Perhaps utopianism is inherently escapist.

The whole idea of a cultural pulse reeks of hindsight, of course. We say in retrospect that a certain kind of art was right for a historical moment because we value the work produced. Coming up with a justification for why it was right for that moment is the easy bit. In which case there’s a simpler explanation for any inadequacies of the PRB: they just weren’t good enough. If they’d just had one or two painters capable of doing great things with the material, then we [I] would look back at them differently.

It’s not that I have a problem with all Victorian medievalism; I took the tour of the Houses of Parliament last year, and while I can’t say I’m entirely comfortable with the symbolism of building a parliament building in a medieval style, there’s no doubt that it’s a magnificent piece of work. It’s tempting, and possibly equally specious, to make another sweeping generalisation and say they Victorians just weren’t very good at tasteful and elegant; they were at their best (and worst) when they were loud and brash. The Pre-Raphaelites aimed for elegant and only managed fey and kitschy.

Dave:

I thought of the neo-formalists myself while I was writing this. And much as I like formal poetry myself, I do think that a lot of the rhetoric associated with the movement is deeply peculiar and more likely to prevent people writing good poems than enable it, because it’s too easy to make a rejection of contemporary poetry into a rejection of contemporariness, and to inflate the importance of rhyme and metre over everything else that makes up a good poem.

Whether neo-formalist poets actually produce more or less good poems per thousand than their avant-garde and mainstream counterparts is probably impossible to measure.

Anyway, that’s a little off-topic. Thanks for a fun post.

I agree with your general argument, about the need for artists to respond to the pulse of their age, and not to hide behind a traditional style. Otherwise they risk becoming irrelevant, parodic, or sterile.

However, I wonder if there is another reading of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The Wikipedia entry gives some idea of their plan to reform their age’s artistic method and taste; they did not think of themselves as conservative. In reaching back to medieval spiritual and artistic values, they were responding/reacting to what they saw was the age’s drive towards mechanization and materialism.

My very imperfect analogy is this: Matisse responded to the wars and violence of his time by painting oases of serenity (for instance, Red Studio), unlike Picasso who confronted the barbarism head-on. Is Matisse necessarily the smaller artist because of this?

When the Pre-Raphaelites, reacting against the dynamism, pace and chaos of the C19, chose to paint medieval settings of great stillness, detail and complexity of composition, were they being escapist or utopian, proposing an alternative social ideal? Or, the easy answer, both?

I do appreciate that I glibly skipped past a serious argument about art, access and power which merits rather more thoughtful commentary.

Despite which, I think there’s plenty about the Art Renewal Center that makes it a fair target for mockery. So *brrrrrrrr-rrp* to you to.

It is about access. About “greenlighting” and supporting certain kinds of work (containing certain kinds of aesthetic/political content) and starving others. It’s about soft censorship and control by those who have the — sorry to be redundant — money and power.

Your sneering tone is precisely the tool used to prejudge works that are not “allowed in” to galleries, magazines, museums. Do you think that the products of artists; i.e. culture itself, is so powerless that rulers would not attempt to control it? Read a little bit of history, just a little bit. Or is your point “It can’t happen here?” Fact is, it already has. Read Stonor Saunders.