Not only that – it’s a reflection of life at its most vital. Art is not about refined tastes and delicate sensibilities: it’s a celebration of the gloriously unrefined. Shakespeare didn’t write for scholars and libraries, Van Gogh didn’t paint for critics and galleries. And Mozart... well, Mozart may have appeared to follow the money, but everything he composed was rooted firmly in the feelings and failings of the common man. And if all of their work – if all art, in fact – is a soaring towards the divine, a glimpse of a higher plane – then that’s only because it has been created in reflection of this too-sullied life. “If there’s hope,” said Winston Smith in 1984, “it lies in the proles”. If there’s art, it lies there too. Art opens a door to the wonder and rapture of Heaven – by showing us the wonder and rapture in ourselves, even the lowest of us. It does so, in fact, precisely because of that.
In the slums and slurry of Elizabethan Bankside, the Globe theatre heaved with the filthy London proletariat, staring at the stage as if through a magic mirror, watching bright, negatively-exposed reflections of themselves express everything they ever felt or yearned for. The parts were of Kings and Princes: the truths were universal. And likewise the importance of those bold canvas splashes, those riots of pure sunlight and strokes dashed down as if in a hot torrent of creativity: that’s why Van Goghs provoke the same gasps, open the same aching chasms in the hearts of all who see them, regardless of station. And as for music...? Well we already know the devil has all the best tunes.
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This is the age of the slogan, the soundbite, the snappy phrase in place of considered argument. Thought is dying; reason’s gone critical. In bookshops and magazine racks we’re told only what we want to hear: we’re told it in neat, bullet-pointed affirmations of our own worth.
No more. This is the fightback. The resuscitation. This is the slogan as explainer of the world. One a day for a year. Three hundred and sixty five phrases, soundbites and bullet points with which to make sense of the way things are now and point to how things could be tomorrow. Read them and weep.
Defining the age through a slogan a day
This is the age of the slogan, the soundbite, the snappy phrase in place of considered argument. Thought is dying; reason’s gone critical. In bookshops and magazine racks we’re told only what we want to hear: we’re told it in neat, bullet-pointed affirmations of our own worth.
No more. This is the fightback. The resuscitation. This is the slogan as explainer of the world. One a day for a year. Three hundred and sixty five phrases, soundbites and bullet points with which to make sense of the way things are now and point to how things could be tomorrow. Read them and weep.
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