Apologetically intellectual, unapologetically anti-intellectual

[imomus]

"Do not admit cleverness in any form into your life," says a spoof Press Release in British artist Stuart Bailey's ongoing text performance at the Whitney Biennial. It's a very British theme, that "do not admit cleverness". We saw it raise its head in the Click Opera comments yesterday when someone mentioned John Carey's books attempting to topple the reputations of some of Modernism's greatest writers. It may also have lurked behind Noel Coward's sketch about the Swiss Family Whittlebot. It's certainly the theme of Frank Furedi's book Where have all the intellectuals gone?.

Clever people in Britain are vociferous in their anti-cleverness. When a camera crew came to Britain from Finland in 1993 to make a Momus documentary called Man of Letters, I took them to meet interesting people I thought would have intelligent things to say. One of these was children's authoress (she'd just published "King Kid") Rozelle Bentheim. I'd met Rozelle -- Scottish and Jewish, like my hero Ivor Cutler -- at my friend Tamar Yoseloff's poetry club at the Earl's Court Troubadour. I didn't know her very well, but she seemed like an interesting and intelligent person. She'd spent time in New York in the 80s, befriending Klaus Nomi.

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So, with director Hannu Puttonen and the film crew, we arrived at Rozelle's basement duplex on the New King's Road. On camera, as you can see in this clip, Rozelle warmed to "Platinum", the first track on my Timelord album, but took me to task for the way I was framing it in words:

"I haven't heard anything you've ever done before in my life. I didn't listen to the words, but this is very playful and this is very intuitive and it's very playful in a good childlike not childish way. So why are you substantiating it with all these kinds of words with edges on them?"

"Because that's one side... that's my playfulness too," I countered, "I love playing with ideas and whenever I hit you with a theory it's always --"

Rozelle interrupted me with a scream: "A theory? ARGGHHHH!"



I wondered what had become of Rozelle Bentheim, fifteen years after that conversation. A quick google turned up an article in the Media Guardian. Headed "Bright Prospect goes on lookout for big ideas", the article described how British magazine Prospect had commissioned Rozelle to make them over in order to attract new, younger readers. Seeking to reflect the magazine's authority and eccentricity (if not its intelligence), Rozelle "has used warm colours, introduced a slightly larger typeface and commissioned typographers and illustrators to create some unique 'furniture' for the title. It feels less cluttered, fresher and easier to read as a result."

The Guardian continues: "While it remains an unapologetically intellectual title - publishing 'big opinions about big ideas' - now it has a big redesign to boot". The syntax and the implications there are oddly British -- do you need to apologize for being intellectual? Why that "while"? Why does a big redesign contradict an interest in big ideas? Are the implications of a redesign using warm colours, large type and simplicity that an ideas magazine is otherwise cold, dense and complex?

What I found interesting, though, was the way this article about a redesign of Prospect magazine followed the same basic contours as my conversation with Rozelle fifteen years ago. "Do not admit cleverness" seemed to be the not-so-secret theme of both.

"Your little songs are all like these little chairs of mine, which I think are rather adorable, and they're very -- actually they're quite unselfconscious," Rozelle told me back in 1993. "But I'm not going to talk about them in an intellectual way."

I countered with: "There is a lot of media attention around pop music and you have to fill columns and columns... you have to talk about it." (You couldn't really make the same defense today: intellectualisation of pop music has fled what's left of the music press.)

"Why do you have to be seduced just because you're supposed to do it, why are you doing it?" demanded Rozelle, making thinking look like abject conformism.

"I love talking about art, I love it, it's so unnecessary. Nobody has to talk about art, nobody has to make art." Going through my mind as I said this was probably some picture of Rozelle sitting in New York with Klaus Nomi. Surely he talked about art? Why was she suddenly so much against it?

Telescoped history of Britain over the next ten years: rave culture, lad culture, Spice Girls, Oasis, reality TV, New Labour. I leave for Paris, New York, Tokyo, Berlin. Zoom up, here we are, fifteen years later.

I look at the Prospect site. Rozelle's redesign is indeed elegant, with a nice curlicue joining the C to the T in the title. The front page headline is unapologetically intellectual: "HOW CHINA THINKS: the brains behind a superpower". Below it there's a profile of a Chinese man with a big domed shaved head, stroking his chin, thinking in the most conspicuous, calligraphic way imagery has yet found to depict the process -- the pose, in fact, of Rodin's "Thinker". The lead article is called "China's New Intelligentsia".

