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Nov. 7, 2019 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
01:02:06
Delingpod 44: Alexander Adams
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Welcome to the DellingPod with me, James DellingPod.
And this podcast comes from you from the Battle of Ideas Festival in the Barbican.
And I love it here.
It's like Glastonbury for the mind.
And I'm always sport for choice about all the different potential guests.
But I've tracked down one who I've been dying to talk to for ages.
Oh, and I forgot to mention, I know I'm always excited about my special guest this week, but I really am excited.
His book...
Culture War is one of the best books I've read about identity politics, about social justice warriors and about the crisis that is facing our culture.
Well, there's a clue in the title, Culture War.
Art, identity, politics and cultural entryism, which makes it sound like a kind of dryly academic tome.
And it's much better than that.
I really, really recommend it.
You should have it on your shelves by Alexander Adams.
Alexander, welcome to the pod.
Thank you.
Thank you very much, James.
Good to meet you finally again.
We bumped into each other last year.
Yeah.
And now we're getting to talk face-to-face after sort of prolonged negotiations.
Well, yeah, no, because I didn't know who you were last name.
And one of the things I love about the Battle of Ideas is that I always get people coming up to me, recognise me and saying nice things to me.
And I just had a chap a moment ago who said, Oh my God, I've got to have a selfie with you.
You red-pilled me.
And he said, I was a leftist and you helped change me.
And I feel that my work is done when I have people like that.
That's terrifically heartening.
Yeah.
So, you are an artist and an art critic, and yet the book you've written, it doesn't read like the work of an artist, which is to say it's very rigorous and well-researched and methodical.
Thank you, and it has lots of footnotes.
All students will be pleased to hear there are lots of footnotes so they can track down my sources and quote them at their professor's.
So does that mean, I'm not familiar with your art, does that mean your art is actually quite shit, Alexander?
Well, some have said no.
I'm quite pleased with the art.
I've been making art since the early 90s.
I've exhibited relatively widely in Europe, Britain.
Do you sell?
Sometimes, yes.
Can you make a living out of it?
No.
No.
You have good years and you have bad years.
You sell to private collectors and you sell.
I've sold relatively recently to the National Museum in Cardiff.
I've sold work to the Victoria and Albert Museum.
The Walker Art Gallery has got some pieces in Liverpool.
Do they know your politics?
Well, they do now.
If they're listening to this, they'll know it.
Yeah, but they weren't listening to this.
That's the thing.
I don't know.
I feel that having written this book, this may have completely tanked my artistic career because it's so critical of a lot of the bases behind the way museums are run and the thinking behind education, art education and so forth.
It's very critical of that and this may have ramifications for my work as an artist but I felt that well if I'm only going to get a chance to publish one book it should be this book because I have to say these things that people have been saying to me in private but they can't say in public because they're so explosive.
So give me the elevator pitch.
What is your thesis about identity politics and how has identity politics ruined artistic culture?
Well, I think, first of all, you've got to realise that the arts in general and culture in general are quite leftist inclined.
They attract a lot of people who are liberal, who are neophiles.
They like new things.
They tend to be quite socially open.
So it's a natural home for people on the left.
Unfortunately, the left has also absorbed identity politics.
And so, because identity politics is not so rampant on the left...
And I've recently met some old-style old leftists who are universalists who believe in Enlightenment values.
I disagree with the old left, but I disagree with it much less than I disagree with the new left, which is so embedded in tribal politics.
And that's carried over into the way museums are programmed, into the way we deal with censorship, into the idea of subsidies for arts and feminism in the arts and so forth.
And all of this has been influenced by identity politics and political correctness.
And these are the subjects of five essays in this book that were published independently.
And then I have two separate chapters which have been added at the end which summarize, which tile this into the idea of cultural entryism.
And entryism is basically when you have a group of individuals entering an organization covertly to influence, control or destroy an organization.
And I see a lot of what we're seeing in the art world as actual cultural entryism.
Right.
Let's cut to the chase here.
This is one of my particular beefs with the artistic world, which is essentially for the previous I don't know how many thousand years of human civilisation, the primary criterion guiding all forms of art Is artistic excellence, is it not?
I mean, obviously, there have been cultures and periods where art has a political function, I suppose.
You think about the Soviet Union.
Yes.
Yeah, Nazi Germany as well.
Nazi Germany, degenerate art, and all that.
But I think generally, from the time of Homer to the time of Dickens, we've gone for quality above all.
Artists with something to say, something enduring to say, who say it well, have succeeded, whereas people with less interesting things to say or less originality have fallen by the wayside.
But now we seem to be in a culture where it doesn't matter how good an artist you are, what matters much more is your cultural background.
Is that a fair assessment?
Yes, I think that's how we've developed the canon.
It's been basically an accretive process where we've added all the best things, the things that have really influenced people, the things that have inspired other artists, the things that have been held up as really excellent.
And these have been judged on merit.
We've collated these into the story, because the canon is a story.
It's what you tell yourself about how art has developed.
It may not be technically true, but it's a good way of thinking about and remembering art in our culture.
And that's where the canon comes from, and it was always based on merit.
It was never based on gender, race, religion and so forth.
Sexuality, ability.
Exactly.
Well, when you think about that, you think, well, what about the greatest, perhaps the greatest artist of all time, Leonardo da Vinci, a gay left-handed atheist?
Yeah.
So you can see that he got in on merit rather than on other characteristics.
And, you know, there are examples of atheists and gay artists and so forth.
But historically speaking, Europe was not demographically very varied, shall we say.
So if you go back in history and you look at literature and works of art, then obviously they're going to be created largely by white people, largely by men, nominally at least Christian.
So naturally this is how your canon is going to look.
