Guest Post by Sir Frederick Chook: "Beware: Culture"

Beware: Culture, By Sir Frederick Chook
Penned upon the 24th of May, 2006
First appeared in FrillyShirt (www.frillyshirt.org).

 

 

The Arts and Crafts movement, of the late nineteenth century, saw a danger in the spread of industrial machines into human life. They set about creating beautiful things with their own skilled hands, and decided that when a machine must be used, it should make work easier, not be work in itself. The furniture, decorations and wallpaper they created were not meant for museums, but to be sold to the public. In working so, they wished to save the creative, spiritual and human from the soulless and mechanised.

One hundred years on, society seems not only to have given up hope, but even to have forgotten what it wanted to protect. Art has become metallic, impenetrable, minimalist to the point of seemingly never having been touched by human hands. The unskilled, uninspiring and unappealing are dominant – and it is said this is in defence of the common people, against elitist values!

Which is more populist: to bring fine things to those who have gone without, that all may enjoy them, or to abolish those fine things and make drudgery universal? Placing low content in a high context may be memorable, for an easy option, but to place high content in a low context is a truly radical act. To condescend to the proles so much as to be afraid to offend them by displaying skill, education or culture is elitist values condensed (though alas all too common in these allegedly-egalitarian colonies, where the manly man is king and those with too much culture must cringe).

Spraypaint a Renoir on a public wall. Perform your favourite opera in a busy shopping strip. Write letters to the editor in verse. Picket a paticularly banal commercial broadcaster in the form of a waltz, demanding Mahler. And by the devil’s well-manicured horns, never let anyone say that high education or public media are special interest concerns.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Sir Frederick Chook is a foppish, transcendentalistic historian who lives variously by his wits, hand to mouth, la vie bohème, and in Melbourne with his wife, Lady Tanah Merah.

When not reading Milton and eating Stilton, he writes, ponders, models, delves into dusty archives, and gads about town. He has dabbled in student radio and in national politics, and is presently studying the ways of the shirt-sleeved archivist. He is a longhair, aspiring to one day be a greybeard. He has, once or twice, been described as “as mad as a bicycle.”

FrillyShirt is a compilation of articles, essays, reviews, photographs, artworks, question-and-answers, promotions, travelogues, diatribes, spirit journeys, cartoons, ululations and celebrations by Sir Frederick, his friends and contributing readers. Irregularly regular features include Teacup in a Storm, an etiquette column, and How to be Lovely, advanced speculations on the aesthetics of the self.

Other topics that pop up include fun things in and around Melbourne, art, nature, history, politics and schnauzers. Sir Frederick’s favorite color is all of them. Enjoy his writing? Drop him a telegram at fredchook@frillyshirt.org.