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emma_in_dreamIt is quite hard for me to review this work fairly, as I read it under very difficult circumstances. Pearl went into a non-sleeping frenzy and I read it for hours and hours while I crouched over her cot.
So I was pretty easily irritated as I read it.
Her starting point is that art and beauty are indivisible, and that true art is a transcendental experience. She takes art seriously. She writes of the need to spend time reading, looking at pictures, thinking about what it means, engaging with art.
Part of me really admires this. Art is important. It does require effort.
On the other hand, there is something about Winterson’s writing which sets my teeth on edge; something about her writing seems so elitest. For instance, there is a point where she says: ‘Inevitably, if you start to love pictures, you will start to buy pictures. The time, like the money, can be found, and those who call the whole business elitest, might be fair enough to reckon up the time they spend in front of the television, at the DIY store, and how much the latest satellite equipment and new PC has cost.’
To begin with, she assumes that you cannot use your TV or computer to access real art. This just reinforces the division between fan/pro, amateur/museum art which I find so gratingly tedious. I’ve heard this argument a million times.
The art she celebrates is relatively expensive, produced by professionals (who are individual geniuses, certainly no kind of collaboration), bought from galleries. What she condemns is the mass produced, and anything made for mass consumption. She writes that the nineteenth-century increase in education meant that there was a massive of audience of people who were not members of the literati. ‘Mass literacy was not a campaign to improve the culture and sensibility of the nation, it was designed to make the masses more useful. The writer faced another new problem: his public were no longer his educated equals.’
So I am really torn by these essays. On one hand, Winterson is right that our culture does not take art seriously. On the other, she dismisses so much art that I do take seriously - art made by fans, art by amateurs, art sold at cons, art given away as gifts. Perhaps it is inevitable, given that Winterson is a professional writer, that she should see art as a calling accessible only to a few serious individuals. But, as an amateur who nonetheless sometimes makes art, I find this is a very difficult proposition to accept.
So I was pretty easily irritated as I read it.
Her starting point is that art and beauty are indivisible, and that true art is a transcendental experience. She takes art seriously. She writes of the need to spend time reading, looking at pictures, thinking about what it means, engaging with art.
Part of me really admires this. Art is important. It does require effort.
On the other hand, there is something about Winterson’s writing which sets my teeth on edge; something about her writing seems so elitest. For instance, there is a point where she says: ‘Inevitably, if you start to love pictures, you will start to buy pictures. The time, like the money, can be found, and those who call the whole business elitest, might be fair enough to reckon up the time they spend in front of the television, at the DIY store, and how much the latest satellite equipment and new PC has cost.’
To begin with, she assumes that you cannot use your TV or computer to access real art. This just reinforces the division between fan/pro, amateur/museum art which I find so gratingly tedious. I’ve heard this argument a million times.
The art she celebrates is relatively expensive, produced by professionals (who are individual geniuses, certainly no kind of collaboration), bought from galleries. What she condemns is the mass produced, and anything made for mass consumption. She writes that the nineteenth-century increase in education meant that there was a massive of audience of people who were not members of the literati. ‘Mass literacy was not a campaign to improve the culture and sensibility of the nation, it was designed to make the masses more useful. The writer faced another new problem: his public were no longer his educated equals.’
So I am really torn by these essays. On one hand, Winterson is right that our culture does not take art seriously. On the other, she dismisses so much art that I do take seriously - art made by fans, art by amateurs, art sold at cons, art given away as gifts. Perhaps it is inevitable, given that Winterson is a professional writer, that she should see art as a calling accessible only to a few serious individuals. But, as an amateur who nonetheless sometimes makes art, I find this is a very difficult proposition to accept.