Yes, that's the correlation not causation issue.
Whereas now, if you want to get funding from the various public bodies, the Arts Council, for example, if you're a white male, especially if you're a white middle-class, heterosexual male, you're not likely to get the same funding that you are if you're, I don't know, a disabled, lesbian, black...
You're basically utterly shafted, is what you're saying.
Yeah.
Yes.
I was speaking to someone before we had our panel, because I had a panel.
I talked about the book here at the Battle of Ideas.
I spoke to someone before then, and he was talking about a colleague, a female colleague, a white female colleague, who'd been given one day's teaching a week at a very prominent arts college.
And he said that she was accosted after the first staff meeting and was told in no uncertain terms that many of the staff were disappointed that she got this position because she is a white woman.
So not even being a woman is good enough.
No, she didn't have any other.
She wasn't lesbian enough.
She wasn't black enough.
She wasn't, I don't know, whatever enough.
I'm sure that there will be some people, not many of them, I imagine, because our listeners are pretty sound and pretty intellectually rigorous, who will say, well, look, despite everything, talent will out.
And if you're good enough, you can transcend this institutional bias.
I...
Yes, but at the cost of doing that after you're dead.
I mean, it's pretty tough to say to a white man who is 18 years old, who's not an uncommon demographic for an art student in this country, And say to him, look him in the eye and say, you're not going to get the opportunities that your black and your female and your gay colleagues are going to get because you are carrying an inherited burden of guilt from your forebears.
And you will be punished for this.
Yeah.
And what are you going to say?
You know, because you used to have feminists saying, you know, a hundred years ago, how can I look my daughter in the eye and tell her that she will never be as successful as her brother?
Now we're doing exactly the opposite, and it's the feminists who are saying, well, good.
He needs to be punished.
This 18-year-old boy who was not even alive, who...
Who was born 100 years after the end of institutional segregation between the genders.
He will carry the can.
He will be punished in his lifetime.
And I think you're just going to get a lot of less art made.
Yes, certainly good art will be made.
It will be recognised after people are dead.
But if you say to someone, well, as an artist, you're not going to get recognised in your lifetime.
Why are they not going to say, well, okay then, I'm going into engineering, I'm going into banking.
One of the many good essays in your book, Culture War, concerns Comicsgate.
And I think that's a particularly interesting example of cultural entryism.
Do you want to describe a bit what happened there?
Okay, well, Comicsgate is essentially the latest manifestation of the culture wars in pop culture.
In the book, I outline briefly the Sad Puppies campaign, which was to do with science fiction fans rebelling against politically correct fiction being nominated.
That's because...
Because the Hugo Awards which were the science fiction awards and they'd been hijacked by cultural entryism so that the judges were judging books not according to whether is this a rocking science fiction book but what were their criteria?
Well I think it was to do with the creator characteristics I think it was also to do with the fact that a lot of the characters were Introduced for demographic reasons.
I'm not exactly sure how bad it got.
The other areas I discussed were GamerGate, a big issue, though that was video games.
MagicGate, which is Magic the Gathering card-playing, role-playing game.
And then ComicsGate, which is the new thing which started a couple of years ago, which was when fans and creators...
Really started to rebel against weird race changing in comics where you had lots of established characters being changed from being white to being non-white, from being male to non-male.
Yeah, can you remember any examples of the...
Yeah, there was Riri Williams who was the replacement for...
Tony Stark, Iron Man, he was replaced by Riri Williams, who was a teenage black girl.
So you had people going to the Marvel movies and seeing Robert Downey Jr.
as Iron Man and thinking, wow, that's super cool.
I've got to buy some comic books with him in.
Yeah, I must become a coke fiend, just like Robert Downey.
Something like that, yeah.
And so they would go into comic shops and they would open up the comics and they would be confronted, but not with Tony Stark, who's the Isn't that quite racist?
Suggesting that the only way this character could get technology is by stealing it and she's a woman of colour.
Absolutely, which people pointed out was a terrible thing.
Actually, the creator spoke quite touchingly about wanting to create a role model for his...
Oh, fuck off.
Sorry, that's not touchingly.
That's just shit.
Well, he was supposed to be doing something for his adopted daughter, but I think it's a bad...
Oh, right.
I could write a really bad book and say that this was for some friend of mine who died of cancer.
Would that make it a better work of art?
Yeah, okay, his motivations were fine, but what he did was fairly lousy.
So you had all these characters who were getting changed for absolutely pure demographic reason, and then there was this weird thing of all women suddenly becoming very asexual, small breasts, not being pretty short haircuts.
That's right.
Tell me, what is the breakdown by sex of comic book readers?
It's predominantly male, very predominantly.
And what sort of age group?
They'd be in their 30s and early 40s, most of them.
Okay.
I would imagine that demographic would mainly like their female comic book characters to look hot, to have decent-sized breasts, pert buttocks.
I could go on, but I mean...
Yes, yes.
You clearly do want to go on.
And...
I did see a few examples of the new women, and they were just sort of fat and hippo-like and dykey, weren't they?
Yeah, and also sort of weirdly asexual, because romantic relationships between heterosexual couples is problematic now, James.
So I think the basic thing about American...
We're talking here about American superhero comics because, of course, you've got the indie scene and there's all sorts of weird sort of lefty stuff going on and that's fine and they do their own thing.
But it's this changes to American superhero comics which kind of shocked people because you want male heroes looking handsome and fit and doing heroic things and you want the female characters to look sexy and attractive and also to be doing heroic things.
Yeah.
And what fans were being presented with was with this crazy stuff that they didn't recognise.
And it was being written by people who were not actually comic book authors.
They had not come up through the independent scene and done occasional work and then worked up to a big book.
