i'm going to see pj harvey perform songs from her new long player White Chalk this evening, at the Royal Festival Hall.
yesterday i read an interview with her in the guardian that forced her into the usual tedious dance around the relationship between her life and her art (why are interviewers so uniformly
unimaginative?). But it livened up at the end:
...she said her sense was that the quality of music, literature and film seems to be going "down and down and down, and I struggle so hard to get excited about anything".
characteristically, she wouldn't be drawn on exactly who or what she
was railing against, but lurking in what she said, there was a kind of
mission statement. "There's too much of everything in the world, but
particularly too much of everything that's not all that good. The world
doesn't need any more art that's just all right. It only needs
mind-blowing, inspirational, life-changing stuff."
that is almost exactly how I feel about the world's cultural production, including and especially everything that is critically acclaimed. It's usually 'just all right' when you get down to it. The only bit I don't agree with - at least, I'm uncertain of - is that standards are going down and down and down. I suspect it's more that, as you get older, you become more difficult to please, and you start to notice how so much of the stuff you would once get really excited about is in fact hardly worth bothering with, not when you could be exploring those artists who have already proved their greatness. When you're more aware that life is short, it becomes harder to justify buying the new Richard Hawley album when you could be getting to know the Van Morrison or Tom Waits albums you haven't heard yet (not that I've anything against Richard Hawley, who is an excellent songwriter, it's just...time is short). Critics exist, in part to create excessive excitement around things. But - as Mr Amis said on Newsnight the other night - the only critic with any real authority is time.
