanted to happen? Doesn’t it kind of prove that, in this one specific instance, Thatcherism kind of worked? Bleh. A silly segue, but it makes me think of this achingly ironic note from Breaking Free (1989) by “J. Daniels” – a very entertaining revolutionary socialist (or perhaps more precisely, anarcho-syndicalist or some such thing) Tintin book in which Tintin and Captain Haddock help to bring down western capitalism.

Breaking Free: “we have copyrighted Tintin” – good luck with that

Apologies for abruptly bringing optimism into what has so far been apocalyptically downbeat, but the point here if there is one, is that people can and retrospectively do choose the zeitgeist they prefer (the changing critical fortunes of pop stars are always very interesting to observe – the world is full of “the kind of people who had to wait until 1968, when it became chic to say that Brian Wilson was a genius, before they could admit that they liked The Beach Boys”*) – so why not do it now, and in doing so strengthen the spirit itself? Against Trump, Farage, rigid political ideology and religious dogma you have to set Greta Thunberg, Katrín Jakobsdóttir, David Attenborough, Bonnie Greer, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, David Lammy, Stormzy, Carole Cadwalladr and really, so many more; this was a random, pulled-out-of-the-air list, in no way meant as definitive or even representative really.

*Charles Shaar Murray in Cream magazine, 1972, from Shots From The Hip, Penguin books 1991, p.16

The current, sunnily optimistic issue of the alumnus magazine of my alma mater (well, why not? I’ve never written that phrase before!) pleased me – because if populism and intolerance are ‘the zeitgeist’, then so is this – and what’s more it is the future too. It’s hard to think of a more conservative (in the tradition-bound sense) institution than the University of St Andrews, but even aside from the cover story (Internationally Scottish; an exhibition celebrating diversity), the magazine regularly celebrates its award-winning graduates from all over the world, the globally important research undertaken at the university and, on a more intimate level, has a news column recording marriages and civil partnerships of its alumni; that is, a hugely diverse mix of people from a multiplicity of backgrounds, doing a range of things. It celebrates diversity (have to admit that phrase is irksome though) – just like movies and TV shows and commercials and shops and organisations now do – not because such things as internationalism and civil partnerships are either ‘politically correct’ or daringly edgy, or because it’s somehow forced on them (by whom, anyway?), but because it’s good business; because it’s society, it’s people, and what people do, how they live and what they want. When people stop being diverse, this will stop happening. And the point is that people always have been diverse, but the people in charge have not. But they are starting to be.

15th century university in the 21st century

Looking at the bigger picture, it quickly becomes clear that all this apparently endless Brexit/Trump reactionary nonsense is just the foamy-mouthed dying throes of old ways of life, ways which, despite the constant yammering about elites and freedom, were established by people with an inflated sense of their own importance and exceptionalism (and/or that of whatever they identify with; nation, gender, ethnicity; the usual suspects) and an interest in a version of freedom which only means their own freedom to do whatever they want to do without interference.

That’s not to say that the dying throes of outworn cultures are harmless (see WW1 for instance), and I’m not naive enough to say all will be well; but the wave of reactionary negativity is doomed, because ultimately people don’t want authoritarianism unless they happen to be the ones in positions of authority and because people who have grown up and lived in relative freedom will not have it easily taken away; I hope anyway. In history there are very few analogues to the present time, which is probably why the geist of the Weimar Republic hovers so ominously.

Despite the current state of world and British politics, in most important ways, more things are probably better for more people – certainly in the western world (not, I realise, a minor caveat) – in 2019 than they were in, say 1989 – and the bits that are worse are fixable, given the political will to fix them (always a problem, admittedly; and more and more I feel the will will have to be forced upwards from ‘ordinary’ people).

