Bad British Art

This is something I wrote years ago, but did not publish because it had a paragraph about New Zealand which would have caused Trouble. That paragraph has been removed. If you can understand the relevance of the photograph, please send your answer on a postcard to the usual address.








Oh dear. The Guardian is trying to create a fuss with the old "why don't we love our intellectuals" ploy, overlooking the obvious answer that most public intellectuals are also insufferable pricks; it goes with the job. Of course there is a list – there is always a list. This one was compiled by taking an earlier list and adding to it people who have contributed to the London Review of Books or the New York Review of Books. It is a list filled with the usual names; well, it would be, wouldn't it? It is after all a list made from an earlier list and from contributors to the two most prestigious literary magazines.

The surveyor, John Naughton, then makes his own gloss of this self-fulfilling list, with such searching questions as these:

The philosopher Onora O'Neill has influenced the thinking of many of us with her coruscating insight. But so too has the playwright Michael Frayn. Both have had a significant impact on our culture. But who has been more influential? Impossible to say. Similarly, with his Radio 4 series In Our Time, Melvyn Bragg has done sterling service in injecting serious ideas into public consciousness. Is he therefore a more significant public intellectual than the unobtrusive editor of the London Review of Books, Mary-Kay Wilmers? Who knows?

Who indeed? And what of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir? They were French and horrible; nobody reads them anymore. Other French intellectuals decided they preferred Martin Heidegger instead. He was German and horrible. He was also a Nazi, but that did not bother the intellectuals. Of course, there were British intellectuals as well, such as Bertrand 'Dirty Bertie' Russell, the well-known Rationalist and sex predator.

Meanwhile the Independent covers the Annual Exhibition of the Royal Society of British Portrait Painters, and in doing so suggests another answer: the British prefer tweedy celebrities to thinkers. So, in short, the British do not like clever-dicks, modern art or the French.

They don't like accordions, either: