The invisible modern

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T.J. Clark’s essay ‘Lowry’s Other England’ in [amazon_link id=”1849761221″ target=”_blank” ]Lowry and the Painting of Modern Life[/amazon_link] is fascinating. He asks why modernism in art turned so decisively away from representing modern life. “There must have been something in the 20th century shape of things that meant that looking for modernity’s location, or its typical subjects, was in itself to misrecognise the way we live now.  … Why was there no ‘painting of modern life’ – or none that Degas and Baudelaire would have recognised? Because modernity no longer presented itself as a distinctive territory, a recognisable new form of space.” He goes on to argue that people who painted or created art came to lead a life physically entirely separate from the masses, Lowry being an exception because of his day job as a rent collector. The classes separated – “The ‘modern’ became a system of separateness – accompanied of course by a more and more coercive machinery of being together-in-what-you-buy.” And then increasingly modern life went indoors, has become personalised, focused on the TV and digital gadgets, and is now increasingly intangible too. Documenting modern life passed entirely from painting to photography.

[amazon_image id=”1849761221″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Lowry and the Painting of Modern Life[/amazon_image]

As a distinguished art professor, Clark doesn’t say that a taste for ‘modern’ art is very much acquired as part of a class-stratified upbringing and education, and the working classes (I generalise hugely) tend to like painters looked down on by the art establishment eg Jack Vettriano. And that part of the reason painters like Lowry have been controversial among the experts is not because they’re not good but because they’re popular.

Liking the unlikeable, on the other hand, is a badge of social status. The social elements make the art market absolutely fascinating, yet the most thoughtful economic analyses have come from Marxists (and a long time ago at that) such as Walter Benjamin in [amazon_link id=”0141036192″ target=”_blank” ]The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction [/amazon_link]and Theodore Adorno in [amazon_link id=”0415253802″ target=”_blank” ]The Culture Industry[/amazon_link]. Conventional modern economics seems mainly interested in whether or not buying paintings is a ‘rational’ investment.

[amazon_image id=”0141036192″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Penguin Great Ideas)[/amazon_image]

And of course, as per recent posts, paintings are supremely positional goods.

What does work look like?

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I’m gliding into holiday reading, and have devoured a fine, albeit rather depressing, novel, Jon McGregor’s [amazon_link id=”0747561575″ target=”_blank” ]If nobody speaks of remarkable things[/amazon_link]. Now I’m well into the introductory sections of [amazon_link id=”1849761221″ target=”_blank” ]Lowry and the Painting of Modern Life[/amazon_link] by T.J.Clark and Anne Wagner, the catalogue of the recent, fine Tate exhibition they curated. It’s a brilliant essay – I’m a Lowry fan being from those parts.

They point out that: “England – we constantly shift between ‘England’ and ‘Britain’ in this book, and always on purpose – has been by and large so determined to evade, in representation, the dull catastrophe of its post-Imperial, post-Industrial-Revolution condition. Lowry does not.”

[amazon_image id=”1849761221″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Lowry and the Painting of Modern Life[/amazon_image]

This reminded me an essay by Hilary Mantel I read years ago, about the extremely narrow construction of English identity, in terms of stately homes, rolling green hills, cricket on the village green, CofE church socials run by Miss Marple, etc. Even Orwell (famously) caricatured it this way. What hope for a northern (English), working class, female of Irish Catholic descent, like her, to feel a sense of national identity, asked Mantel. (The other nations of the UK are different, of course.) I can’t track the exact quotation down now – I’d thought it was in her excellent memoir [amazon_link id=”0007142722″ target=”_blank” ]Giving Up The Ghost[/amazon_link], but can’t find it this morning.