But while looking forward, it’s instructive to look at what it actually is that people are nostalgic about. Yes, there are those who yearn for times when they could do whatever they wanted because of the class/country/whatever they came from, but there are also things like the wartime spirit, or the solidarity of the mining communities before Thatcher destroyed them. No-one wants to be bombed, and few if any people actually enjoyed working in coal mines – what people generally miss is the sense of community that arises in adversity* The thing to do then, is to try to create the missing sense of community without having to experience the adversity. And people are doing exactly those kinds of things; community projects, ecological movements, local groups, international organisations. Imagine the progress – in the sense of good things for the future of the world – that could be made if people tried to humanise entities like the EU, rather than breaking them apart or divorcing from them or viewing them as first and foremost business ventures – if hate groups are on the rise (and they always seem to be), then more positive movements are flourishing too. Personally, although I think it’s great, I don’t really feel comfortable belonging to things, but I’m glad other people want to. But like the ever more arcane (and ever more necessary) rules about recycling and plastic-usage, I’ll get used to it. We can still be okay in the end, if we want to. This wasn’t what I started out to write, but it’s a nice note to end on.

*Side note: it can be shocking for someone of my generation to realise the extent to which shared experience – already very much in the decline in the 70s and 80s, has changed and all but disappeared. To take a very trivial example, if you were at school in the UK in the 80s, and if your family was the sort where the TV was on in the evening, you could pretty much guarantee you and almost everyone you know would be watching one of 4 (or even 3) shows at any given time. Not only did you as a child know what was in the top 10 (possibly most kids still know that) but, thanks to Top of the Pops your parents did too, and possibly even your grandparents, if you had such things. I’m not saying it was better, but it was substantially different, and it seems (to me) that what we have in place of that kind of boring, take-it-for-granted shared experience now is similar but utterly different; instant familiarity – ‘re-imaginings’, reboots, remakes, new songs that sound like old songs (I recently heard a hit song that blatantly “borrows” the melody of the verses from Dolly Parton’s Jolene and another which lifts the chord sequence of Every Breath You Take by The Police; these are not obscure reference points, but nor are they acknowledged as pastiches or homages, or credited as samples are). Familiarity, however much contempt it’s supposed to breed, is apparently comforting, or at least saleable.

Review of the Year – the paradox of realism

2017, like most years but somehow more so, was filled with unpleasant things, events and people. For me though, one of the more pleasant features of the year was that I made the effort to visit art galleries more often than previously, in particular to see the superb exhibitions held by the National Galleries of Scotland; after missing Modern Scottish Women in 2016, I was determined to see Beyond Caravaggio at the National Gallery and especially True to Life – British Realist Painting in the 1920s and 1930s at the National Gallery of Modern Art. Both of these exhibitions were excellent, but I am writing mainly about the latter. As curator Patrick Elliott was clearly aware (see also the essay What Sort Of Truth? British Painting Between The Wars by Sacha Llewellyn in the excellent exhibition catalogue), ‘realism’ is not a simple thing to define, and indeed it seems strange that (for example) the peculiar and highly artificial painting of Maxwell Armfield and the shockingly immediate work of David Jagger should be considered the same kind of art.

‘Pacific Portrait’ (1929) by Maxwell Armfield (left) and ‘The Conscientious Objector’ (1917) by David Jagger (right)

If ‘Realist’ at first seems a pretty simple and unambiguous description, the fact that many of the artists (Dod Procter, Meredith Frampton, Gluck, Glyn Philpott) and paintings discussed in the exhibition catalogue also appear, equally convincingly, in Edward Lucie-Smith’s book Art Deco Painting (Phaidon, 1990) demonstrates just what a subjective term it really is. What the word seems to denote in the context of this exhibition is something like ‘representational rather than abstract’, which admittedly is an extremely unwieldy and far too wide term.

In the period in which the art of the exhibition was produced (the title says the 1920s and 1930s, but a few earlier and later works were included, so roughly from the years of World War One up to the first half of World War Two), the word realism tended to have mainly negative connotations; for which see Billy Bunter author Frank Richards’ famous 1940 reply to George Orwell’s article Boys’ Weeklies; “They go grubbing in the sewers for their realism, and refuse to believe in the grass and flowers above ground – which nevertheless, are equally real!” This was and still is an aspect of a wider conception of realism that Orwell himself attacked occasionally in its more extreme political forms. Today, ‘realpolitik’ is used as a term of criticism, but in fact almost all political or social ‘realism’, even when respectable, is basically an excuse for people or governments not to act compassionately when it becomes unprofitable to do so. People who term themselves realists rather than optimists or pessimists tend (in my experience) to lean more towards the latter, but with an added smug quality as befits someone who is never surprised when bad things happen. While the artists of True To Life presumably held beliefs and opinions on a wide range of issues, these are by and large absent from their work as collected here. This is not the 1920s of the General Strike or the 30s of the Depression and The Road To Wigan Pier, let alone the 20s and 30s of Lenin, Mussolini and HItler, or perhaps more to the point, of Picasso, Matisse, or Dadaists and Surrealists.