Rozelle's disgusted scream when I uttered the word "theory" rings in my ears. This new job must be a sort of torture for her. Unless -- like all clever British people -- she only affects, cleverly, to hate cleverness. Now there's a prospect to get you scratching your chin!

Comments

[microworlds.livejournal.com]

I've always had a proclivity to dislike "warm" color schemes. I much prefer "cool" color schemes, which is odd considering my favorite color is red. Maybe it's because of where I'm located, the weather is almost always hot and I want it to cool down. Do you think region affects the preference of color schemes or am I just talking out of my ass?

Also, the color scheme on the cover of Prospect that you posted makes me hungry, which is why McDonald's uses that color scheme. 5 points please, Mr. Fry!

[microworlds.livejournal.com]

Oh and I've watched that video before and it looks like she's attacking you. You seem so sad about it in the video. Awww, poor FancyPants. :(

[planetboo.livejournal.com]

Yes, the curse of the British... 'nobody likes a smartarse', 'it's a bit clever clever', 'too clever by half'... that last phrase always puzzled me. I used to imagine a school parents evening with a teacher saying, "Your Tommy is doing OK, but there is just one thing - he's too clever I'm afraid."
"Really? Oh dear!"
"Yes, by exactly fifty per cent, in fact."
The British public will always take an unashamed idiot to their hearts, but one must be ashamed to be the opposite.

[psalamone.livejournal.com]

How much of this is a product of the Blairist attempt to move the British Left / Labor away from seeming like patrician know-it-alls to focus-grouping faux-populists? Is this the legacy of New Labor, or something even more deeply British? Prospect, by the way, looks like really bad intellectual porn -- complexity reduced to affect, literature giving way to the literature industry. That fucking curlicue says it all.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Well, at least too-clever-by-50% British kids can still get a cleverectomy on the NHS. It's painless, I hear.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I think we can trace it back to Cromwell. Elizabeth I's Britain certainly loved cleverness and compexity. It was obviously considered very sexy then. You seduced someone by writing a fiendishly difficult sonnet.

[(Anonymous)]

Well, it's obvious that anti-intellectualism is merely an affectation rather than a reality in Britain. The very fact that it's a culture that produces the likes of Prospect, the TLS, LRB, Radio 3, BBC 4, a culture where getting into Oxford or Cambridge is both an educational and a social pinnacle - all that belies the fact that Britain (or the British middle classes at least) are anti-intellectual. Go to places that really are anti-intellectual - the Deep South, huge tracts of Australia, etc. - and you'll see the difference.

I think Rozelle Bentheim's recoil at "theory" is a different thing, it's the idea that to intellectualise art is not to experience it. She probably hated the 'conceptual turn' of the art world in the nineties and beyond.

Unapolegetically unintellectual self-promotion

[dzima.livejournal.com]

Tangentially related...

As seen here:

http://dzima.livejournal.com/68133.html

I am selling all my cds and dvds so if anyone is interested in buying my copy of the Man Of Letters DVD, my price is 5 dollars plus postage from Sydney, Australia to the world out there and beyond (there are a couple of Momus cds in that list if you look hard).

microworlds and other members of the momus_lolz community will be granted a special discount on this dvd only.

I'd also give Momus a 10% cut of my sale's yields.

Thanks for the space.

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

I don't know if Klaus talked about art much, but he did talk about pies.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

As Roger Doyle puts it (http://www.frankfuredi.com/pdf/JournalofMusicinIreland.pdf): "The Department for Culture, Media and Sport also believes that people may be put off going to the library because it looks too much like... a library."

[imomus.livejournal.com]

But did he theorize pies?

[kumakouji.livejournal.com]

I don't think Britain has an aversion to intellectuals; Stephen Hawking's popular Cosmology book "A Brief History of Time" stayed on the Sunday Times bestseller list for a record-breaking 237 weeks. Stepehen Hawkings is one of the greatest minds of our time. He went out of his way to present his brilliance in an accessible way and people embraced that. Some cynics have accused him of dumbing down, but he never intended for these books to be technical -- they were a way of introducing people to cosmology. They're fit for purpose.

I think Britain has an aversion to intellectual poseurs; those ingenuine, pretentious people who act like being able to quote obscure books and use esoteric language somehow entitles their ideas to merit. Quoting obscure books and using esoteric language doesn't necessarily make one an intellectual poseur, but it's certainly the only way a mediocre mind can pass itself off as worthy of merit.