The other aspect of modern life Lowry captures is of course work, work in the mills. Until around a decade ago there was very little English fiction about work. David Lodge’s [amazon_link id=”0099554186″ target=”_blank” ]Nice Work[/amazon_link] stood out as a bit of an exception. This was a great contrast with the days of [amazon_link id=”014143967X” target=”_blank” ]Dickens[/amazon_link], [amazon_link id=”014043464X” target=”_blank” ]Mrs Gaskell[/amazon_link], [amazon_link id=”046087781X” target=”_blank” ]George Gissing[/amazon_link] and their peers, writing about the effect of the Industrial Revolution on work and other aspects of life. I think this is changing now, and there is some fiction about post-Internet working life (nominations for good examples, please).

[amazon_image id=”0099554186″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Nice Work[/amazon_image]

However, visual representations of modern working life seem rarer – I can’t think of any. Cotton mills and assembly lines are iconic. But rows of people tapping away at terminals? Why is it so hard to visualise modern work?

Hirsch on Galbraith

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More on Fred Hirsch’s[amazon_link id=”0415119588″ target=”_blank” ] Social Limits to Growth[/amazon_link].

[amazon_image id=”0415119588″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Social Limits to Growth[/amazon_image]

Hirsch has a chapter on J K Galbraith’s book [amazon_link id=”014013610X” target=”_blank” ]The Affluent Society[/amazon_link], with its famous description of ‘private affluence and public squalor’. Hirsch comments that Galbraith’s critique is apt but misses a key point in arguing that the problem is one of incorrect priorities, of insufficient attention and money directed to the public domain. [amazon_link id=”0415119588″ target=”_blank” ]Social Limits to Growth [/amazon_link]argues that there is a fundamental adding up problem in capitalist societies: the market excels at satisfying individual wants, but not all individuals can get what they want – by definition whenever you accept positional goods to be significant. Whether resources are allocated through the market or by the government is irrelevant. Moreover, attempting to satisfy all individuals’ wants through public spending sets taxation and expenditure on an ever-upward trajectory.

[amazon_image id=”014013610X” link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Affluent Society (Penguin economics)[/amazon_image]

Enough at Christmas

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In late February I’m taking part in a workshop featuring the Edward and Robert Skidelsky book, [amazon_link id=”0241953898″ target=”_blank” ]How Much is Enough?[/amazon_link] – no doubt because my last book was called [amazon_link id=”0691156298″ target=”_blank” ]The Economics of Enough [/amazon_link]and is about sustainability, broadly defined. The new edition of their book has just arrived, so I don’t yet know how it has changed.

[amazon_image id=”0241953898″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]How Much is Enough?: Money and the Good Life[/amazon_image]

Meanwhile, this morning I was looking back through one of the best books on this theme, Fred Hirsch’s 1976 classic [amazon_link id=”0415119588″ target=”_blank” ]Social Limits to Growth[/amazon_link].

It covers the same territory, albeit in the language of the 1970s  – ‘commodity fetishism’, the adverse effects of excessive commercialization, including moral effects, and distributional questions. The book is of course best known for its definition and explanation of ‘positional goods’. Hirsch saw most material goods as having the potential for productivity improvements, but scarce goods and many services as subject to congestion in demand. The relative price of positional goods would rise over time, he argued.

[amazon_image id=”0415119588″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Social Limits to Growth[/amazon_image]

Hirsch’s conclusion was that, “The social rationale of individual maximization weakens.” [amazon_link id=”1490944052″ target=”_blank” ]Adam Smith[/amazon_link] could have been right about the benign effect of self-interest in the material economy (the only part of the economy Smith thought mattered), but in the modern economy with positional scarcity, “A shift of the invisible hand from the private into the public or communal sector is needed. Rather than pursuit of self-interest contributing to the social good, pursuit of the social good contributes to the satisfaction of self-interest.” Hirsch has no issue with past capitalism; indeed, he agrees it has been a great leveler. But the distributional tensions due to past growth and increasing scarcity of positional goods now justify – he argues – “drastic limits” on consumption choices. “Society is in turmoil because the only legitimacy it has is social justice,” he concludes.