Edward McKnight Kauffer – poster for the London Underground (1930)

Nevertheless, from the delicate figure studies of Dod Procter to James Cowie’s pastoral portraits, it is a window onto certain aspects of British art and life between the wars. Also, the painters’ rejection of the vocabulary of avant garde modernism should be seen in the context of the time; while abstract or semi-abstract art had been at the cutting edge of modernism in the years just prior to and during World War One, not only had the innovators of that era moved on (why not look at my article about Wyndham Lewis in the 20s here?), but the angular, dynamic language of modernism had infiltrated mainstream culture to the point that institutions as staid as the Royal Mail were using designers like John Armstrong and Pat Keely to give the Post Office a modern identity, while Edward McKnight Kauffer and others did similar work for the London Underground and, outside of the UK, fascist Italy, Hitler’s Germany and the Soviet Union all utilised versions of modernist design to establish new national identities. In that sense, the idiosyncratic, apparently old-fashioned and above all individualistic styles adopted by British artists outside of the more radical movements can be seen as, if not revolutionary, then at least stubbornly dedicated to their own visions.

Although it may seem paradoxical or incompatible, the ‘realism’ of these artists is founded to some extent on escapism and idealism; but maybe that is truer of realism in a wider sense than at first seems to be the case. The definitive artistic form of realism (if we think of everyday life as ‘real’ – but I don’t really want to get into philosophical questions here as I’d like to finish this article at some point) nowadays is probably something like instagram, or on a slightly grander level, the documentary film, but the very nature of documenting reality – whether in film, photographs, painting or in writing – is necessarily selective, and in being so, tends towards some kind of commentary (and/or judgement) on its subject. One of the nice things about the True To Life exhibition was that both the grime-and-hardship/warts-and-all and the grass-and-flowers aspects of realism were represented – albeit mostly in a perhaps fairly superficial way. There was very little evidence of the documentary as protest – perhaps because, by the end of WW1, photography had become the obvious tool for this kind of work. That said, social commentary of a sort was present in Thomas Nash & Stanley Spencer’s idiosyncratic recasting of some of the Renaissance’s favourite religious scenes such as the Crucifixion & the Last Judgement in ‘modern dress’ and modern settings (and slightly generic ‘modernist’ styles). This use of realism was not uninventive, but was in essence just another way of looking back at the ‘old masters’; revisiting the groundbreaking realism pioneered in the 14th century. More interesting, (to me) was John Luke’s strange 1929 modern-dress version of one of the baroque era’s favourite Old Testament scenes, Judith and Holofernes, in which the story of the beheading of an Assyrian general is made even more unsettling by having a strangely surreal Agatha Christie/Enid Blyton aura.

Much as in Edward Lucie-Smith’s Art Deco Painting, the unifying factor in the exhibition’s disparate works was less a matter of style/school or subject than it was atmosphere; the paintings, as different as they are, belong definitively to the period between the wars, in much the same way as the very different works of Evelyn Waugh and Christopher Isherwood did (according to me, here).

If the term ‘realist’ in painting suggests the artist as eye (kind of an analog to (again) Christopher Isherwood’s fictionalised realism; “I am a camera”), the eye of the artist/writer is necessarily as individual as the brain it is connected to. For example, one might assume that realism and idealism were opposites, but there is a strong classicising element among some of the artists in the exhibition – but even then, individual artists seem to have reached a kind of classical serenity and monumentality via different routes.

