Scott Timberg mourns a lost golden era for the arts but he should stop looking backwards in search of a healthy cultural life
Our politicians hate culture; our media have given up serious reporting; our tech firms have stolen our content; our citizens are in hock to celebrity; our creators cannot make ends meet. To read Scott Timberg’s lament about the creative class is to despair about the state of American and British society.
The author – one of an army of journalists and creatives who have been shunted out of good jobs and into the badlands of freelance – manages to be very right and very wrong at the same time. He bemoans the demise of a golden era, the late 60s to early 90s, when the public arts were celebrated as never before. Independent bookshops flourished; artists could sell their wares and enjoy a decent life; musicians did not have to reckon with illegal downloads and the scraps off the table from iTunes. He notes that when Kodak was sold to Instagram, an established company with 140,000 employees succumbed to an upstart with 13.
His part-history, part-analysis provides absorbing detail of the demise of the mid list – the authors, painters, designers, architects and actors who did not become famous but whose contribution to the greater good should be celebrated rather than relegated to average annual earnings of under £20,000.
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Culture Crash is published by Yale University Press, £16.99
The author – one of an army of journalists and creatives who have been shunted out of good jobs and into the badlands of freelance – manages to be very right and very wrong at the same time. He bemoans the demise of a golden era, the late 60s to early 90s, when the public arts were celebrated as never before. Independent bookshops flourished; artists could sell their wares and enjoy a decent life; musicians did not have to reckon with illegal downloads and the scraps off the table from iTunes. He notes that when Kodak was sold to Instagram, an established company with 140,000 employees succumbed to an upstart with 13.
His part-history, part-analysis provides absorbing detail of the demise of the mid list – the authors, painters, designers, architects and actors who did not become famous but whose contribution to the greater good should be celebrated rather than relegated to average annual earnings of under £20,000.
More
Culture Crash is published by Yale University Press, £16.99
2 comments:
Let's stir the pot Graeme.
The Arts are that field, in my mind, where the resistance to the power of state should lay; that can't happen when reliant on the state for its existence. If culture is only 'vibrant' when govt funded, then I have serious problems with the concept of culture, whatever the hell that is.
Though this book appears to be about economic and technological change. Again, I would hope the Arts existed on the hairy and dangerous cusp of change, but instead, I finally realise now, it is the reactionary Establishment. Perhaps the arts (small a) need to be 'gutted', and move to discussing the world, rather than the stream of consciousness of our interiors it has been since the Bloomsbury group.
Have a great day :) Gonna be a hot one in Geraldine.
Sorry, Graham, Greame ... there's too much choice.
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