Daniel Finkelstein, The Times Associate Editor, doesn’t think so. In another fulsome encomium to the late David Bowie, he writes: “…pop, with Bowie at its head, saw that consumerism isn’t base and philistine. It can be the ally of artistic endeavour. Commerce, liberty and art, arm-in-arm. That was the great David Bowie.”
Earlier in the piece, Finkelstein opines that Bowie was “undoubtedly one of the artistic geniuses of the past 50 years”. Chaps like Igor Stravinsky, Dmitri Shostakovich, Glenn Gould or James MacMillan don’t get a look in. The genius slot is occupied.
That Finkelstein knows about art as little as he does about football (about which he writes a regular column), and understands even less, is evident. That he doesn’t even understand the words he uses, equally so.
For consumerism is indeed base and philistine when it’s applied to the higher reaches of the human spirit. For example, when love equates consumerism, it’s reduced to the base level of a Soho whorehouse.
However, Finkelstein’s meaningless waffle wouldn’t merit a comment if it didn’t reflect a wider problem, a malaise that has both afflicted and defined the modern world: a catastrophic loss of mind and soul.
Finkelstein kindly provides an exhaustive illustration of this tragedy, which he however doesn’t see as such: “The most revealing… was his [Bowie’s] response to the question ‘Who are your heroes in real life?’… Bowie replied, truthfully and insightfully: ‘The consumer’.”
If Bowie’s ‘insights’ had been meant to mock Bach, he could have inscribed his CDs with ‘The glory is the consumer’s’, just as Bach inscribed his scores with ‘The glory is God’s’. The difference in motivation is obvious, as is the difference between real art and its modern, philistine perversion.
Anyone needing further persuasion of the difference between art and non-art could do worse than compare a recording of anything at all by Bowie (or any other purveyor of pop) with anything at all by Bach, say his aria Mache dich, mein Herze, rein from St Matthew Passion.
The former is a lewd, primitive caricature of art; the latter, art produced by a genuine creative impulse emulating the outburst of divine energy that brought the world into existence. It’s not for nothing that both Judaism and early Christianity frowned on non-verbal artistic creativity.
A man assuming the role of a creator seemed to them a hair’s breadth away from usurping the role of the Creator – an unspeakable heresy. For example, Clement of Alexandria (d. circa 215) wrote that art contravened not so much the second commandment as the eighth: by displaying creativity, man was stealing God’s prerogative.
Even in pre-Christian times music was seen as something more than just a product to be consumed. Thus Plato: “Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything.”
This isn’t the right medium to ponder the philosophical, theological and moral implications of music, or art in general. Suffice it to say that referring to pop effluvia by the misnomer ‘music’ testifies to nothing but the paucity of language.
We often use the same words to describe phenomena that have nothing in common. One man loves God, another loves a woman, a third loves fish and chips – language lags behind the notion it designates or else races far ahead of it.
Hence the likes of Lord Finkelstein see no contradiction between describing Bowie as ‘an artistic genius’ and quoting his cynically crass comment on the identity of his heroes.
Do you think Bach would have answered the same question with ‘Duke Johan Ernst’, Mozart with ‘Prince Lichnowsky’ or Beethoven with ‘Archduke Rudolph’? Yet those were the ‘consumers’ of the most sublime music ever written, the greatest testimony to the divine origin of man.
Pop, on the other hand, supports Darwin’s slapdash theory by only testifying to the simian origin of man, or rather some men. Bach proves the ape isn’t our past; pop proves it’s our future: by severing all links with divinity, man is rapidly forgoing his humanity as well.
Believing, as Finkelstein does, that art can be mass-produced exclusively for commercial purposes betokens woeful ignorance and semantic confusion. Both conditions are lamentable, but not nearly as much as the disease of which they are merely symptoms.
P.S. In the spirit of crass commercialism that so fascinates Lord Finkelstein, may I remind you that such issues are pondered at depth in my book How the West Was Lost, now available as a paperback from Amazon or directly from the publisher, I.B. Tauris, London.