Meredith Frampton – Sir Charles Grant Robertson (1941)

One of the stars of the exhibition for me was the portrait painter (George Vernon) Meredith Frampton (1894-1984). Frampton’s art was in some ways the most ‘realistic’ art in the exhibition, in the sense of being (by far) the most illusionistic and quasi-photographic. In a way, portraits like the stunning Sir Charles Grant Robertson (1941) are less ‘realist’ than than they are ‘corporealist’ – their accumulation of painstakingly rendered detail being in some ways closer to taxidermy than to the realism of a snapshot. In their almost eerie stillness, his portrayals of professional men surrounded by the accoutrements of their work, (another excellent example is Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins (1938, below) seem – despite the maximalist inclusiveness of the painting – closer to the carefully composed minimalism of a photographer like Lilo Raymond than to a more or less contemporary realist (or ‘objectivist’) painting like Otto Dix’s theoretically similar portrait of urologist Dr Hans Koch (1921). And yet, for all of their modern realism, both artists looked to the past; for Dix – who had experimented with Expressionist styles earlier in his career, the aim of the modern realist painter was to tackle the breadth and the often-unrecorded detail of modern life with the – to him – unimprovable techniques of the old masters. For Frampton, the source of his style is less the realistic tradition of the Northern Renaissance than it is the monumental, but still ‘realistic’ neoclassicism of Ingres.

Meredith Frampton – Sr Frederick Gowland Hopkins (1938) and Otto Dix – Dr Hans Koch (1921)

The more usual classical influence on British art of the period was the modernist route via Picasso and cubism; in the case of painters like the ex-Vorticists William Roberts and Edward Wadsworth (also Edward Burra, whose expressionistic 1930 painting The Snack Bar was included in the exhibition), the angularity of Vorticism became a kind of stylistic shorthand that marked out their otherwise fairly conventional/traditional art as ‘modern’. Several other artists in the exhibition, such as Gladys Hynes and James Walker Tucker seem to have used modernist stylistic traits in the same way; to heighten the clarity and monumental qualities of their work; a kind of ‘realism’ as simplified solidity and a classicism that couldn’t be easily written off as old fashioned.

Gerald Leslie Brockhurst – By the Hills (1939)

For society portrait painters like Gerald Leslie Brockhurst and Sir Herbert James Gunn, realism – if explicitly not ‘gritty’ realism – was a necessary part of their trade. The glamour and drama of portraits like Brockhurst’s By the Hills (1939) is what made the artist in demand for fashionable sitters, but their effect – despite relying on a similar sense of heightened photo-realism for their success – is almost the opposite of Frampton’s still life approach. This kind of art was, despite its use of traditional techniques (and even, in the case of By The Hills, a Renaissance-influenced landscape in the background) resolutely of its ‘modern’ age, referencing Hollywood and the world of contemporary fashion, but not really any of the ideas that had affected the visual arts since the mid 1800s.

The same is true of the slightly creepy empty street scenes of Algernon Newton; despite their passing resemblance to the post-impressionist work of Maurice Utrillo, these brilliantly realised townscapes are depictions of the modern world, but not interpretations of it. While the artist captures the melancholy charm of the slightly shabby suburbs he painted, their spirit is more like restrained romanticism, rather than being invested with the revolutionary sense of psychogeography that the proto-surrealist works of Giorgio de Chirico had pioneered two decades earlier. That said, because of the role of artist – not just as a ‘camera’, but also as processor and interpreter of experience – his paintings are something more than a documentary photograph of an empty street.

Algernon Newton – The Outskirts of Cheltenham (1932)

Pietro Novelli – ‘Cain Killing Abel’ (1625)

In fact, what True To Life highlights, is the extent to which the vast majority of art, until fairly recently, had as its aim something that could be called realism; the National Gallery’s Beyond Caravaggio exhibition likewise showed Caravaggio and the artists of the late 16th/early 17th century trying to make their art – both in religious/mythical and modern genre paintings – more immediate & vivid through a kind of dramatic heightened realism. Impressionism broke away from the staid, schematised world of academic painting to capture something closer to the experience of both the artist and viewer, Expressionists tried to infuse their works with the feeling of events as experienced, Futurists tried to capture the violence of the 20th century where traditional techniques tended to distance it… And in that sense, much of the work labelled ‘realist’ in this exhibition works for us now in a way that it possibly didn’t at the time; to a modern audience the work in True to Life is almost all imbued with a between-the-wars ‘period’ quality that seems to capture the zeitgeist of that troubled era, even while sidestepping most of the troubles themselves.

