Monthly Archive for June, 2007

Taking on Damien Hirst

Published
by
Tom Nuttall
on June 27, 2007
in Arts and culture and Inside Prospect
. 102 Comments

One of the difficulties with assessing contemporary art is that the self-referential nature of much work makes it difficult to distinguish between a banal work of art and one that takes banality as its theme (much like the imitative fallacy described below). Nevertheless, Ben Lewis, Prospect’s art critic, makes a valiant attempt at bringing Damien Hirst down a peg or two in the current issue of Prospect. How might we make a case against Hirst, asks Lewis?

One way is to point to the large amount of terrible work that he has produced. All great artists have produced bad works, but surely none have made as many as Hirst.

Let us know what you think of Damien “diamond geezer” Hirst below (and check out Tom Chatfield’s related post on this blog, “The test of art.”)

Prospects of the world

Published
by
Tom Nuttall
on June 26, 2007
in Media
. 0 Comments

At Prospect, we have to deal with various impostors and imitators—a Scottish architectural magazine, a graduate careers magazine and, of course, our American namesake. But we hadn’t previously come across the Iranian Prospect, which, as far as one can judge from its rather spartan website, doesn’t look half bad.

Great hates 3: Dr Samuel Johnson

Published
by
Tom Chatfield
on June 25, 2007
in Arts and culture and Books
. 1 Comment

It is thanks largely to the work of James Boswell that we possess one of the finest bodies of strong opinion ever to exist in English letters—that of Dr Samuel Johnson, who could be relied upon to fulminate upon almost any matter under the 18th-century sun without, it seems, even pausing for breath.

To pick just one example from the riches of Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson—which was first published in 1791, some six years after Johnson’s death—here is the doctor in full flow on the topic of Thomas Gray [1716-1771], the poet and author of “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”:

Next day I [i.e. Boswell] dined with Johnson at Mr. Thrale’s. He attacked Gray, calling him “a dull fellow.” BOSWELL: “I understand he was reserved, and might appear dull in company; but surely he was not dull in poetry.” JOHNSON: “Sir, he was dull in company, dull in his closet, dull every where. He was dull in a new way, and that made many people think him GREAT. He was a mechanical poet.”

It’s delightful stuff, especially in comparison to a modern literary scene which often seems to have no gradations of attitude between blandishment and obscenity. We should be at least a little careful of Boswell’s Johnson, however. As Horace Walpole noted in a letter of 26th May 1791, discussing the insulting of Gray, among others, by Boswell’s new book:

…it is a new kind of libel, by which you may abuse any body, by saying some dead body said so and so of somebody alive.

Dr Johnson, he concluded, was not so much misrepresented as selectively reported by his disciple—for whom Walpole expresses a less than complete admiration:

Often, indeed, Johnson made the most brutal speeches to living persons; for though he was good-natured at bottom, he was very ill-natured at top. He loved to dispute, to show his superiority. If his opponents were weak, he told them they were fools; if they vanquished him, he was scurrilous—to nobody more than to Boswell himself, who was contemptible for flattering him so grossly, and for enduring the coarse things he was continually vomiting on Boswell’s own country, Scotland.

In fact, so little of worth besides the great biography was achieved by Boswell (who distinguished himself in later years by writing a satirical poem against the abolition of slavery) that it’s one of literature’s enduring mysteries he managed to produce the thing at all.

Glasto-snobbery

Published
by
Tom Nuttall
on June 25, 2007
in Arts and culture and Elsewhere on the web
. 1 Comment

images.jpegI didn’t make it to Glastonbury this time around—and my memories of the “Somme years” 1997 and 1998 mean that I was nothing but glad to have avoided this year’s mudpits. Stephen Pollard, however, has his own reasons for staying away, and enumerates them in this three-year-old absurd rant of his, recycled on his Spectator blog. The festival, Pollard sniffs, is “a clichéd, typical and deeply worrying reflection of how those with time and money choose to abrogate any sense of propriety, decency and upholding of legal, let alone moral, values.” You get the picture—it’s dreary, humourless boilerplate, and would not be worth mentioning were it not for the wonderful response from “StuartA” in the comments.

Replies to Shiv Malik

Published
by
Tom Nuttall
on June 21, 2007
in Uncategorized
. 1 Comment

I’ve uploaded a few replies to our June issue cover story—Shiv Malik’s account of the radicalisation in Beeston of Mohammad Sidique Khan, ringleader of the 7/7 bombers. Michael Bond describes some of the psychological research that sheds light on why some individuals may be more prone than others to violent extremism. Yahya Birt, national director of the City Circle, thinks that Malik reads too much into one case study. And Kishwer Falkner, a Lib Dem peer, says that there’s more to extremist Islam than crises of identity.

Meanwhile, at his Pickled Politics site, Sunny Hundal has written his own response to Malik.

Speciousness elsewhere

Published
by
Tom Nuttall
on June 21, 2007
in Elsewhere on the web, Media and Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

Over at Slate, Ron Rosenbaum asks if the cover-profile of Angelina Jolie in the latest issue of Esquire is the worst celebrity profile ever. And to judge by some of the shudderingly bad extracts he posts, which combine vacuousness and pretentiousness to peerless degree (”in post 9/11 America, Angelina Jolie is the best woman in the world because she is the most famous woman in the world—because she is not like you or me”), it’s got to be a contender. But in passing, he notes an example of a fallacy not yet covered by our in-house speciousness expert, Tom Chatfield:

He begins with the question

“Does 9/11 still have meaning for most Americans? Does it have more meaning than celebrity? Does it have more meaning than the very specific message of meaninglessness contained in the weekly parable of Angelina Jolie’s twisted double life? Or have we reached the point where its meaning is somehow inextricable from the meaning of celebrity, as 9/11 recedes into the past and celebrity gives birth to the future?”

