Editorial

Matthew Arnold (1822 – 1888), Walter Horatio Pater (1839 – 1894) and Oscar Wilde (1854 – 1900).
George Orwell writing in 1941, suggests that art for art’s sake emerged with the thinking of these men or at least, in their times. He writes from the perspective that 1939 had changed everything more absolutely than 1914 ever did, and that ‘mental honesty’ had become markedly more difficult.
The phrase ‘art for arts sake’ was used in my family to mean you dedicated your entire life to your art so that relationships took second place, but it has been perverted since the second world war and the alignment of art with propaganda, that ‘anything and everything is art’. I would not blame the war for this, propaganda has always existed. But this argument is the reason why Duchamp managed to persuade weak thinkers like Peggy Guggenheim that his merest thought was art. These poor thinkers and their inheritors today cannot comprehend that if everything is art then we have lost definition and nothing is art,
This alignment can clearly be seen in the woke agenda which perfectly correctly informs us to be aware of all the differences in all the native species of the planet, and our conduct unbecoming with other species is savage and horrendous; calling for us to change. While also making demands it has no right to make most notably in sport, of all things. But then even a brief survey or the lives of artists in the past eight hundred years would show you they were woke before medical science had even caught up with the many characteristics of human gender and behaviour.
Social wars are no less dangerous than hot wars and trying to propagandise your space in society so as to enrich yourself at the expense of others, is also socio-political warfare. None of this, of course, concerns Orwell in his thoughts which centred on literature not visual arts – though his dissertation on Dali is a doozey. But this must concern us.
Finance is running out of New York and since New York became the avant garde because it had the money to attract artists we must now watch to see if the flow of investment out of New York is enough to apply the coup de grâce on its pre-eminence and wonder where the new avant garde will appear. If it’s money then the obvious places are China, India or the Emirates. The Emirates are definitely making a play for it. And it won’t be arts for arts sake in the definition of the last two generations. Maybe AI for AI sake.