It is with that last point that the artists – without doubting the depth of feeling they put into their work – mainly succeeded in recording (limited aspects of the) reality of their era in a relatively superficial way. As an example, Clifford Rowe’s The Fried Fish Shop (1936) depicts what the interior and clientele of a fried fish shop of the 30s presumably looked like; as such it has sociological and historical value, as well as being a fine, faintly modernist painting. On the other hand, a slightly earlier and in some ways comparable painting like the Vorticist-inspired Rain On Princes Street (1913) by Stanley Cursiter (it’s quite surprising that none of Cursiter’s fashionable work of the 20s & 30s was included in the exhibition), despite its fractured, faceted and in that sense ‘unrealistic’ modernist appearance, not only captures in its stylised way a glimpse of late Edwardian metropolitan life, but also the feeling – still the same over a hundred years later – of being on Edinburgh’s Princes Street on a busy, rainy day. So in the end I suppose which painting deserves to be called ‘realist’ is as subjective as reality itself.

Clifford Rowe – The Fried Fish Shop (1934)

Stanley Cursiter – Rain on Princes Street (1913)

Right vs. Good – a rambling digression about the arts

This is not all about black metal, or all about music even, but it essentially began with the De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas Alive album that Mayhem, the pioneers of Norwegian black metal, released towards the end of last year.

PART 1: MUSIC

Despite somewhat lukewarm expectations, De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas Alive is a very good album and therefore highly recommended to Mayhem fans, especially those who value the band’s early/90s output above their subsequent work. Like the Velvet Underground’s Live MCMCXIII album (released, coincidentally, while the Norwegian black metal scene was at its most intense and chaotic), it seemed beforehand like there was too much water under the bridge, not just within the band itself, but in music, in the world even, for any of the very particular magic the band had created at its peak to have survived. Arguably this was even more so in the case of Mayhem, because the 1994 De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas album, iconic though it is, is to many people (though I am not one of them) itself only a shadowy version of what it should have been, had the band’s classic lineup survived. In that sense (and only really in that sense), De Mysteriis… is strangely like The Beach Boys’ Smiley Smile (1967), a very peculiar and almost entirely inappropriate comparison that I’ll make again later.

So; a good album, and very likely a great show if you were lucky enough to be there; the band is powerful and the music is atmospheric, as it should be. Attila Csihar (vocals) gives a typically eccentric but (for that reason) typically great performance; Necrobutcher (bass) and Hellhammer (drums) bring the irreplaceable aura of authenticity to the proceedings, while also generally playing very well. But for all that Teloch and Ghul are, by any method that exists for quantifying such things, far “better” guitarists than original Mayhem guitarist/founder/composer Øystein ‘Euronymous’ Aarseth was (and in fact both of them are fantastic throughout), the guitar solo on ‘Freezing Moon’ (the yardstick by which I measure all performances of the song) isn’t right. So there’s that. The band is not alone in this; many, many great artists have recorded good or even excellent versions of the song, and none of them (that I’ve heard at least) have got it right; not least Mayhem themselves. Rune ‘Blasphemer’ Eriksen was and is also an infinitely superior guitar player to Euronymous in most respects, but the versions of ‘Freezing Moon’ on the Blasphemer-era live albums Mediolanum Capta Est (1999), Live in Marseilles (2001), European Legions (2001) etc, etc are far less good than the live versions of songs from the band’s then-recent albums.