We have an instant suspicion of lofty ideas presented in a complex way, but this is way it should be, otherwise we would never take the time to dissect what has been presented to us. We need to see if on a basic level it actually makes sense.

When someone is clear and transparent in their words and speech, their reasoning becomes accessible to a larger number of people. This is the purpose of communication. It's in your own favor to try to be as concise as possible when attempting dialectics.


The truly intelligent know the difference between dumbing down to the point meaning is being lost, and intellectually grandstanding where weak ideas are being inflated for the sake of style over substance. An ingenuine, pretentious "Intelligentsia" will do nothing but intellectual grandstanding.

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

No, he just made them for the eating.

Although I guess now he's making pies on the Astral Plane for Astral Marc so maybe astral pies are theoretical pies.

[kumakouji.livejournal.com]

I wanted to ask you something... you were Mormon right?

How true is this?:

aarrrgh

[(Anonymous)]

"but i'm not going to talk about them in an intellectual way..."

When she says this I nearly screamed. I'm not sure how much of her reaction is to do with the whole cleverness acceptance, i thought it more a selfish and self righteous act. I'm purely speculating, but if the interview had been the other way round i dare say she would have had plenty to say about herself, and after all aren't your songs about you - you are the artist, why not talk at whatever level you see fit - you are the creator.

You say in the interview "Nobody has to make art" - After reading Carey (sorry to bring it up again) i actually questioned that statement. You see depending on what you define art as then that statement either rings true, or is inaccurate.

wewillbecome.com

[(Anonymous)]

der.

[kineticfactory.livejournal.com]

Believe me, Australia is worse. We inherited all the British anti-intellectualism and multiplied it by itself.

British anti-intellectualism, grounded as it is in the English empirical tradition, is content to pooh-pooh theory and abstraction though does accord kudos to clever people who do something practical with their gifts, such as scientists and engineers. Hence people like Isambard Brunel can rightfully be considered national heroes. Australian anti-intellectualism, however, rejects anyone with half a brain; the only figures it is acceptable for an Australian to be proud of are athletes and film stars.

A survey from a few years ago revealed that, while the average British IQ is 100, the average Australian IQ is 98. The difference is unlikely to be genetic or nutritional, so presumably it is cultural.

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

Are you talking to me?

The only contact I've had with Mormons is with microworlds and laughing at them when they're trying to convert Dutch people by cycling around trussed up in protective gear.

[georgesdelatour.livejournal.com]

Okay I'm being grumpy.

The whole anti-intellectual, anti-excellence thing in England drives me crazy. It just gets tiresome. Right now there are too many bands whose highest aspiration is to endlessly remake Graham Fellows' "Jilted John" - and who don't realize the original was a send up. Could a young Green Gartside come through today? Or is Babyshambles as thoughtful as it gets?

The BBC recently commissioned two hour-long programmes - one with Paul Morley, the other with classical conductor Charles Hazlewood - telling us how brilliantly clever pop music is. Both shows subjected Kylie's "Can't Get You Out Of My Head" to harmonic musical analysis. They just flattered the audience; claiming that liking the pop music that's ubiquitous is actually some sort of ingenious critical discernment by its consumers.

By the end of it, I wanted to find some cob-webbed old Oxford Professor to come and tell me pop music was rubbish and that I ought to despise it. BBC 2 used to programme hour-long specials on Webern, with bookish dons trying to explain serialism to the lay-person. Now they're telling us how clever we all are to like Amy Winehouse. But I want to hear some young musician take Webern to the disco, because the most interesting pop is always sneaking in ideas from elsewhere - usually from "higher" culture.

This "everyone loves pop music" orthodoxy - with Tony Blair playing his Stratocaster, and David Cameron apparently a Morrissey fan - is actually bad for the music.

[kumakouji.livejournal.com]

I'm always mixing you two up.

That question is for microworlds...

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

By the way, I think it has more to do with the fact that most British (and Dutch too) intellemelectuals are almost exactly like Mr Mybug in Cold Comfort Farm.

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

lol seriously, my family has been Baptist for over 400 years, so, no.

[(Anonymous)]

Getting into Oxford or Cambridge is both an educational and a social pinnacle that belies the fact that Britain (or the British middle classes at least) are anti-intellectual.

[(Anonymous)]

Well, it's obvious that anti-intellectualism is merely an affectation rather than a reality like in Britain.

[(Anonymous)]

Well, it's obvious that is merely an affectation rather than a reality.