I got annoyed this morning so I took it out on my blog - but maybe it
might also interest some of you.

To quote me at http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com/2008/08/with-friends-like-these.html

Via Skepticlawyer, Ms TN this morning read some astoundingly crass
comments by the Age's art crrritic, Robert Nelson, which were
published in the print edition. Mr Nelson was, not so long ago, in the
news defending photographer Bill Henson (and Nelson's own wife)
against charges that they were child pornographers. And some of his
comments sadly justified the average arts-hater's view that artists
are chardonnay-addicted ponces who consider themselves superior to
ordinary mortals.

At the time I thought Nelson's defences of Henson's art were odd,
since comments he made in a 2005 review of Henson's work in fact
sounded very similar to the criticisms made by those who wanted to ban
it. He accused Henson of displaying "a vulgar relish in depicting
naked, pouting youngsters" and said his "good landscape work is
discredited when used as a backdrop for rehearsing the lubricious
display of nubile or pre-pubescent children". Henson's work, he said,
"is an aesthetic of spying, granting you an illicit glimpse, as in all
pornographic genres, a teasing sexual spectacle with ocular impunity".

I don't agree with Nelson's analysis here, but that's beside the
point. He's perfectly within his rights to think what he likes. But it
made me wonder if his very public defence of Henson was a matter of
protesting too much... Who knows? Who cares? There he was, out
defending art's essential superiority to every other aspect of life,
rather than its profound and vital investment in life itself, and
making the rest of us look like noodles.

And last week he was at it again, this time attacking sport as "the
antithesis" of art. One quote will do - as Skepticlawyer says, this
man is impossible to parody:

The social role of sport is to provide an outlet for intelligent
people to behave like brainless people. Everyone knows there's no
intrinsic point in shifting a leather ball from one post to another,
no matter how energetic or invested the contest. Nothing is achieved
outside the game; no one is wiser or can add a benefit to the world
beyond the fury of the struggle.

Contrast this with the markedly brainy Roland Barthes' beautiful
meditation, What Is Sport? Speaking of watching a soccer match,
Barthes says:

To watch, here, is not only to live, to suffer, to hope, to understand
but also, and especially, to say so - by voice, by gesture, by facial
expression... in a word, it is to communicate. Ultimately man knows
certain forces, certain conficts, joys and agonies: sport expresses
them, liberates them, consumes them, without ever letting anything be
destroyed.

All art, Nelson says with enviable certainty, has a "purpose behind
the work". Untangling this one is a complex business beyond the range
of this snark, but Ms TN suggests that Robert Nelson should, for a
start, have a careful read of Susan Sontag's classic 1963 essay,
Against Interpretation.

It certainly seems to me that Mr Nelson understands very little about
either sport or art. The poets of ancient Greece, who thought both
were essential celebrations of human possibility, would have found his
attitude mystifying. Next on Nelson's reading list could be the Odes
of Pindar. Pindar, who died in 442BC, is credited with inventing the
Ode, a form of lyric poetry. And most of his Odes were in praise of
athletes. The oldest was written to celebrate the victory of the
runner Hippocleas in the double stadium race in 498BC. The final,
written when Pindar was supposedly 72, was in praise of a wrestler,
Aristomenes.

PS: Just to add a theatre spin... it's worth mentioning that Samuel
Beckett is in Wisden. As a spin bowler.

--
Editor, Masthead: http://www.masthead.net.au
Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Home page: http://www.alisoncroggon.com