It’s not so obvious in, for example, hair styles. So I like hair styles as an example because we all have them – well not quite all of us. But if you think about what’s going on when you choose to wear your hair one way rather than another, what you’re really doing is saying I belong to this particular world where this kind of hairstyle would exist. You’re broadcasting something, but you’re also very alert to all the other hairstyles that you see around you. So you’re in receive mode as well. And what I think you’re doing then is you’re positioning yourself in all the possible stylistic worlds that could exist, you’re taking a certain position. And that’s an identification for yourself, it’s an identification for other people as well.
There’s an American aesthetician called Morse Peckham who I was very interested in. He wrote a book called Man’s Rage For Chaos: Biology, Behaviour And The Arts. And he says in it, ‘Art is the exposure to the tensions and problems of a false world in order that man may endure the tensions and problems of the real world.’ So I’d actually go a bit further than Peckham – probably even as far as Bromley or Lewisham – and say it’s also the exposure to the joys and freedoms of a false world in order that we might recognise those and locate them in the real world.
So, I like this idea of art having a serious function in our lives and I think this might be one of them. I don’t think it’s the only one, by the way, but I’ve only got 40 minutes…
When you go into a gallery, you might see a most shocking picture. But actually you can leave the gallery. When you listen to a terrifying radio play you can switch the radio off. So one of the things about art is, it offers a safe place for you to have quite extreme and rather dangerous feelings. And the reason you can do that is because you know you can switch it off. So art has a kind of role there as a simulator. It offers you these simulated worlds – a little bit like a plane simulator, you know – the reason you have simulators for learning to fly a 747 is so that you don’t crash too many 747s – you can have a crash and get out and laugh. Well it’s true of art as well.
There’s a book by an American historian called William McNeil. It’s a very, very nice book called Keeping Together in Time. And its subtitle is ‘Dance And Drill In Human History’. And in that book he talks about the intense pleasure humans feel in muscular coordination: in dancing, in marching together, in carnivals, in all the things where a lot of people synchronise themselves…
You know, we live in a culture that is changing so incredibly quickly. I was thinking about this the other day and I thought probably in a month of our lifetimes we have about the amount of change that there was in the whole of the 14th century. So we have to somehow come to terms with all of that.
None of us have the same experiences: you know you might know a lot about what’s happening in cars and you might know a lot of what’s happening in medicine and you might know something about mathematics and you might know something about fashion. None of us are at all expert on everything that’s happening. So we need ways of keeping in synch, of remaining coherent. And I think that this is what culture is doing for us and as I said, culture is the creative arts so far as I’m concerned.