They had been taken out of the YA young adult author fiction market and transplanted directly...
into writing a mainline Marvel or DC comic book.
So this is a perfect example because I was looking for concrete examples because it's all very well us railing against cultural entryism and saying how it's killing quality and stuff but unless you've got some concrete examples one can get fairly flabby.
But here you are Old school DC or Marvel Universe, what you would have is really enthusiastic, geeky, probably males predominantly, working their guts off to get into the system and proving themselves through their talent and creating stuff that people wanted to buy.
Now you've got people being parachuted in because of their politics and because of their gender criteria.
Yeah, you had Mariko Tamaki, who was brought in to write She-Hulk.
She-Hulk, yeah, that's going to work, isn't it?
That is a feminist issue, I suppose.
Well...
It was a character that was established a while ago, but they thought they could do something new with it, so they brought in Mariko Tamaki, who is a young adult author who had not much or no experience of writing comics.
She's Asian, she's gay, and her She-Hulk comic story started with, I think, three or four issues of the She-Hulk character sitting around watching cooking shows on YouTube.
We're eating chocolate.
Yes.
Well, yeah, that's fair enough.
That's realistic.
Not for a superhero, it doesn't.
But how did the adventures spin off from that?
Well, I think...
Did she lose weight suddenly?
No, I think the character got possessed and she had to...
The chef character who was on this internet show got possessed and she had to rescue him and it was not entirely convincing.
It does sound quite Japanese, though.
I'll give it that.
Technically, I think she's Canadian, but she's of Japanese heritage.
Ah, Canadian.
Yeah, Canadian.
That explains everything, doesn't it?
I mean, Canadian.
Canada, probably the second most ruined country, Western nation after Ireland, I would say.
Oh, you're missing out Sweden?
Oh, sorry.
Sweden, yeah.
Those three countries must really fight it out, mustn't they?
Which has died most totally.
They're plummeting to the bottom, I'm afraid.
Okay, so I would imagine, correct me if I'm wrong, and I could be editorialising here, but did these new-look comics sell very well?
No, they did not sell very well, James.
They sold very badly.
Colour me shocked.
And a lot of them, they sold sort of below break-even point, and they were kept on as sort of prestige things.
Prestige?
That's interesting to use the word prestige.
Prestige?
Well, you know...
Niche.
Niche.
Demographic things.
They obviously had...
You know, personnel obviously had spreadsheets with little tick boxes, you know, percentages of who was writing what, and the people at Marvel and DC, they wanted to...
Fill in these boxes, and so they've kept on these writers.
I mean, so for example, you have Kamala Khan, who is Ms.
Marvel, and she is a Muslim superhero, created by one of the senior figures in Marvel Comics, Asana Amanat, who has an interesting history.
Yeah, tell me.
Well...
Within the laws of libel.
She comes from a family with very strong Islamic connections.
They were in the Muslim Brotherhood.
And her cousin is the woman who is Hillary Clinton's aide.
Oh right, the really dodgy one.
Yes, the one who's married to Weiner.
Okay.
Uma Aberdeen.
So you've really got politics intruding into this world.
And what interests me here, we're entering get woke, go broke territory.
And yet, this has persisted, hasn't it?
Or has there been a backlash to the point where...
There has been a backlash.
This is what Comicsgate is.
The Comicsgate is the resistance, where people started saying, no, we're not going to buy this anymore.
This is terrible.
You've really damaged the characters.
You've gone back and you've distorted canon.
For example, you had a story where Captain America was saying, Hail Hydra, and Hydra is sort of the Nazi analogue in...
In the Marvel Universe.
So this is basically Captain America saying, I was a Nazi.
I was doing it for the Nazis.
I was always a Nazi.
So even if you disagree with this new story, retrospectively it kind of contaminates canon.
It's very destructive.
And so you had this group of creators and fans getting together and saying, well, we're going to make our own comics.
We're going to make our own action comics.
We're not going to be right-wing or patriotic.
We're just going to make exciting adventures without politics, with women who look like women, men who look like men.
Yes.
The bar?
No.
See, this is the kind of when real life entries...
Why does he think we might know where the bar is?
I've got coffee cup in front of me.
I've got nothing alcoholic.
I suppose we look like we might be officials at the...
Anyway.
Sorry, you were saying?
Oh yeah, well, we're in the hub of the Barbican, looking up at all its brutalist glory.
Do you know what though?
Actually, just a brief digression.
I was standing outside the Barbican.
It is a brutalist horror show and yet at the same time I kind of quite...
I wouldn't mind having a flat here at all actually.
Yeah, I heard that the only problem with the flats was that they had heating that you couldn't turn off.
Oh, that would drive me nuts.
So that sounds like a very socialistic approach to things.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Very inefficient and inconvenient for everyone.
Yes.
But one size fits all.
Yeah, absolutely.
So, back to the culture wars in Comicsgate.
Yeah.
So you were saying this...
Friend of the dotty friend of Hillary Clinton, which already damns it, is one of the key writers.
Actually, I think she's probably in charge of a lot of the hiring.
So she's driving the women and the hiring of women and young adult authors as well.
Do these companies not have shareholders?
Well, yeah.
I mean, why have the parent companies responsible for this not gone broke?
This is something that I don't understand.
There is this idea of sort of woke capitalism where you've got these big companies, they do their virtue signaling.
We have that with Nike.
Who was that?
Gillette as well.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
They all seem to be doing it.
I had an idea that it was perhaps cross-subsidised, but I think the laws are quite strict on that.
So I don't imagine that the money from Marvel films is being funnelled into Marvel Comics to support that.
I think it seems to be a suspension of gravity.
I don't know how they manage it.
Right, okay.
