The central skill for liking culture is not to let others bully you into pretending to like what you do not like, or into pretending to dislike what you do like. To live a happy life, in other words, try to avoid cultural false consciousness.
And if one of the skills of excellent writing is to confess to a sin that lots of others know they are guilty of too, but hadn't yet got around to admitting to themselves until the excellent writer confessed it out for them, then this Spectator article by Tom Utley is truly excellent.
It is by no means a bad thing that so many of us (if I am right) go around pretending to enjoy the finer things in life, when they don’t really do all that much for us. We do far less harm than the unashamedly philistine, beating each other up on the terraces at Millwall. But one can push a pretence too far. If Buccleuch gets his 'Madonna of the Yarnwinder' back, as I earnestly hope he will, the Dumfriesshire and Galloway fire brigade should be given new instructions: in the event of a fire at Drumlanrig, save the Duke, who seems a nice old buffer, and let the Leonardo burn.
The sad thing is that Tom Utley still seems to confuse the aesthetic and the moral. There is no necessary connection between deciding that you don't much like Leonardo's paintings and assaulting people at football matches. If you don't like Leonardo, don't bother with him, and don't fill the newly empty hours by assaulting people. Is that really such a hard rule to follow? Most "philistines" are not bad people. I don't much like sitting through concerts, staring at paintings except in attractive female company, the operas of Rossini in any circumstances or on any medium, Baroque music played in an excessively authentic style ditto, so I don't endure these things. Nor do I beat people up. Nor do I write Spectator articles recommending that Leonardo paintings be left to burn just because I don't personally care for them.
The same kinds of things can be said of Patrick Crozier, who also picked up on this piece.
It is a bad thing that Tom Utley has wasted so much of his life making himself unhappy with what others consider to be great art but which he didn't like. Unhappiness is bad.
However, the news for Utley is not all bad. His time wasn't completely wasted. What Utley and I clearly both enjoy is writing cleverly. He even gets paid to write cleverly, but he does it cleverly enough to suggest that he would do it for nothing if no one paid him, and probably he does in such things as clever letters and emails to friends and family. And now that Utley has trudged through all those art galleries and castles and sat through all those concerts, he has all kinds of things to write about cleverly, as this article of his proves. He will have learned things. Even so, it's a bit sad that he had to wait until he's middle aged (and thus qualified to write for the Spectator) before learning one of the basic rules for how to enjoy yourself.
I have a category of experience which I label something like: didn't make me very happy but happy to have done it. When David Carr took me to a Premier League football match at Stamford Bridge, frankly, my mind did wander a bit, Utley style. And of course there was lots of annoying travelling involved, as always when you actually go to things. But the recollection of that event is pure pleasure, and I would hate now to be without that memory. It was Roman Abramovich's first home game as the owner of Chelsea. Fascinating. I was entertained only on and off at the time, but afterwards I loved it.
At the risk of going on far too long, I do want to add one more thing here, which is that I do truly love to listen to classical music CDs. There's no false consciousness there. I love them. If you're happy to take that on trust, if you already see the point of this point, if you don't give a toss about Richard Strauss, and if you have other things to do now, fine. Stop reading this now.
A long time ago, I once, for those of you still with me, had a little spell of worrying that perhaps I didn't really love classical music and that I only pretended to myself that I loved so as to feel superior to all the people who didn't love it. And then I went to the cinema and saw a frankly rather dreary (I later decided - Utley style) film called 2001 A Space Odyssey. But the start wasn't dreary. And it had this fabulous music. At the time I had no idea about Richard Strauss tone poems, and the habit of stitching unaltered classical music (or for that matter unaltered pop music) into movies was not nearly as common then as it is now. So I just thought that some Hollywood hack had had, so to speak, a rare on day. Most of Hollywood made-for-the-movies music strikes me as dull, dull, dull – whether orchestral, jazzified, poppified, or, now, I suppose, danceified or hiphoppified. But this 2001 music struck me as genuinely arresting. I thought: Wow, can I buy it?
Well, of course, it turned out that I could. It was one of my team, and I've loved all those grandiose Richard Strauss tone poems ever since, not just the opening of Also Sprach Zarathusthra (the now famous 2001 music), but also the Alpine Symphony and Heldenleben. Even the much despised Sinfonia Domestica.
And there's another taste you aren't supposed to have, according to some snobs who like to make subtle distinctions between kosher classical music and the rest. And if you do like Richard Strauss, you are supposed to like the strident and decadent and often rather discordant early stuff like Elektra and Salomé, but you aren't allowed to like the mushy stuff like Rosenkavalier or the somewhat ridiculous stuff (in the sense that the programmes are ridiculous) like Heldenleben and Sinfonia Domestica. The sublime Metamorphosen and the equally sublime Four Last Songs are also verboten because by the time Strauss wrote them the style he used was way out of style, so you can't love those either.
Oh yes I can. As Alice Bachini might put it: Our Hero now waves his wooden sword at a gang of gibbering Culture Snobs who withdraw from the stage in disarray.
I apologise if this posting has been rather long and a bit grandiose and self-centred, but I hope you enjoyed it anyway.
