Goering got it Wrong

Goering got it Wrong

Goering is said to have been fond of saying, When I hear the word 'culture' I reach for my gun. The original line, "When I hear "culture" I release the safety catch on my Browning!", comes from Hanns Johst’s play Schlageter performed in 1933 for Hitler’s birthday.
What was it that worried the second-in-command of yet another of histories book-burning repressive regimes? What was the threat from culture?

We tend these days to semantically dissolve Culture, the Arts and Art into an expedient mess from which no useful conceptual or strategic model can be constructed. Add to this mix, recreation, and sport (NSW Dept. of the Arts Recreation and Sport, Rod Kemp Minister for the Arts and Sport, in the UK, the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, etc.) and it is no wonder that it is difficult to make a public case for specific planning measures, and difficult to see what was spooking Goering.

“By ‘culture’, Goering probably meant the old literary civilisation typified by Goethe and Schiller rather than opera houses and galleries, but it's difficult to be sure because the semantics of "culture" are even more complex than those of "the arts". Nowadays the word has pretty much lost its original sense of "a process of nurtured development" and operates under several levels of meaning, all of them vague.

The sloppiest modern usage makes "culture" synonymous with "the arts"… several efforts have been made to find a new vocabulary that dissolves the entailed misconceptions. The result is that the use of the words "the arts" and "culture" is fading: instead, we've come up with the peculiar bastardised notion of "multiculturalism" and more neutral terms such as "recreation" or "leisure activity" (a phrase that comes close to self-contradiction).
The latest Blair-approved wheezes are "creative industry" and "creative partnership" - Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell recently prophesied, in an unfortunate image, "an avalanche of creativity". Scratch at the agenda there, and you find an implication that 'the Arts' need to get off their backside, stop relying on public money and engage with commercial imperatives.

And that, inexorably, is the way that things are going. The arts can only be justified if they feed into some great pumping-station of urban regeneration. Culture is no longer a matter of a lifetime of slow, meditative looking, reading and listening - it's gone ‘fast-food’.” Extract from the UK Daily Telegraph.















Nasi Goering - Pop Culture, Pop Art.

The following ‘mission statement' is a good example of the institutionalisation of this confusion between culture and the arts, and most significantly, of the complete omission of Art, as a distinct conceptual entity.

Making the Case for Culture.
"Culture or 'the arts' takes on many forms: painting, writing, quilting, pottery, museums, landmarks, sculptures, landscapes, streetscapes, memorials, sport. It is a way for individuals and communities to express and engage themselves with family, friends, and their neighbourhoods, their communities. Culture can be used to renew or revitalize municipalities, regions, even a country. It can build community identity and pride, strengthen bonds, improve quality of life on all socioeconomic levels, and engage children and youth in education and their environment. Culture can be the catalyst for positive change, engaging all ages and communities. Diversity can be embraced through culture, building trust and understanding. And culture can act as the economic engine that drives municipalities toward growth and prosperity."

I reach for my Browning….

"Revolving pistols are ingenious things,
But prudent men (Academicians are)
Scarce keep them in the cupboard next the prunes"

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who also wrote in the same poem Aurora Leigh:

"While Art
Sets action on top of suffering:
The artist’s part is both to be and do,
Transfixing with a special, central power
The flat experience of the common man,
And turning outward, with a sudden wrench,
Half agony, half ecstasy, the thing
He feels the inmost, - never felt the less
Because he sings it."


As artists we need to be able to articulate what it is that distinguishes Art from “the arts”, what makes it a unique aspect of culture (And why it worried Goering).

More in a later post…"the wife likes that sort of thing".