So, what's been going on in the world of comics obviously is also taking place in the world of fine art.
Yes.
Oh, I should mention Maria Balshaw.
Oh, tell me.
Maria Balshaw is director of the Tate Gallery, which for your special listeners who are not part of the art scene in Britain, the Tate Gallery is basically the gallery for modern British art and for contemporary art.
So she is essentially perhaps one of the two or three most important people in the art world in Britain.
Maria Balshaw studied at university English literature where she specialised in black American literature and critical theory which is basically Marxist theory.
She's never written on art history, she's never published on art history I've got no idea how much or how little she knows about art history, but she is now head of the National Museum for Modern British Art.
How did you get the job?
He asked rhetorically.
Being a woman and being left-wing?
Yeah, yeah.
Beyond that, I can't say.
But however competent or incompetent she is, and that remains to be seen, she's only been in the job a couple of years, certainly she was appointed on characteristics not to do with experience whatsoever.
Yeah.
In your talk, which I went to earlier, or part of it before I walked out when the Swedish guy started banging on about how the far right was the real problem in Sweden and not the left, and I thought, you're completely ducking the argument here.
You're not engaging with Alexander's case at all.
Yeah.
Yeah.
What were you saying?
I completely lost my track here because I was just thinking about...
Oh, we're talking about Maria Balshaw.
Yeah, Swedish guy.
High culture.
Yeah, exactly.
What you were saying was that...
The expertise is no longer valued in curators.
So you've got people being chosen for being woke but not knowing about...
They probably couldn't tell a Rembrandt from a Vermeer.
Yes.
That kind of thing.
Yeah, because the personnel departments have...
You know, they have targets to hit.
You have to get so many women.
You have to get so many whatever characteristics in.
And...
You also have this problem which I've raised, and it's a bit of a live issue, to do with women being more people-focused and being more politically left because women skew left when they are younger.
You look at the Pew opinion polls, you'll find that young women tend to skew left, men less and less, and they move slightly right as they get older, as they have families, they get married and so forth.
So what you've got is you've got lots of, it's generational, so you're getting in women who are going into the personnel department and then beyond that they are hiring women curators and directors of departments who are also left-leaning and they tend to view art in a rather instrumentalist way.
They tend to want to please people, they want to be agreeable, so they want to do lots of stuff to do with representation and so forth.
Just tell me what instrumentalist means.
Well, utilitarian, it's basically, oh, we're using art in order to do a particular social thing.
So we want art as a social tool to aid integration, or in this sort of identity politics world, actually to do the reverse of integration, to fractionalise, to tribalise everyone.
You can also say that it's to do with outreach to the poor.
It's also to do with art venues have been marketed as a place where you can sort of improve your mental health and so forth.
So you have arts, also urban regeneration, economic regeneration as a sort of art hub.
So all of these are utilitarian uses for art rather than saying art is fantastic and it's exciting as art.
Yes.
Does this...
Patronising quality, isn't there?
In the idea that you ordinary folk don't really understand art unless we make it relevant to you and we show you how it's relevant to you.
But I read histories of the National Gallery and I know that when the National Gallery started in, when would it have been?
Early 19th century perhaps?
Yeah, I think it's the last decades of the 18th century, yeah.
The working classes queued round the block.
They did not need some curator explaining to them that actually, if you're a gin drinker and you live below the poverty line, this particular painting will have some meaning for you.
The working classes wanted culture.
They wanted high culture.
They didn't want culture talking down to them.
Yeah, absolutely.
They wanted a challenge and they were really excited.
They didn't want stuff dumbed down.
They didn't want stuff targeted specifically at them.
They wanted to see the great works of art that all the nobility had on their walls.
They wanted the chance to see it firsthand.
And that was something that really excited them.
And I think that we should be presenting art and saying, Art is fantastic as it is and it's really complex and it's difficult and you get out as much as you put in and not targeting stuff today to sort of say, oh, you know, black people only want to see art by black people.
Women only want to see art by women.
That seems a little bit patronising and suspect.
Tell me, do you think the start of all this was Bastia?
I mean, I do actually...
I don't quite like him.
Basquiat.
Sorry, I'm confusing.
I won the Bastiat Prize once, so I'm confusing with that.
Yeah, Basquiat.
I saw a documentary about him, and I do actually like his stuff, but I hope I was liking it because...
It did something for me, rather than because he was a marginalised...
Where was he from?
He was, I think it was half Haitian.
Yeah, half Haitian, yeah.
Yeah, although he spent most of his time in, I think, Brooklyn and New York.
But do you think part of that, they were thinking, this is fantastic, he's not a white, middle-class man?
Well, there was this attitude.
He was very upset at the time because there were...
Articles and interviews with him where he was sort of being treated as a sort of tame Negro.
Yes.
And he didn't like that, did he?
He didn't like that at all.
Good on him.
But he was kind of ambivalent because, of course, black identity played a part in his art, but he wanted to be taken on as an equivalent to Leonardo or Van Gogh, who were his heroes.
He was very, very fluent, wasn't he?
Absolutely.
I mean, I think he was a genuine talent.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, I really like his work and it really excites me.
There is the identity politics aspect of it, but he wanted to be taken on one-to-one as someone who was really good and someone who really immersed himself in the Western tradition.
And he wasn't opposed to the canon.
He wasn't opposed to that.
He said, I'm the extension.
I'm the next part because I'm good enough, not because I'm black.
And not because I want to destroy the canon.
So that was probably...
That was the transitional phase, I would suspect, roughly, that period between the old culture where you had Ruskin writing about the lives of the artists and so on, and standards being maintained, and this new world we now live in where...
Yeah, it's difficult.
It was happening in all sorts of phases.
