The BBC loves the art world, the intelligentsia, the chatterati.  It loves especially garnering their views on the world, politics and everything and laps it all up with relish only to regurgitate their ruminations in the form of a ‘settled science’ for us lesser mortals to learn from,  just as they do with climate science…these guys are so intellgent, thoughtful, incisive, humane and caring that they just couldn’t be wrong…and anyway it all sounds as if it should be true.

 

Radio 4’s Zeitgeisters takes a look at:

Theaster Gates

BBC Arts Editor Will Gompertz meets the cultural entrepreneurs whose aesthetic sense infects and influences our daily lives… who know what we want, even when we do not… the men and women whose impact goes beyond mere commerce, it shapes contemporary culture.

Will Gompertz travels to Chicago to meet the the artist who is using collectors’ desire for his artworks (they sell for anything upwards of several hundred thousand dollars each) to transform the rundown Southside where he now lives.

 

Now Theaster Gates is in fact no ‘pretender’, he literally puts the riches he earns where his mouth is…..unlike so many in the art/media world who take the millions and run.

Gates  sells his art for large sums of money and use that to renovate run down property in poor communities.

 

But what is interesting is what Gompertz says during the programme about artists and their ilk….made all the more apposite because of what another BBC employee, Michael Rosen, ranted about recently, castigating the new culture secretary for daring to have made a living from banking:

You’re an ex-banker who made millions during the fatal bubble of the early 21st century; you were at a bank that has been fined for rate-fixing. You know all about this kind of money. The fact that people like you got up to all sorts of greedy lending and fiddling is why we’re in the crisis.

…..you are someone who benefited from the false boom, the very same boom that caused the crash, and to continue the chain, which is what has given your party the excuse to slash public services and cut waged and unwaged people’s standard of living, and further enrich the mega-rich.

 

 

Gompertz, nail on the head, said that ‘Art is a hustle’.

Artists can flog their creations for millions…quite happy to take the dirty money off those self same gullible bankers that Rosen railed against.

We have ‘Blood Diamonds’ perhaps Rosen would like to pen a poem about ‘Blood Art’….art funded by money made by the ‘ greedy lending and fiddling‘ that ruined so many lives according to …Rosen.

Gompertz also said that ‘Artists are enormously privileged and are able to say things that others can’t.’

How true.

Part of that is of course because they have the other side of the Arts’ world, the Media, giving them easy access to a vast platform to spout their stuff which the man in the street doesn’t have….the artists bringing us their unique ‘aesthetic sense which infects and influences our daily lives.’ that us plebs just can’t possibly create for ourselves.