Tuning the whorehouse piano

‘One gets tired of the role critics are supposed to have in this culture: it’s like being the piano player in a whorehouse; you don’t have any control over the action going on upstairs’.

Robert Hughes

Aside from the occasional gasp of frustration at the muddles of culture, the Australian critic Robert Hughes (1938–2012) wasn’t one to stray from a fight. Loved and reviled in equal measure for his acerbic art criticism, Hughes was incapable of writing a boring sentence. ‘Agree or disagree’, said John O’Connor of the New York Times, ‘You will not be bored. Hughes has a disarming way of being provocative’. Part of his appeal was that you never knew where he was going to swing next.

Hughes may have been branded a conservative, but that only gave him room to move. Of his forays into wider cultural criticism, his 1993 work A Culture of Complaint was a one-man artillery barrage, excoriating not only ‘the sham of Reaganism’ and the cold cynicism of evangelicals, but also academia’s obsession with identity politics and infatuation with jargon. It’s such an idiosyncratic piece that you’d have to be Hughes himself to actually agree with the entire thing, but what’s important is its unwritten commitment to ‘be dangerous’. It prods and pokes and demands a response. I don’t think it’s ever petty, because it’s so beautifully done. There’s respect for the work of a craftsman.

Last week’s election led me to pick up his work again. For me, Hughes’ writing has the same invigorating effect as a long dinner with an old friend: a time to be open, to test the causes of things, and together, to recapture the essence of a mission. His work isn’t ephemeral, like a guest column in the Guardian can sometimes be: the same agreeable ideas, occasionally updated due to circumstances. It’s an intense vision honed from deep reflection. What makes it different and shocking is that it is unabashedly elitist. He championed quality. ‘Some things do strike us as better than others – more articulate, more radiant with consciousness,’ Hughes wrote. ‘We may have difficulty saying why, but the experience remains’.

This was an elitism that was not concerned with class, wealth or race, but on skill and imagination. He loathed the term being wielded as a pejorative. While his elitism was directed at the world through the prism of art, he reminds us of its broader applicability. We must have the courage to sort out what’s bad from what’s beautiful and useful, and defend it where it needs to be defended.

The beguiling stories of the populists do not articulate a useful or beautiful vision, because they promote a chimera. Short term economic gains and longer term dignity are not sustainable when the pain of their creation can be directed to someone else. We naturally coalesce around what is comfortable and what supports us. But it cannot be permanent in the world we now find ourselves in. No matter any retreat to a previous position, the pace of technological change will inevitably catch us. Our reflex instinct to ‘throw up the walls’ will simply make us worse off in the long run.

It’s easy to sneer at the man in the gilt elevator, a pantomime who is repellent because, underneath all that bluster, he’s pitiful. What’s more challenging is understanding how he became a vessel for other’s fears. The French historian Pierre Rosenvallon writes that ‘many genuine democrats hate populism but fail to understand its deep roots’. Despite the leading though that people are fortified by identity – white, nationalist, etc – there’s something more complex and shifting at its foundation, a kind of spiritual ennui that leads us down seemingly irrational and dangerous paths.

Right now there’s a great deal of media discussion about the need to ‘organise’ for our new and chaotic world.  For those who think Trump, May, Le Pen, Hanson et al repugnant; the types branded ‘elitist’, or ‘citizens of nowhere’, a great opportunity has arrived to seek what’s beautiful and useful and craft a compelling vision from many broken pieces. It is a project that demands deep thinking and conviction. It makes us dig deep into a thing like we haven’t done before, and do it in partnership. Solidarity is hard, but circumstances demand it. We might feel we’re at the swinging doors of the whorehouse. Better get to tuning that piano.