I mean, I would say that a major thing was postmodernism, where suddenly you could talk about art and present art in ways that were not connected to looking at art.
Because if you buy this book, you will find it in footnote 69.
The name of the author and the book name of a book that I reviewed, which was a whole book...
about contemporary art in which there was not a single sentence devoted to the visual appearance of the art under discussion.
Interesting you say that.
I remember when I was at university, I had a friend studying at the Ruskin, which is the art school in Oxford.
And I remember going to the Ruskin degree show and thinking, this is really, really poor quality art, number one.
But what fascinated me was that clearly a lot more effort had gone into the undergraduates explaining what their art meant than letting the art speak for itself.
Yes, it becomes a verbal exercise.
You're impressing your tutors, you're impressing other people with your verbal fluency, and you start larding in all these terms from sort of post-structuralism and post-modernism.
But that was in the 80s.
Yeah.
Presumably the rot set in even earlier than that.
I mean...
Was Duchamp part of the problem?
Yeah, I mean, Duchamp's sort of revival as a modernist icon happens in the 1960s with the rise of post-modernism and you have the idea of specifically attacking the canon.
To be fair, the Dadaists in the 1910s were specifically setting out to...
Destroy the canon.
You have, for example, Marinetti in the Futurist movement from about sort of 1910 saying, oh, we should use Rembrandts as ironing boards.
Right.
So there was sort of an anti-canonical approach before then.
But yeah, it's sort of the 1968, I think, is basically the foundation of postmodernism.
And from there on, you can see the attacks on the idea of judging art on its visual appearance and the merit of art.
Because postmodernists believe that there is no way of judging art in aesthetic terms because that requires consensus.
And consensus is an illusion derived from power structures.
So you can't judge anything at all.
So therefore, artists stop using aesthetic criteria to make art.
They make art that is deliberately...
It's anti-aesthetic.
It has no visual qualities at all.
It is entirely verbal.
It is entirely conceptual because they believe there's no such thing as aesthetics.
Aesthetics for a postmodernist is a parlor game of the intelligentsia.
Right.
And I imagine that is that when the craft element as well started disappearing from art?
Because after all, isn't craft elitist that discriminates against people with no talent?
Or training?
Yes and no.
One thing is you have the feminists who start in the 1960s and early 1970s saying that, oh, quilt work is the equivalent of old master painting because women were excluded.
Right.
Not true, but it's an understandable fallacy.
Women were excluded from painting.
So therefore they turn to crafts.
So therefore crafts are the fine art of women and the oppressed.
But also you find an additional thing which is happening now where you have like weird neurotic crafts.
where people make art out of pricking banana skins to make them go brown or they start drawing in biro on polythene cups or whatever.
And it becomes extremely technical and actually very skilled, but it's all incredibly trite.
Right.
It's a perverse adoption of weird craft, just so long as it isn't to do with painting or printmaking or drawing.
So if 68 was the sort of watershed moment, I'm going to put you on the spot here.
Who do you think that's been good since?
Who do you rate?
Philip Guston, who reached his mature style in around sort of 1968.
He was an abstract painter, American abstract painter, and then he came back to painting figures, like figures, faces, pointing hands, clocks.
So if people go look up Philip Guston, they'll find this sort of, his most famous art is these sort of cartoony-like figures, and it's got sort of a tragic element.
I would also say artists who had already been established like Lucian Freud or Frank Auerbach or Francis Bacon, they're good.
But if you're talking about people who came to their mature style since then, I would say one name to look up is Belinda de Bruca.
That's B-R-U-Y-C-K-E-R-E and she is a fantastic sculptor, Belgian sculptor.
She makes casts out of wax and horse hair and animal skins and they're figures.
They're like people or animals and they're distorted and it's really crazy, amazing, creepy stuff.
Go look it up.
Okay, right.
But generally, the sort of thing that gets bigged up in the Tate Modern?
No.
You know, I go to the Tate Modern and I walk through those rooms to get to the Jackson Pollocks and the Francis Bacon's.
Okay.
You're an art critic, among other things.
Who do you write?
I write primarily for The Jackdaw, which is an independent newsletter which has got lots of independent views on fine art.
It's very anti-PC. It's very anti-identity politics.
Fantastic.
They've got a website, but they do more in print.
So if you really like what you find on the website, perhaps consider subscribing and supporting independent journalism.
I also work for The Critic, which is a new magazine.
Yeah, I went to the launch.
Were you there?
No, I missed out sadly.
It was a good party.
I also write occasionally for Spiked Online and sometimes specialist art journals.
Okay, so the point of that is you write for fairly niche publications which I imagine are despised by the arts-lovy mainstream.
Most of them, yes.
You're considered a bunch of reactionaries...
Yes, and the problem is that I'm always considered too reactionary by some people and then too sort of modernist, because here I am saying that there is a few good pieces of contemporary art.
So I get it from both sides.
You were, before I forget, you were at Goldsmiths, which is the ground zero of this.
Why is Goldsmiths so stupid?
They've been consumed by identity politics.
It was originally a very sort of liberal, leftist liberal college.
It was sort of teacher training, but it got a fantastic art department set up in the 1980s.
And this is where artists like Damien Hirst came from.
Right.
And they were...
Extremely inventive and creative, and whether you like it or not, it's very striking stuff.
You're not going to find anything like that now.
They've now become consumed by identity politics, by leftist activism.
The student union there has banned the word women with an E. They spell it with an X now.
Womuxen.
Womuxen.
They had the diversity officer who banned white men from a diversity meeting.
That's not very diverse, is it?
So it's sort of a par for the course.
But I don't know why specifically they've gone so far.
I guess it's virtue signalling.