The book is clearly right about the role of positional goods, from diamonds to houses located in beautiful countryside. So far, so [amazon_link id=”0141023988″ target=”_blank” ]Veblen[/amazon_link]. Hirsch has some sharp insights into hierarchies, too. He spots the arms race that has occurred in educational qualifications – where finishing high school used to be enough, a degree is needed; and instead of a Bachelor’s degree, a Master’s. But – as the note I scribbled on an earlier reading reminds me – he over-aggregates. People in diverse modern societies have at least to some extent taken their search for position in a range of directions. Still, it’s going to be worth re-reading properly before engaging in discussion with the Skidelskys.

Besides, all of this is the perfect accompaniment to the last few days of Christmas shopping. I like the giving and receiving of presents – as do so many economists in their own way – but actually how much better if that’s books and chocolates, or home made jam, or a cosy scarf, rather than positional status symbols of any kind.

Lifting the iron curtain of the mind

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My first trip to Prague was in February 1991. It was my first time away without my eldest son, then one, and I felt extraordinarily light. Memories of the Velvet Revolution were fresh, so I rented an apartment close to Wenceslas Square with a friend for a few days. Vaclav Havel was a hero. It was snowing atmospherically. There were few tourists, and a beer and plate of ham and bread at the famous (still-unrefurbished) Cafe Slavia cost little. The local people were very friendly, as soon as they established that one was not German, and almost nobody spoke a word of English.

(It wasn’t my first visit behind the former Iron Curtain – in early 1990 a stockbroker flew a group of us to Budapest to visit a giant state company first in the line to be privatised, the Ganz works. It was astonishing, a huge plant that started with steel at one end and ended with trams, and other vehicles and electric products, miles away at the other. I was the only woman on the trip, and to go to the toilet had to be escorted by the director’s secretary, bearing the key to the cupboard where the still-scarce toilet paper was kept.)

My second Prague trip was in the autumn of 2000, as a journalist covering the annual IMF-World Bank meetings. There were English signs everywhere, half of them including the word ‘Internet’. Vaclav Havel was still widely admired, although the tourists and designer shops had arrived in force, and there were anti-globalization protests too. One evening I met a senior official for dinner in Old Town Square. We heard music seeping out from the church and walked in to a free concert, a dinner-jacketed pianist playing Rachmaninov. After half an hour we descended into a basement restaurant for a pleasant meal. On climbing the stairs afterwards, we found that a jazz concert was under way in the bar, which was packed full of young people with tankards of beer nodding away in time to the music.

So all in all, like every other visitor since time immemorial, I think of Prague as a magical place. I’ve very much enjoyed reading Derek Sayer’s [amazon_link id=”0691043809″ target=”_blank” ]Prague: Capital of the Twentieth Century[/amazon_link] this past week. It’s a cultural history focused on the unsung Czech role in creating modernity. Sayer makes much of the similarity of things now thought of as opposites. For example, both the USA and the USSR signified the modern in the 1920s, both skyscrapers and socialist realism. A flâneur or radical artist could lean either to the left or the right, be a rebel or a secret policeman.

[amazon_image id=”0691043809″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century. A Surrealist History.[/amazon_image]

The surrealists are at the heart of the cultural story told in this book, and the Prague-Paris axis. I confess that surrealism doesn’t do anything for me, and the illustrations here look just enormously dated. As this is an academic book there are also too many long lists of Czech artists with unpronounceable names for the general reader. One can easily lose sight of the wood, while enjoyably wandering around the trees. Still, this is a fascinating, forgotten, cultural history.

It is particularly interesting to read of the closeness of artistic groups working in western and central Europe, and the inspiration they drew from each other. We westerners tend to think only of the thirst people in the east had for western pop culture during the communist years but before the war the cultural exchange was far more mutual. Actually, this aspect of the book reminded me of the underlying theme of Tony Judt’s brilliant [amazon_link id=”009954203X” target=”_blank” ]Postwar[/amazon_link], which is that Europe is one continent with one history, not two. But the Iron Curtain still lives in the public mind – a timely thought, looking at events in Kiev, a place which isn’t really “over there” at all.

[amazon_image id=”009954203X” link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945[/amazon_image]