Entertaining Art
BBC News calls it 'Entertainment & Arts' - but what's the difference?
Mark Wigglesworth 10:12am GMT 1st July 2011
The BBC News website has a tab labelled 'Entertainment & Arts'. It makes me wonder what they feel is the difference between the two. The implication seems to be that the 'Arts' are not entertaining and that 'Entertainment' is not an art, an idea as insulting as it is patronising. I'm sure the insinuation is unintentional but it is often the unintentional that reveals what one truly thinks. I appreciate that not everyone finds Wagner entertaining and I know that there are many who don't think there is anything artistic about The X-Factor but is that not just a matter of taste? Where there is creativity, there is art, and where there is art, there is entertainment.
Obviously it depends how one defines each word. If there is a difference, I suspect it is a modern one. I am no anthropologist, but in human civilisation the concept of high culture and low culture is probably a relatively recent phenomenon. Mozart saw no contradiction in writing a masterpiece like The Magic Flute for a Viennese suburban popular theatre. Beethoven had no problem arranging a series of Scottish folksongs. And the poorest Elizabethans regularly spent vast proportions of their weekly salaries on watching the latest play by Shakespeare. Of course entertainment that is not in some sense artistic will not survive long but I'm not sure who has the right to decide that in advance or on behalf of others. Whether entertainment is artistic or not is something that only time ultimately decides.
Theodore Adorno felt that popular entertainment represented an enormous threat to high culture. It seems to me though that the biggest threat to high culture is to define it as such in the first place. The idea that the Arts are superior to Entertainment is a dangerous form of snobbery. Not everyone likes classical music, but if they don't we should not alienate them further by suggesting that it is something other than entertainment.
In America, the changing economies are forcing orchestras to seriously engage in how people want to spend their 'Entertainment dollars'. This is an honest acknowledgement of the fact that most people do not distinguish between types of entertainment other than through personal preference. There is a finite amount of money to spend on an almost infinite range of possible activities, including even the option of being entertained without leaving the home. The art forms that are succeeding are the ones that are making themselves the most entertaining, and the ones that are succeeding the most are doing so without compromising on their artistic goals at all.
The best performers do not distinguish between arts and entertainment and I don't believe that audiences do either. Intriguingly, if you access the BBC website from abroad, the heading on the tab only reads 'Entertainment'. I hope this means they think that at least foreigners consider art as entertainment. Either that or they don't think foreigners see art as entertainment at all. Then there really would be a problem.
Comments
It is difficult for me to think how Dostoyevky, Faulkner, Camus, or Tarkovky could take Mark's argument seriously. Tarkovsky thought art's role was to "plow and harrow the soul." How entertaining can that be? A substantial percentage of people, seeing this on a billboard promoting an 'arts and entertainment' event, would quickly move to the next line, the longer line. Art requires some work on the part of the audience . . . and some willingness to be torn apart, to be spiritually engaged, to rise above oneself. Goethe said that to read a good book is as difficult as to write one. None of this has anything to do with high or low culture. It has to do with the question of what it means to be a human being.
What does it mean to be a human being: This is the central question of art. While entertainment, like sentimentality, is unearned, art asks us to look into our souls; it requires our existential engagement.
Art, whether entertaining or not, demands our spiritual participation; 'point blank' entertainment does not. Through entertainment we escape for a moment what Wallace Stevens refered to as "the pressure of reality," but the next day we find ourselves with little if any new insight: we head back to the office unchanged and unchallenged. We are exactly what we thought we were, no more and no less.
Rick Visser
www.rickvisser.com