They just want to show to the other universities and other colleges, we do it better than anyone else.
We are more virtuous than any other institution I see.
And was Tracy Emin at Goldsmiths as well?
No, I don't think she was there, but Sarah Lucas and some of the other YBAs went there.
Has that YBA generation reacted at all against this stuff, or have they kind of endorsed it?
I'm not sure.
The following generation, it's quite interesting, I've been super drab.
Now, the problem with the YBAs is they were always known for being a little bit superficial, being a little bit too clued into pop culture, being too interested in making a sensation, as you'll remember from the Saatchi exhibition, it's called Sensation, and that featured the YBAs.
A lot of that has died out.
The next generation is being as drab as possible.
They're making art which has no visual qualities at all.
It's being made by assistants.
They're working in multimedia.
So none of them are specialists.
Well...
Yeah, theoretically.
But they've abandoned the idea of craft, as you pointed out, and they're now delegating to assistants.
They're moving between different media.
They're making art which is supposed to be thought-provoking and so forth, but it's very dour stuff.
And none of this stuff is going to leave any impression.
Right.
What I was coming on to there was you're talking about art criticism, of being a kind of old-school critic in the field of arts, but I've noticed this happening across the board in movie reviews, for example.
There's this newish phenomenon whereby if you go to Rotten Tomatoes and you compare the...
Reviewers' ratings with the audience ratings.
For example, this new series, Woke Men, Watchmen.
Yes.
Watchmen gets 98%, I think, from the critics.
And we're talking about a lot of critics.
This isn't a kind of unrepresentative sample.
And then you see the audience rating, and the audience rating is about 42%.
And so critics who are supposed to be, to represent presumably the audience, I mean they're supposed to be the interface between the artist and the mediator, and yet they're not mediating, are they?
Because the audiences are thinking, sod this for a game of soldiers, this is crap.
Yeah.
They're acting as the cultural gatekeepers.
They're the elite.
They have become detached from their audience.
And they've become overly political.
And you'll find that consumers just reject it.
They can see this stuff.
They don't like being patronised.
They don't like going into a gallery or a cinema and having a finger wagged in their face and being told, you are evil, you are wrong.
Everything you've believed up till now is wrong.
And you get this also in things like...
I hear a terrible rumour about the next series of Doctor Who.
You don't need to hear terrible things about the next series.
You haven't heard this one.
This one is Jodie Whittaker is going to be lecturing David Tennant and berating him for being a white, sexist man and tearing down It's such a shame because Doctor Who used to be a fantastic role model for young boys.
It was a thoughtful, intelligent, compassionate man who would think around a problem and try to avoid violence and try to solve problems that way.
And, you know, Tom Baker and Peter Davidson were my heroes when I was a kid.
And young boys, they're not getting that now.
Yes, no.
And for me as well, John Pertwee.
Yeah.
I mean, fantastic.
Yeah, that is so sad.
It's very cruel.
I think it's very destructive.
I think one of the things that I said in my talk today was that it's to do with occupying a culture and a canon and destroying it and despoiling it out of cruelty and out of spite to make a point, to take away the cultural capital of your opponent.
I think that can't be emphasised enough, that point, and you did make it very strongly, which is that these people are not motivated by a desire to make art better.
No.
A lot of them, they don't even know much about these franchises or these canon.
They're brought in and they just see stuff that they think is ridiculous.
They think it's all, you know, whatever.
They think it's all sort of ridiculous and so forth.
So, yeah.
Yes.
Sorry, I was distracted then by me making you adjust your microphone and now I've lost the plot.
We're talking about occupying culture and sort of having a dog in the manger effect.
And you see this with a lot of companies, a lot of creators, that if they can't control the culture that they are occupying, they will destroy it.
They will bring down the company.
They will ruin the canon.
This is happening...
I kind of want to write this book, but I can't think of the title yet.
But it seems to me that the phenomenon you describe with relation to the arts applies to almost every aspect of our society.
For example...
Businesses are no longer in the business of generating value for shareholders.
They are about affecting social justice.
Well, you gave some examples.
Gillette, Nike.
The emergency services.
Are no longer in the business of primarily saving lives, or at least saving lives is considered no more important than recruiting more lesbians to run different police departments.
And altering the fitness requirements in order to allow that.
The latest recruitment ads were not about fighting for your country.
They weren't even about this new role for the army about kind of disaster relief.
They were about when you're out on patrol and you're a Muslim, your comrades will sit around good-humouredly while you whip out your prayer mat in Snowdonia.
This kind of stuff.
So, in every case, what you have is the institution's core business, and I think you argue this very well in the Culture War, being diverted to something else which has got nothing to do with the core business.
Is that fair?
Yes, absolutely.
Because a lot of the time, I think these people, they don't have a competency in this area.
I think that with competency comes respect.
And this linking of competency, merit and respect means that you actually become part of the culture, you become part of the canon, you become invested and you want to see it furthered and nurtured.
Whereas if you come in and you don't have any particular connection, Then you just see this, you just see this, what you're working in, in an instrumentalist way.
And you think, well, I have to advance my politics.
I have a political agenda, and I'm going to use this.
And what you see now is, I mentioned an example where we had...
A venue manager, a gallery manager, who said that he was making changes to his museums.
Oh yes, you quote this because it is quite scary.
Yeah, so I'll read out this paragraph that I used.
Second, so this is the second point I made.
In June 2019, Alistair Hudson, director of Manchester and Whitworth Galleries, issued a statement about the receipt of £75,000 in grant, To further the aims of Art Util and Outside Partners, two arts organisations dedicated to injecting politics into art venues.
Hudson wrote of a plan to, quote, reuse our buildings as places to generate conversations between people about what we need to do and what we need to address, unquote, and partner with, quote, local constituent groups, creating an agency to inform the...
