The Real Language of Men

All art is quite useless.


There is a misappropriated notion that art is elitist. This is incorrect. However, like anything worth doing, studying all forms of art requires work and dedication. There is no reason why the average person should not be able to pore over the language of Eliot, Joyce or Blake and take just as much away from it - dare I say it - as Stephen Fry would. It is a question of dedication - nothing more. I find that often when people don't understand something, they have fulfilled their own pessimistic prophecy. Hand them a poem by Eliot or a painting by Matisse and they won't understand it. Why? Because they decided ten minutes ago that they weren't going to try to.

Mr Wilde, who famously attests that "all art is quite useless" is, in many ways, correct. He is not merely being his self-righteous, decadent self in this line; he is expressing a feeling that even those of us who are equipped with the utmost respect and trust in our art know to be true. When it comes down to it, art will not save Granddad's life, kiss your child goodnight or, unless you're very lucky, pay the mortgage. It exists in and of itself and it is perhaps this that some people cannot get their head around.


The elite classes, in fact, scarcely produce elite artists. Everyone from William Wordsworth, who strove to write in "the real language of men" to Oscar Wilde himself, renounced their claim on the elite to speak for the masses. This meant, of course, that over time the masses produced artists of their own. The biggest giants of modern music are arguably The Beatles and what were they? Young, working class, passionate. For it is passion that creates true art; it has little to do with class.