ART AND THE LABOUR MOVEMENT:
A MARRIAGE MADE IN MATERIALIST DETERMINISM
by Richard Russell.

The future has been bootlegged onto a blank CD. This isn't killing music: by definition it is propagating music. So Metallica have to make do with only fourteen Ferraris. So listeners can find out how crap the latest 'girl' band is without having to buy any. So Murdoch loses his grip on what we're allowed to know about the world we live in. The effect will be a new role for local and home-grown artists, as well as an entire new medium for those artists to reach. You can e-mail your script to the BBC; it's their loss if they don't read it. Sooner or later the culture industry will be forced to acknowledge that this country has more than three poets, more than four stand-ups, more than a thousand concert pianists equally worthy of appreciation and economic subsistence. So far, the music industry has done what all capitalist systems do when challenged: it has continued with its current route with renewed vigour. Major artists, eg. Madonna and Kylie, are pushed still harder, while even moderately well-publicised acts are dropped as too financially risky Company bosses are so desperate to preserve short-term profit share that they've thrown all their babies out with the bathwater.

Publishers are still pretending they don't have an inbox. They know they'd never have time to read it all, let alone vet it all with their market-led arbitrary judgement. I'm not saying we should publish any old tat; I'm saying any old tat will be published, whether Random House gets a cut or not. Book publishers' websites are designed to sell you their books. There is no interface for aspiring authors. Even the smallest houses emblazon those trenchant words: "no unsolicited scripts sent by e-mail will be considered." I might be a bit chippy on this point, but the suspicion is that the publishing establishment wish to restrict the ranks of first novellists to those from their immediate wine bar. Record companies are trying the same thing. In their case, the bar is raised and raised on 'production standards' in order to keep the vast majority of home-made albumns out of the system. By today's 'production standards', the Soft Machine are hopelessly swimming in reverb; while Thriller has really tinny brass sounds. Neither would get released.

Often the practise of limiting cultural output to a few marketable brands is disguised as a necessary elitism. In many fields, the established cultural corporations hide from the creative proletariat under the guise of 'style'. 'Brit-art' could sell (even if to one bloke called Saatchi) but indiginous art is 'derivative'. The unspoken ethos says creative artists are very special people who spent years perfecting their precious talents in a garret. This notion is often fostered by artists themselves, since their bread is only buttered with that occasional sale, and never in January. The truth is that artists are very special people, but that doesn't stop there being millions of them. Most of them living on 'dole'. Opera singers, actors, sculptors, film directors. All on the 'dole'.

Now, the orthodoxy tells us that all this art is great so far as it goes, but you can't expect everyone to make a living. After all, you only get a Tracey Emin once in a generation. The truth is cultural exchange is trapped in an economic system which is artificially skewed. If someone is really prepared to fork out tens of millions for a fairly average Van Gogh, then surely a really fine piece by Joanne Bloggs from Peckham should fetch fifty thousand. Go on; have a heart. But then who said capitalism was fair. Joanne Bloggs gets £500 if she ever sells anything. Of course, if she had fifty thousand in the first place to spend on publicity, things might be different. Then if Van Gogh had had fifty thousand to spare he might not have ended up mad and dead and so sought after.

In a world where cricketers get paid more than sewage workers; game show hosts more than teachers, we tacitly accept that for every U2 Inc. there are several thousand rhythm-guitar bands relying on their giros. The reality is the cultural establishment only wants one U2 because it suits its agenda of cultural exclusivity. One U2, three boy bands and some Russians pretending to be lesbian. Any more than that and they'd have to recalibrate all the machines. The impact of digital downloading may well mean there will never be another U2. This may be no bad thing.Already a whole generation of DJs and producers have taken culture as they found it, chopped it up into little pieces, mixed it with a bit of mashed potato and served it up for their contemporaries as good tunes to take pills to. The industry's response was to apply the same rarefying arbitrary exclusion, telling us there was only one Fat Boy Slim and he was well worth £30 million. Fact is, there was a Fat Boy Slim on every tatty estate in Europe. There still is. There's even a couple in Hampstead.

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