Museums collecting, curating and presenting, unquote.
When Mr Hudson writes of, quote, artistic strategies to make change happen, unquote, we know what type of change he envisages.
Yes, who's changed?
Exactly.
The thing that really annoyed me about that Swedish bloke when he said that, he said, yes, you have some interesting points, but I do not recognise that the problem is purely from the left.
He made his far right point.
But it is purely from the left.
The culture in Western Europe is largely dominated, especially in Britain and America, is largely dominated by leftists, by politically liberal people anyway.
Yeah.
And so, you can't really talk about, you know, people talk about, oh, you know, the writer's got a big, powerful influence.
It's like, well, okay, name me one British novelist who is working today who is a cultural conservative.
Name me one poet.
Name me one playwright who's on the right.
Yes.
You can't name them.
It's very, very hard.
And you certainly aren't going to get a literary award, for example, or indeed a BAFTA award now.
You've seen this new ruling they have.
Oh, they've got quotas now, yeah.
You've got to have quotas.
You've got any production in order to qualify for a BAFTA award, which is, I suppose, like the British...
Oscars, isn't it really?
Yeah, it is.
It's the Film and Television Awards, yeah.
So if you want one of those, your production has got to have a significant number of black people, gay people, whatever.
You can't just have a...
Yeah.
And there was another institution as well that I was thinking of that's playing this game.
It'll come back to me maybe.
The Turner Prize, which is for fine art, was won last year by a female lesbian artist who made a film with her iPhone.
Not of her vagina, I hope.
I believe not.
I didn't see it.
Luckily, because I don't cover contemporary art, I managed to avoid it, so I don't have to...
I'm not obliged to see these things.
What do you...
Well, I tend to prefer to write about modern art, so that sort of stuff from the middle of the century, also the old masters, so I'm much happier writing about Vermeer and Rembrandt and Picasso and Jackson Pollock than anything that's happening today, but I do see occasional stuff that I like.
It's interesting you mention Jackson Pollock in the same breath as Vermeer.
Tell me why he's good.
Okay, well, basically, he does things that you don't get in other painters of previous periods.
So you get lots of energy.
You have the idea of the microcosm and the macrocosm.
So you look at his big, splattered, splashed, dripped paintings, and you have a sense of...
Looking at a landscape from a great height, but it's also like an example of looking inside a cell, and you've got this microcosm and macrocosm existing at the same time.
Also, he's dealing in sort of polyrhythms, so if you look at film of the way he works, he's splashing out arcs in a particular rhythm.
And then he goes through with a different colour and then he's sort of splattering in sort of dabs.
And you'll find that what happens is the mind is very attuned to polyrhythms.
So you have two different rhythms working sort of in harmony, then also against each other.
And this is something that excites people.
So you get lots of polyrhythms in, for example, drumming.
So that's a visual equivalent of what you get in Jackson Pollock.
Like a raga.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, you've sold him to me.
Do you know who my favourite is?
My favourite contemporary or living artist.
I totally love him and I think the British public shares my enthusiasm.
I love David Hockney.
He brings me so much joy.
He's immensely creative and...
Oh, I can say you're not a fan.
I can tell you.
Immensely creative.
Talk about damning with faint praise.
Yes, he's not my...
Okay, I'm a big fan of his very early work.
I must say, I really love the early prints and the early paintings.
I'm going off you, Alexander.
No, no, because I'm not going off you.
We can agree to disagree.
I mean, isn't that the point?
Yeah, and also I think, you know, one of the points that I put in the essay in this book about the canon is that people say, oh, if you have a Raphael or Leonardo in the canon, then that means you can't have Jackson Pollock.
And I say, no, it's to do with excellence, visual excellence in particular fields.
And Jackson Pollock is a brilliant abstract painter.
And so he's as much part of the canon as Raphael or Leonardo or Rembrandt.
And I would say that certainly early Hockney deserves to be part of the canon.
I think he will be reviewed.
Just not his late stuff.
Yeah.
Not so much.
So his swimming pools don't make it?
Oh yeah, yeah.
I mean, I would say the stuff up until the early 70s.
So the swimming pools, the boy paintings, the prints, the illustrations from the 60s.
Yeah, definitely.
Right, but not his...
Yeah, well, okay, fair enough, fair enough.
Are you saying that you like the later stuff better than the early stuff?
No, of course I'm not.
Well, there you are.
You're exercising your discrimination.
Which is a good thing.
Yeah, totally, totally.
If you were allowed to have one painting, any painting, what's it going to be?
Okay.
Now you've put me on the spot.
I think maybe I'd choose Vermeer's artist in his studio where he's sitting at his easel with a painting in front of him and he's painting a model.
It's a beautiful interior.
Does she look like Scarlett Johansson?
She's very pretty, yeah.
Yeah, I think you'd like it.
I love Vermeer.
I absolutely love Vermeer.
But doesn't everyone love Vermeer?
I mean, he's kind of...
He's got that...
Are you saying he's the acme of good taste now?
Yes.
No, I'm not saying that in a bad way at all.
I just think...
I like Vermeer for the same reason I like, say, Holbein.
It's just beautifully executed.
The drawings of Holborn are fantastic.
They're not as well known as the paintings, but the drawings are absolutely super.
Yeah, you see, there you are again.
You see, you're going niche Holbein.
You see, I'm thinking about the Ambassadors.
I'm thinking about stuff like that.
Henry VIII's portrait.
The obvious stuff.
Who did Christina of Denmark?
Was that in the National Gallery?
Well, that may well be him.
I'm not sure.
Yes, I think I might go for the...
