Good lord - perish the thought.
BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | A prediction that's a safe bet
It was agreed, back in the day, that serious artists should not look like hucksters. Now it is assumed that serious artists look even more serious if they do look like hucksters. They look bigger, more corporate, more influential. Or they did until yesterday. But now it's today, and it suddenly looks like a fast buck. It looks off. Madoff off. And it looks silly. We've reached a turning point. A madness has gone out of fashion: the madness of behaving as if only too much can be enough. There will always be another madness, but not that one. From now on a man will have to be as dumb as an petrodollar potentate to think that anyone will respect him for sitting on a gold toilet in a private jumbo jet.
It was agreed, back in the day, that serious artists should not look like hucksters. Now it is assumed that serious artists look even more serious if they do look like hucksters. They look bigger, more corporate, more influential. Or they did until yesterday. But now it's today, and it suddenly looks like a fast buck. It looks off. Madoff off. And it looks silly.
We've reached a turning point. A madness has gone out of fashion: the madness of behaving as if only too much can be enough. There will always be another madness, but not that one. From now on a man will have to be as dumb as an petrodollar potentate to think that anyone will respect him for sitting on a gold toilet in a private jumbo jet.
Maybe it will get somewhere, maybe not. What I don't understand is having resentment at the messenger.
So it galls for two reasons - one of which is that James himself is unlikely to be poor, and the second of which is that what he's saying isn't true.
Nothing corporate will change because of anything that either Stirling or James write or say. The corporate world will still be fuelled by greed, toxic stupidity, egotism, pointless drama and social climbing for the sake of it. It may stop being fashionable to flaunt wealth - if only for fear of being lynched - but that's hardly going to stop the rest of the world from continuing to try to accumulate it.
It's a wrong-headed view because you don't take a nipple like greed away from people without giving them something else to suck on. Currently there's no replacement - survival is still on the same Darwinian branch with the same value set. Instead of accumulating when you win, you don't lose your home or your life.
That may be evidence of a New Seriousness - which may even be Far More Serious than last year's Seriousness was.
But it's not much of a real change, and it's certainly not a progressive one.
