Worlds Together, Worlds Apart: What unites us and divides us at Century’s End:

Part II Art as the Common Denominator

An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make a better soup.

Mr President, Ladies & Gentlemen, I am most grateful, I am much honoured and not a little surprised to be here.

Painting started as a craft (and so did the other arts) and I think it is the modern status of art that would most astonish our forefathers. That a Grand Inquisitor should be known only for his portrait by Greco would amaze the sitter, and fancy Velazquez being better known than the Duke of Olivares!! Who would now know of Dr Gachet if it were not for van Gogh?

Shakespeare of course understood;

So long as men can read and eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Phillip II melted down the Aztec gold treasure of Montezuma for coins, the equivalent value of which, however you convert it today, would not even nearly buy those lost artefacts. Our Henry VIII did much the same with the treasures of St Thomas Becket at Canterbury.

Since then it’s gone further. Art, despite the close shave with photography, escaped the scientific broom that swept so much of the explanatory value of religion away. Art, which, as Oscar Wilde pointed out, explains nothing, has remained to replace the spiritual comfort formerly the sphere of faith. So people come to museums, not to admire and learn, not to remember and reminisce happy days in the Piazza Signoria, but to worship. It is no blasphemy only to enjoy art: But to worship it may well be idolatry.

There is such a thing as indecent exposure of the mind as well as of the body. We have to start at the end of the Middle Ages. With the Renaissance came the Reformation, and I am convinced that the rise of Protestantism in Northern Europe is one of the greatest revolutions in the intellectual history of mankind. Why?

Because in its barest essence it is the revolt of EVIDENCE OVER AUTHORITY

Biblical at first, once evidence took precedence over authority, the way was open for science. Science and then the Enlightenment, democracy, liberty, freedom and free trade. It has taken us five hundred years.

Art needs a certain amount of leisure and Science has delivered it in the form of unprecedented prosperity. Who now can believe the tired old Malthusian prophesies? The repeated failures of doomsayers in all their now Greenish forms testify to a vital progressive civilisation. Despite wars and other horrors, despite continuing errors of distribution, all commodities are down (as Julian Simon said they would be). Oil has been at around $12/barrel this week. Estimates of global warming sink by the day.

Science is almost totally universal but it was not ever thus - remember Lysenko. It is only 50 years since Russia had its own science and China is still getting a bit of its own medicine. Art will go the same way - actually there have been hardly any truly national schools left during most of the twentieth century. It made little sense for the Pre-Raphaelites to call themselves British but the Nazarenes German. Degas predicted that Impressionism would quickly become the universal academic painting as it remains today.

Today’s modern and abstract, and realist and hyper and pre and post-whatever schools pay no attention to national borders. Go up Bond Street and along Cork Street and Bruton Street and try to guess, without cheating, just by looking at the artefacts, where the artist was born and where he trained. Oh yes, he or she. While you are about it try to guess what anatomical sex the artists have put on their travel papers.

Jazz and Rock are being played in Moscow, Jeans are worn in Peking, Brahms is played in Tokyo; the kilt and the kimono are fancy dress. The most commonly recognised icon world wide for many years has been - - Mickey Mouse (and I think the Coca Cola logo second), maybe the big Mac by now.

The Mexican river swimmer comes to San Diego; or is it Texas. The Korean stowaway to Seattle like those who used to be called the huddled masses came to Ellis Island in New York. You came or are coming to Tufts. They came, as you come, though more comfortably, for one reason:

To seek a vision and a version of the most successful culture the world has ever known. But do remember where our culture comes from

ROME.

What is this culture? What does it consist of ?

Make no mistake - nearly everything we have comes through a single amplifying filter.

ROME

Our Law and our languages come more or less directly from Rome

Democracy we like to say comes from Athens - via Rome

Our own Arts may come to us from Greece in general, Byzantium perhaps and Egypt - via Rome

The Military Arts (if such they be or were) came from Macedonia - via Rome

The various versions of our Religions came from Palestine - via Rome

Note that only Mathematics escaped the Romans completely and comes to us via Islam. Our scientific culture, dependent on the melange of all these things, which has brought untold wealth and prosperity to the world arises out of a Protestant revolution, no less Roman in its direct derivation for its opposition to the authoritarian aspects of Empire. Rome and the studies that make Rome and its derivatives comprehensible are what we call the Classics.

The search for truth that led to the invention of the steam engine and the Mandelbrot set has also led for the first time to an opening of our minds to the spiritual contribution of all peoples. Because of universal science we now can study Mohenjo-Daro as well as Rome and we may admire Mayan art as much as Matisse or Mantegna. We have been freed to choose but have a care: There was a poet who was continuously trying to get where nobody had ever been before - when he got there he discovered there was nobody about.

Science is both the analogy and a parallel. I believe that, far from splitting, and fragmenting, the world is coming together, unifying rapidly into a single culture. But if you choose the arts as a life style rather than science you must study the artist in HIS time and HIS place. Because as Hazlitt said. It is hard to find in minds otherwise formed, either a real love of excellence, or a belief that any excellence exists superior to their own .... There is a provinciality in time as well as in space. To feel ill-at-ease and out of place except in one's own period is to be provincial in time. But he who has learned to look at life through the eyes in turn of Chaucer, of Donne, of Pope is freed from this limitation. He has become a cosmopolitan of the ages, and can regard his own period with the detachment which is the necessary foundation of wisdom.

And the same applies to Giotto, Rubens, Chardin, Manet , to Oceanic art and Japanese sword blades.

Unless you understand the artist and his times you will always be missing most of the work of art and most of the works of art. .....works of art are not simply forms that either do or do not satisfy the desires of the beholder but are historical phenomena, the product of human intention. And historical knowledge is needed, not merely to understand and appreciate them, but even in order to see them at all.

If you are Japanese, until you know why one sword blade is better than another, yes better, you will not even begin to be able to understand, to learn, why Titian is better than Tintoretto, or Mozart better than Salieri. You or I may never find out why one ordinary sword is better than another, but we can learn from our own culture and we can now largely choose which to make our own. Thus I learn the difference between say Gaspard Dughet and François Millet. Then, just as when a great work by Nicholas Poussin appears, when I am shown the BEST sword I may recognise its shimmering perfection.

Art is not some vague hobby or a branch of interior decoration or of conspicuous expenditure. It may properly be all of these things but it is much more. We learn to read and work a computer - we have to learn to understand what it is about art, the great art and the little art, the cut of the Jeans as much as the cut of that sword, that can be understood by any human being.

As the great world unifies each person also feels a need to identify with a smaller unit as well. Nation, tribe, sect or college, usually more than one of these. That is why, though it is necessary, it is also comforting to study a relatively small specialist form of art (usually close to home) the better to appreciate the greatest in the world. We learn to walk before we run.

I am sure that the Arts will come closer together and great art has always been universal. If the word ART has any meaning it must be that which speaks to the universal and eternal in mankind. We are uniting, and in doing so, Art will further unite the world in a culture as enriching spiritually as the scientific culture so enriches us intellectually.

And I will not worry about a loss of diversity.

Look at the names of the authors of scientific papers, more diverse even than those painters in Cork St.. With time some things will disappear, as they always have. There will be losses, but I believe we need have no fears of cultural monotony while the USA spawns ever another Protestant sect.

Which, as de Gaulle said, are yet fewer than the cheeses of France.

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