The Arnolfini marriage portrait, because I quite like his hat.
It's beautiful, and a nice dog as well, if you're a dog lover.
Are you a dog lover?
I'm a dog lover, yeah.
There you are, you've got a dog as well.
And also, I'm rather fond, for different reasons, of the Wilton diptych.
Yes.
Just because it's such a rare example of...
Yeah, of the art that preceded the Reformation and was destroyed in the Reformation.
Imagine what Britain would have looked like if our churches were still painted.
Yes.
It would be amazing.
Do you know, I had a big quibble with the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.
You know that it was, obviously, the Rijksmuseum is full of Dutch art, golden period.
Yeah, too much bloody Dutch art, I have to say.
Yes, absolutely.
It hasn't, yeah, it's actually, I would say it's a second-rate collection because it doesn't have enough Italian and German art.
I think you need to visit a coffee shop before you go just to be able to cope with the boredom of it.
Well, I went to the reopening and I said, and basically the problem is that you've got this sort of Calvinist, quite sort of strict, austere kind of approach to art in the sort of 17th century, for historical reasons.
There's lots of still lifes and lots of portraits and so forth.
And that was the time when they were whitewashing all the churches and getting rid of the icons.
So that's quite a sort of Calvinist, Puritan approach to art.
Unfortunately, when the Rijksmuseum was built in the 19th century, it was built by a Catholic, and he built it like a Romanesque archbishop's palace.
So the venue's completely wrong for the contest.
The Dutch king would not go to the opening of the Rijksmuseum because he said it was an archbishop's palace.
And he got it quite right.
It's absolutely the worst setting.
Now certainly there's certainly great Catholic art, and there was some great Catholic art made in the Low Countries, but the museum should have been built in an appropriate style for the heyday of Dutch art, which is a sort of more Calvinist, austere approach.
So I criticised not only the collection as being slightly second rate, but the building as being completely inappropriate.
It's like basically the houses of Westminster.
And what is your fave art gallery?
Probably the Dulwich Picture Gallery.
Oh really?
Yeah.
That used to be my local.
As with all things on one's doorstep, you never appreciate it as much as you ought because it's local.
Yes, it's a beautiful little collection.
I'm a big Poussin fan.
Classical French painter.
So they've got lots of that.
Also, it was the art gallery where my dad...
My dad was actually an old boy, an old Alainian.
He went to Dulwich College.
And so I've got that sort of emotional connection that he used to visit the art gallery and I used to visit when I lived down in London.
I used to live in London when I was studying at Goldsmiths and a little bit afterwards.
So the Dulwich Pitch Gallery has a sentimental place for me.
Right.
And you now live in one of the bellies of the beast.
I mean, Bristol.
Yeah, I did a talk at the Bristol Free Speech Society, which basically is almost an underground society.
I bet there were about three people there.
Yeah, the university there is terrible with free speech.
And I asked the president...
Yeah, Bristol.
Well, Bristol and Bristol University especially.
And I spoke to the president of the Bristol Free Speech Association.
And I said, well, you've got it pretty tough here.
And he said, yeah, why do you think we set up this society?
You know, it's more needed here than anywhere else.
University?
Yeah, university.
Okay.
But back in my day, Bristol was basically for yards who couldn't get into Oxford, and they all lived in lovely houses in that crescent, what's it called?
They all lived in Clifton, basically, with their golf GTIs and stuff.
Yes.
Is that not the case anymore?
I wouldn't know.
I would recommend students of Bristol University to buy a copy of my book.
And I... Yeah, spread the word.
I don't know about the quality.
I always thought I had quite a good reputation, academically speaking.
Do you know where I keep your book?
I keep it in the upstairs loo.
So I heard in an earlier podcast.
I read it while I'm sitting on the loo.
Because it's got lots of bite-sized chunks.
I'm glad you didn't bring it in for me to sign.
I don't use it as bog paper.
I can afford bog paper.
Thank you very much.
Congratulations on having human necessities, James.
So, Culture War.
Actually, it just reminded me of Dominic Frisbee.
I went to Dom's show the other night, Libertarian Love Songs, and he's got this fantastic closing number about when you're feeling down, about the something you do every day that makes you feel so much better.
And it's a song about the joy of doing a poo.
And if anyone gets a chance to go see that show, I really recommend it.
But Alexander, thank you very much for being on the podcast.
And I do recommend your book, Culture War.
Who's the publisher?
Societas.
Societas.
Okay, can people buy it online?
Yes, they can buy it online.
They can also buy it through bookshops in Britain and North America.
It's distributed in North America.
You can buy it also from the publisher's website, which is either Imprint Academic or Societas.
Either one will lead you to that page.
And while we're plugging our product, I'm very, very conscious, and people keep telling me this, I am absolutely rubbish at reminding people, please, please, subscribe to this podcast.
Subscribe on YouTube, subscribe on, what are the other ones, Podbean, on iTunes.
Please leave your comments as well.
You know, when I'm bored sometimes or feeling depressed, I sometimes look on the...
I get more comments on iTunes than on Podbean for some reason.
I love your five-star reviews.
Fuck off with your one-star reviews, but I don't get many of those.
So please engage, because actually, it's a crowded market.
I still think this is...
Yeah, frankly, it's the best podcast in the world.
And you can be found on YouTube as well.
On YouTube, yeah, exactly.
So please subscribe, and don't forget...
Apply to me through my website, delingpoleworld.com.
You can get your special friend badges.
I know they're quite expensive.
They're like 25 quid if you order them online.
But good things don't come cheap.
That's all till next week.
Thank you very much for listening to the podcast.
Thank you very much to my very special guest, Alexander Adams, author of Culture War.
Thank you and goodbye.
Thank you.
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