| In the 2004 Isaiah Berlin Lecture playwright Tom
Stoppard took us on a switchback tour through the history of the idea
of
art, with accompanying fireworks. The title of the ride, ‘Drawing on
the
Wall of Plato’s Cave’, had us foxed in advance, but it soon became
clear
that it was a way of avoiding what Stoppard called the ‘narcoleptic’
title
‘The Artist’s Role in Society’. The highs and lows on the switchback turned out to be a matter of whether we believed art belonged to Caesar (aka the Tsar or Commisar) or to God. Is the artist a mere artisan, like a bootmaker, or a conduit to the divine? Plato took the first view, which is why he wanted to banish artists from his Republic: as some would say today, soi-disant artists are in fact trivial, privileged, overrated work-shy ‘lucky bastards’ with a Matron’s off-games chit for life. Stoppard takes the more modern view that the artist is responding to an overwhelming impulse to split the rock like a saxifrage in search of air. Art is not just one on a list of skills, but special and separate, a mediation between gods and men (if only metaphorically). Art is not mere imitation (a view which is the source of Plato’s objection to it); rather, in Shelley’s words, ‘Artists are the unacknowledged legislators of the world’ – seers, visionaries, conveyors of ‘truths not of their understanding’, divinely inspired maniacs. Artists are not the state-funded functionaries of the Arts Council’s pedestrian outlook, winning grants to perform ludicrous emperor’s-clothes activities; for Stoppard they are ‘the ruffians on the stair who are just possibly coming down from seeing God’; not men with an agenda, but men in a trance. ‘Who appointed you a poet?’ the Commissars asked Brodsky; ‘I thought it was God,’ he replied. In the course of our ride we were given a good ration of Stoppardian one-liners. (Will they reappear in his next play?) Apologising for using the gender-neutral ‘he’ throughout, Stoppard explained that he didn’t want to have to ‘double de-clutch’ every time he ‘went over the bump of a personal pronoun’. Citing scholars who denied that a particular remark attributed to Plato was in fact his, he observed: ‘Let’s not be deflected by scholarship when we have bigger fish to fry.’ Invoking conceptual art like John Cage’s entirely silent ‘musical’ work, he offered an invention of his own: Static Dance. And his peroration, a vision of art from James Joyce, was offered in deference to the possibility that we felt by the end of his talk that there was ‘an elephant called “Art” missing from the room’. An appropriate image to end with on two counts: Isaiah Berlin was described by Stephen Spender as ‘a baby elephant, always the same baby elephant’; and the lecture was delivered in the Wolfson dining-hall, often affectionately known as the ‘elephant house’ because of its towering shape. On this occasion the elephant dung beetles were not disappointed. |