Howard Jacobson - Whatever It Is, I Don't Like It, part 2, Ideas in art

In fact, I did like it, although with some reservations. This is a collection of essays written for the Observer, so they are all exactly the same length, which is long enough to allow for some anecdotes, illuminations and digressions, and they are serious in a mildly amusing way.

My main gripe is that each essay lacks a date, and a preface, explaining the circumstances that inspired it. Was Jacobson asked to write a preface (or an afterword) with the above, and any thoughts he may have had on re-reading the piece? If he wasn't asked then this failing is the publisher's fault, and if he didn't offer, or if he refused to do it, then it is his fault.

Included is a good essay called "What Things Are For" which was a response to something Tom Stoppard (the famous playwright) had said, and I had to have recourse to the Internet to find what Tom Stoppard had said, and when, in response to what. Credit to Jacobson because he does quote the nub of the argument, and goes forward to explain it and help us to see.

Stoppard made a critical speech about the Turner shortlist in 2001 - that information should have been in the non-existent preface - in which he said: "The term artist isn't intelligible to me if it doesn't entail making." Jacobson explains Stoppard isn't referring to craft and honest labour but....

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A work not made is a work not undergone, a process of discovery and change not submitted to, revelations not revealed. Every good writer and artist will tell you that the most productive days are those which begin in ignorance and confusion, the tunnel ahead black, and not an idea in your head. Strictly speaking, ideas are your enemy. Ideas are what you had before, not where you might end up. "Never trust the artist, trust the tale," D.H. Lawrence famously wrote, meaning that an achieved work is another thing entirely from anything the artist merely wanted it to be.
The conceptual artist reverses Lawrence's dictum, in effect saying, "Never trust the art, trust the artist's intention."
In art we get beyond ourselves; here is part of the reason we value it. Marooned in the sterility of his will ... the conceptual artist fears the process of change and contradiction which is art's justification. Hence the inertness of his work when we stand before it - no trace anywhere of what else it might have been or any argument it might be having with itself. Mere insistence. Which isn't, as Stoppard reminded us, what art is for.


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So what did Stoppard say art is for? Can't find that. But the BBC News site says:

Stoppard made a link between the work of such artists and Marcel Duchamp, who exhibited a urinal in 1917 under the title Fountain.

He said that Duchamp's gesture had been a valid attack on the orthodoxies of the time, but that now conceptual artists were themselves an orthodoxy, championed and supported by the establishment.