All that said, Euronymous himself didn’t always play the solo right either (actually, the version on De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas itself is ‘good enough’ – in that sense, the new live album does do it justice); but in the definitive versions of the song (the best probably being the one on the ‘official bootleg’ Live In Leipzig (1990) – there’s some slightly obsessive stuff about the 1990s live recordings here) it’s a thing of spectral, affecting majesty; quite at odds with the prevailing tone of frozen emotionless-ness that black metal is popularly supposed to embody. Indeed, it’s one of the central paradoxes of the genre that, for all its focus on the cold and dead, it’s a kind of music that is all about extreme emotion and feeling. More than most music in fact, black metal stands or falls on feeling; that hardest of musical elements to define or indeed to create deliberately. Dressing in black leather and spikes and painting your face is one thing, but you don’t scream and cut yourself like Mayhem’s Dead (Per Yngve Ohlin) or Maniac (Sven Erik Kristiansen) because you don’t care about anything. You hopefully don’t do it because it’s cool either; and when Dead was doing it c.1988-90, it really wasn’t cool. So anyway; on the new live album, the all-important solo isn’t right, not because the right notes aren’t played in the right order, but because – although it certainly sounds like the band are playing with passion and intensity – it doesn’t feel right. Still, De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas Alive is a very good album. But is it as good as Live In Leipzig? Unless you value listenability and high quality sound above all else – which is in itself fair enough and certainly easier on the ears – the answer has to be no. Still, it’s an album very worth having if, like me, your favourite Mayhem songs (mine is ‘Life Eternal’) were never in the band’s live set while Dead was alive (ah, the fun of writing about someone called Dead).

So anyway, that solo; it’s good, so why isn’t it right? On the face of it, this could be one of those cases where sterile perfection* loses out to inspiration and/or passion but I don’t think it is. In any case, the technical perfection vs passion/originality argument is one I don’t really believe in. It gets used a lot when talking about people covering Jimi Hendrix songs, or when people are being insulting about Yngwie Malmsteen, so let’s call it the Malmsteen/Hendrix correlation.

*for all his precision when on form, Euronymous himself was mostly not notable for sterile perfection; for example it sounds awfully like he plays the all-important solo in the wrong key on the notorious but mostly brilliant Dawn of the Black Hearts bootleg

Straight away, any comparison of this type shows that the criteria involved are completely useless for analysing music (or indeed any art form short of architecture, where a lack of technical skill would have disastrous results). Here’s a syllogism of sorts: Yngwie Malmsteen can play Hendrix’s solos but Jimi Hendrix probably couldn’t have played Yngwie Malmateen’s – so therefore Yngwie is a better guitarist, right? Well, obviously (at least I think it’s obvious), no.
On the face of it that might seem to mean that technical skill is not the most important factor in being a great guitar player, which is true – but is not the whole truth. Yngwie may not be better than Hendrix, whatever that would mean, but nevertheless he is a great guitar player, and he would not be a better one if he played more like Jimi Hendrix, or for that matter, if he played more like an arch passion-over-precision player like Steve Jones from the Sex Pistols, James Williamson of The Stooges or Johnny Thunders. Moreover, Yngwie’s music at its best is entirely passionate and feeling-ful, while also being extremely technical. Like the classic virtuosi through the ages, Yngwie happens to express himself best through the medium of extreme technical ability. As did Jimi Hendrix of course, in a less neat and streamlined/traditional kind of way. But at the same time, to say that Malmsteen or Hendrix would have been better in the New York Dolls than Johnny Thunders, or have been better in the Ramones than Johnny Ramone is also very obviously untrue. This is a very long way around just to say artists are at their best while being themselves, but that is probably one of the logical conclusions, if there are any; Euronymous was great at being Euronymous, while Teloch & Ghul are probably best at being Teloch & Ghul. If they were great at being Euronymous then they would be better off being in a Mayhem tribute band than being in Mayhem.

To bring back the Beach Boys again, since I said I would, one of the closest parallels for the kind of nonsense I have been writing about De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas Alive that I can think of, is with the odd trio of records, Smiley Smile (1967), Brian Wilson Presents Smile (2004) and The Smile Sessions (2011, recorded 1965-71). Brian Wilson probably isn’t the only person who rates Brian Wilson’s Smile the most highly of the three, but he is definitely in a small minority. Smiley Smile may have essentially been a work of expediency, a slightly silly mish-mash – albeit one full of incredible music – completed for partly commercial reasons, but it’s nevertheless imbued with the atmosphere of the psychedelic zeitgeist of 1967; one of the elements which is most obviously missing from Brian Wilson’s Smile (the Beach Boys being the other, even more obvious one.) It is, however, a neat, sunny, well-recorded, impeccably performed collection of songs. More, in a way, like an orchestra recording a symphony than a band playing an album. Meanwhile, The Smile Sessions has it all; inventiveness, insanity, atmosphere – it is practically all zeitgeist – fantastic songs and, at its heart, a brilliant if somewhat confused band, often audibly grappling with material which is making their brains hurt. Still, the Malmsteen/Hendrix correlation doesn’t work here. Brian Wilson’s band is flawless in their technical interpretation of the music – but no more so than the Beach Boys were, and for all their undoubted skill, they are certainly not better musicians than the Beach Boys either. What’s missing is the messiness, the inspiration; which makes one wonder about modern interpretations of the great classical works versus the performances in the composers’ lifetime. If Purcell for example, could hear a modern performance of Dido and Aeneas would it sound as plastic to him as the least exciting moments of Brian Wilson’s Smile do? We can never know, which is probably just as well.

