>How does this effect the arts and poetry? Well, they were part of the
>"educated" agenda, and "educated" in the 80s and 90s came to mean "elite" by
>the same tortuous process. And poetry and the arts became "elitist".
>Theatre, opera, classical music, modern classical music, ballet, sculpture,
>painting etc. etc. in the same category.
Jackie, thanks for that analysis, which makes sense to me. I hate that
word "elite": I don't know what it means. Not usually what it appears to
mean. In Australia it has a double take: perjorative when applied to
arts, which are only for the leisured middle class (although they only
seem to spend money on stuff which I don't think of as "art"), but
positive when applied to sportsmen and women.
At the Australia Council Vision Day I was told by a well meaning and
likeable woman that young people were put off by literature because it
was too "difficult", and that in order for it to survive it had to be
more "accessible". I don't buy this, but maybe the young people I know
are exceptional: they _want_ difficult things, because the world around
them is difficult, and difficult to understand. Anything else they
consider patronising. I was the same when I was a young woman. But I
put this fear of "difficulty" in the same basket as the contemporary
desire for anaesthetic: every pain has its analgesic. I'm all for
getting rid of headaches, but human responses like grief and despair and
anger are pathologised, and consequently obscured and mystified, matters
for the "professionals". This ties in neatly, of course, with the
patient as consumer, just as the reader as consumer is part of the
problem in defending poetry. That old mantra, "poetry doesn't sell", as
if its value as consumer object were the only one, and that objection
irrefutable, being the popular mandate.
The point is I suppose that people who are "uneducated" (I don't mean
simply school education) are infinitely more manipulable by those who
_are_.
Of course, all this is so much more complex than I can say here.
Best
Alison
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