I’m not making this up. I’m copying it right out of the pages of a well-known magazine, which (full disclosure) I’ve written for in the past. But I will be deeply indebted to any Slate reader who can make the slightest bit of sense of this paragraph about meaninglessness. Is it an example of what they used to call at Yale “the fallacy of imitative form,” in which in order to write about meaninglessness you have to be meaningless?

How not to judge a book

Published
by
Tom Chatfield
on June 20, 2007
in Arts and culture, Books and Media
. 7 Comments

A mini-trend struck me this morning on the train as I was perusing my latest travel-reading, Dan Hind’s excellent The Threat to Reason. To my horror, I realised that anyone casually glancing at me and my book across the carriage might think that I was reading something trashy. Witness the cover:

The Threat to Reason

The design is, of course, a witty parody of traditional pulp fiction jackets. But could someone glancing at me for less than a second really be expected to take this in? It was then that I thought back to my previous transit reading, Christopher Hitchens’s God is not Great—a high-energy source of trashy signals if ever there was one:

God is not great

Evidently, a profound subversion of the visual language of publishing is taking place—and is quite possibly generating sales for heavyweight authors who deserve a mass audience. But, please, can someone bring out a Harry-Potterish “adult” version of these books, so that we intellectuals in our trains and cafés can retain the thrill of knowing that those around us know that we’re reading terribly clever stuff…

Today’s top links

Published
by
Susha
on June 19, 2007
in Elsewhere on the web
. 0 Comments

Bogus trends. Jack Shafer writes Slate’s “press box” media criticism column, and he’s the scourge of lazy journalists everywhere. In this post, he dismantles a recent New York Times article which claims that e-commerce has peaked.

The world’s best untranslated novels. I rather dread the “summer reading” lists that appear at this time of year, since they always add a few more books to my own “must read” pile, which I’m unlikely ever to finish unless scientists dramatically extend the human lifespan. But that’s what’s so great about this list—there’s no way that I’ll be able to read any of them, any time soon.

Good fences make good neighbours. I have to link to this post on the academic blog Crooked Timber, simply because the comments are so funny.

The Hitchens rematch

Published
by
William Skidelsky
on June 19, 2007
in Books, Inside Prospect and Religion
. 11 Comments

The Hitchens brothers, Christopher and Peter, made a rare public appearance together this morning on the Today programme, debating Christopher’s new book about religion, God is Not Great. For an earlier Hitchens brothers clash, see their Prospect debate, in March 1998, about the legacy of the 1960s. Christopher kicked things off this morning by describing a challenge he has been issuing to religious types recently: “Name an ethical statement made by, or act performed by, a believer that could not have been performed by a non-believer.” Not surprisingly, he said, no one has been able to come up with one. So—we are presumably meant to conclude—that’s 1-0 to atheism then. Well, no, actually. Christopher’s challenge may show that it is perfectly possible for non-believers to behave ethically (which few religious people would deny) but surely the more important question is whether non-believers are as likely to behave ethically—and on this score the challenge proves nothing. It was, in other words, a typical manoeuvre: superficially bamboozling, but also slightly missing the point. However, encountering such rhetorical slipperiness at so early an hour did have one beneficial effect: it roused me instantly from my slumbers, and ensured that I got to work (sort of) on time.

Species of speciousness 3: begging the question

Published
by
Tom Chatfield
on June 18, 2007
in Media and Philosophy
. 1 Comment

Derek Draper, Labour adviser turned psychotherapist, has recently graced the Guardian’s Comment is Free blog with a piece on TV therapy programmes, one of which he is currently involved with. It’s an interesting topic, and an interesting post, not least for its reliance on a technique familiar to any regular reader of “defences” of arguably exploitative, voyeuristic programmes. Draper summarizes his case as follows:

[T]he most fundamental argument for TV therapy is related to the objections to it… I suspect there is an underlying, if often unconscious, dynamic behind many of the objections to this new “psychological TV”: that being openly emotional is still something many people find uncomfortable, and therefore that exploring our thoughts and feelings and searching for emotional comfort is something that should be done only in private.

This is the fallacy of begging the question or, in more formal terms, petitio principii, in which the proposition to be debated—in this case, that TV therapy is a good thing—has already been assumed. Any reader who accepts that “the objections” to Draper’s position are founded on an unreasonable and “often unconscious… dynamic” must accept that there can be little legitimate querying of his conclusions. It is, in other words, impossible to suggest Draper is wrong without rejecting the terms of his debate (which also present an oversimple account of his opponents’ arguments). He continues:

Why do we flinch at seeing feelings expressed and explored in public? Why do we assume that people will be risking damage to themselves if they open up their emotions and let others know how they are feeling on the inside?

These are both good questions, but they are not being asked openly. Their intention, rather, is to bolster the opinions offered in the previous paragraph. “We”, Draper tells us, flinch at seeing our feelings publicly expressed; “we” assume we risk damage by opening up; and “we” are surely unreasonable when we assert these things. Thus, when “we” disagree with him, it’s because of our unconscious fears and repressions. And who wants to be on the side of nasty things like repression, or against good stuff like expression, self-exploration and opening-up?

Importantly, Draper’s position does not involve a failure of logic. It is an informal, as opposed to a formal, fallacy—we cannot deduce from it that any of his claims are wrong. He is, after all, an expert. Like many other experts, however, his writing here presents opinion as though it were argument; and makes the assumption that its author knows better than “we” do about our true feelings and motives. He may well be right. But this is still a dishonest way of beginning a debate.