Words Well Spoken 1 August, 2007
Posted by StingWriter in Art, Writing.add a comment
Greetings all! Still on holiday here in lovely Seattle. Just arrived yesterday from my family in Portland. Remind me when I get back to dreary ol’ Michigan to gush about the Decemberists.
I’ll make this one brief, as I don’t have much internet time available to me. I was flipping through the news section in the latest edition of The Dramatist, which mum was kind enough to send along from home, when I came across a quote that I thought I just had to pass along, especially considering my rant from a couple weeks ago.
“What disturbs me is a perverse and ever increasing populism that sabotages the specialist expertise on which any art form is built. … One of the most dismal public statements made in British Life was by Richard Luce, a Thatcherite minister, who said of the arts that ‘the only test of our ability to succeed is whether we can attract enough customer.’ … While ultimately the arts are answerable to the public, I think it highly dangerous if creators and critics surrender to the capricious tyranny of popular opinion.”
– Michael Billington, The Guardian (21 Feb. 2007)
I know I already went into detail on that argument but I felt this quote summed it up in a way I couldn’t. So with that I will leave you until a week and a half from now when I get home. Until then, dear readers, good night.
