At this point, one is reminded of David Graeber’s assertion that “what we think of culture is actually social movements that won.” For Read, “culture” is capitalism’s breaking apart of life and art, and the subsequent fencing off of the poet, the architect, and the painter into separate institutions, giving politicians titles such as Minister for Culture, and making artists subservient not to the “natural” forms of life but the will of political power. This ontology is the basis of what he means in To Hell With Culture when he talks of the “natural” and of the necessity of returning to such a thing. Informed by Carl Jung’s notion of “archetypes,” the intersection between Freud’s psychoanalysis and the Surrealist art movement, as well as his wartime experiences, Read’s theoretical anarchism rested on what he saw as universal forms underpinning human experience - forms which could be realized through art and become the basis of a world without nation states. In To Hell With Culture, he posits that “culture” began with the Romans, those “first large-scale capitalists who turned culture into a commodity” by “importing culture” and who “set a standard to which all newly civilized people aspired.” “Culture” reemerged as a concept in Britain during the Romantic era, thanks to industrial England’s need to hark back to the days before the birth of machines and mass production. Generally friendly toward him, George Orwell wrote that Read’s “open-mindedness has been his strength and weakness.” Read himself didn’t seem too concerned with this line of attack, writing that “it is perfectly possible, even normal, to live a life of contradictions” - probably not coincidentally, this was his defense against those who criticized him for accepting a knighthood.įor Read, the Greeks and the Middle Ages provided examples of epochs in which the artisan was an artist, and when art was part of the quotidian. While being an early adopter of Nietzsche made him a Europeanizer of British criticism, he also stuck closely to the traditional objects of art history while continental counterparts expanded their analyses to include cities and social movements. Read is often described as a contradictory figure: a bow-tied, softly spoken pacifist an art critic open to automated processes but nostalgic for the medieval crafts guilds a philosopher who stressed the importance of workers owning the means of production but who was far from an orthodox Marxist. “There will only be workers.” The eightieth anniversary of this essay’s publication provides an excuse to return to Read and consider him and the relevancy of his work today. “In a natural society there will be no precious or privileged beings called artists,” Herbert Read declares in his 1941 essay To Hell With Culture.
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