The problem of living up to one’s past work is one that any successful artist with a long career comes up against. In music (that I like) there are some very obvious examples; when Paul McCartney performs Beatles songs or Morrissey performs Smiths songs, there is obviously an authenticity there that is lacking in a cover by another artist; and often they sound good and the fans love them, but no-one would pretend that it’s the same as hearing The Beatles or The Smiths. That of course may be as much due to the listener as the performer, but not always. Black Sabbath has had several vocalists who are infinitely ‘better’ at singing than Ozzy Osbourne, but not one of them could sing ‘Iron Man’ without sounding a bit laughable. Bruce Dickinson is the only Iron Maiden vocalist who can sing ‘The Number Of the Beast’ et al correctly, but he doesn’t sing Paul Di’Anno’s songs as well as Paul Di’Anno did. And that’s just the singers. You would think any guitar player with the ability and the right equipment could sound like Tony Iommi, but even on the strangest, least Black Sabbath-like Black Sabbath albums, the guitars sound right, where even in the best covers, they usually don’t, quite. I was lucky enough to meet Thomas Gabriel Fischer of Celtic Frost/Tryptikon a few years ago and asked him how – given the multitude of different guitars, amps and production budgets he has had over the years – his guitar tone (not his style or playing, just the actual sound it makes) has remained so recognisable from the first Hellhammer demo to the latest Triptikon album. He told me ‘it’s the way I play it.’ And even though it’s hard to see how that can be right, it must be.

All of the above reinforces that simple and obvious point; art is subjective, so be yourself. No-one can be you like you can. But again, that is not the whole story. As the evolution of Smile suggests, the further one travels from the initial inspirational impulse, the less powerful the vision can be; which makes sense and seems to be confirmed by the work of many visual artists and writers.

PART TWO: THE VISUAL ARTS

Partly, the perception that art can overwork and dilute the original vision comes from modernist taste; the revolt against academic art that began with the Romantic movement and was confirmed by following generations of artists and theoreticians all the way through to the 1960s, looking to (what they sometimes patronisingly perceived) as ‘untutored’ art produced by cultures other than their own, ‘naive’ artists, the mentally ill, children; people who they felt were closer to the unadulterated forces of creativity than the trained professional artist, writer or musician. The willingness and ability to enjoy the incomplete, sketchy and unfinished (a classic example; John Constable’s rough oil sketches vs. his highly finished works) is perhaps a mostly modern phenomenon, but I don’t think it’s just pretentiousness. In Hans Holbein’s great portraits of the 1500s, such as those of Lady Audley and Lady Guildford, something – some kind of vitality – has been lost – or perhaps traded – the fleeting for the permanent – between the original pencil sketch and the final painting.

Hans Holbein the Younger - Lady Guildford — Hans Holbein the Younger – Lady Guildford

Similarly, Ingres, one of the great technicians of the neoclassical period, could produce a painting of skill and beauty like the 1807 portrait of Madame Devauçey, but somewhere seems to have lost something of the life that was so perfectly captured in his original study. And the moral of this is? Is there one? Capturing something and creating something are not the same thing, and anyway, painting a portrait is both. Not only essentially ‘realistic’ artists like Holbein and Ingres, but also, arguably, artists like Brian Wilson, Jimi Hendrix, Yngwie Malmsteen and Euronymous are doing both; it’s just that away from ‘realism’ of one kind or another, the dividing line between capturing and creation is eroded, sometimes to the point of non-existence. Inspiration isn’t one, unchanging thing; Live in Leipzig doesn’t capture the first, time Euronymous played/created the solo – it is simply the best version he happened to play while being recorded – and for all I know he preferred the final version on De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas anyway, just as Ingres almost certainly preferred the finished painting of Madame Devauçey, not least because he had managed to replace the fleeting, lifelike effect of the sketch with something classic, monumental and perfect.

Ingres - Lady Devauçay (1807) — Ingres – Lady Devauçay (1807)

PART THREE – WRITING

Writing, too has parallels with all of these things which, if anything, take this piece even further from any kind of definitive conclusion. While Wordsworth preferred his complete and, to most modern readers, slightly lifeless version of his great autobiographical poem The Prelude to the more vivid early version, it was in the nature of the work itself – the Growth of a Poet’s Mind – that the early version couldn’t be definitive in the sense that the final one is. It wasn’t supposed to be a work of youthful energy and if we prefer the young version we are almost certainly wrong to do so, from Wordsworth’s point of view. And yet it feels like The Two-Part Prelude (1798-9) and The Prelude (1805) are right, where The Prelude (1850) is only good. It’s easy to forget from Wordsworth’s later works that the aim of the Romantics was (initially at least) for the absolute opposite of an artist like Ingres; simplicity (though neoclassicism values simplicity in a different kind of way), vividness & the fleetingness of life, rather than monumentality, rigidity and academic perfection. But as The Prelude demonstrates, not all ideas are simple and not all ideas – even simple ones – are best expressed simply. But I think that our instincts tend to tell us otherwise. (I’ve said similar things while making a different point a long time ago)

Having struggled through it and even enjoyed roughly half of it on the way, I would be among the majority who agree that James Joyce’s Ulysses is absolutely his masterpiece, but by almost any criteria aside from originality (of execution, rather than theme etc) most readers would find his A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to be ‘better’. The ‘difficult’ nature of Ulysses itself inspires a kind of confidence; while being far more ‘lifelike’ than A Portrait… it feels blatantly, intimidatingly clever, where Portrait… feels life sized and familiar. Somehow it feels like masterpieces should be clever, perhaps more than they should be enjoyable. As with music, the pigeonholing of literature into ‘popular’, ‘genre’, ‘literary’ etc creates a sense of hierarchy that is essentially meaningless. If nearly everyone likes and understands and relates to A but hardly anyone likes, understands or relates to B in what way can B be better than A? What are the criteria, if not human responses to the work?technical ones? Who outside of academia cares about those? And who outside of academia cares what academics think, most of the time? But all that said, is A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man better than Ulysses? I don’t think so.

On a more homely and yet more epic scale (see: genre vs. literature), the four volumes of J.R.R. (and Christopher) Tolkien’s The War of the Ring (or indeed the full 12 volumes of The History of Middle Earth) are fascinating, engrossing and full of drama and excitement. But I don’t think anyone would pretend that it’s as good as The Lord of the Rings. This, despite the fact that the excitement of creation (the sketch vs the finished painting) is more vivid everywhere in the pages of The War of the Ring than it is in The Lord of the Rings. And yet for some reason Bingo Bolger-Baggins and Trotter have not replaced Frodo and Strider in the hearts of Tolkien fans.

So; what I am left with is platitudes and contradictions – art is not a science; sometimes inspiration is better than polish; sometimes polish is better than inspiration; sometimes simplicity is better than complexity and vice versa. Great art comes easily; great art doesn’t come easily. It’s better to be a genius than a craftsperson. Being a genius is no use unless you are also a craftsperson. Nothing is true, everything is true. So I’ll end with this; I don’t think there’s any method, scientific or otherwise, that could prove that standing in a gallery looking at the Mona Lisa is a ‘better’ experience than standing in a gallery looking at an exact reproduction of the Mona Lisa; but somehow, it is. I would like to think that, even without the knowledge and emotional baggage we bring to these things, that that is still true. But it might not be. Anyway, De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas Alive is really good, but that solo on ‘Freezing Moon’ isn’t quite right.