The Culture Blog
So you think you can talk culture?
The anxiety of keeping up with the cultural Joneses takes its toll.
Anish Kapoor's 2009 exhibition at the Royal Academy
How many media men does it take to change a light bulb? One to turn it into an art installation. Three to curate the exhibition. Six to award it the Turner Prize. One to write the novel Illumination. Ten to award it the Booker Prize. One to see the potential for Bright Lights: The Musical. One to buy the screen rights. Six hundred to produce Halogen in 3D. Twelve critics to review it for the Sunday supplements. And sixteen students to take it to the Edinburgh fringe as an interpretive dance piece.
Keeping your finger on the cultural pulse is an exhausting business. The sheer volume of creative output in all media, fuelled by arts podcasts, Culture Shows and the broadsheets, is daunting. Keeping up with the new media-savvy Jones is a full-time business. How do you score on the culture-metre?
Seen the Terry Pratchett adaptation at the National Theatre? (One point. Half a point if you left at the interval)
Seen Enron, Jerusalem or the Power of Yes? (One point each. A bonus point for the set.)
How about The Turner Prize, Turner and the Masters, Damien Hirst at the Wallace Collection, Sacred Made Real at the National Gallery? (One point each.)
Made it to the V&A for the re-opened Medieval and Renaissance Galleries? (Two points.)
Seen Glee? Season 3 of Mad Men? Set the Sky+ for the final season of Lost? (One point each.)
Read Lady Antonia Fraser’s memoirs of her marriage to Harold Pinter? (Three points.)
Heard Lady F. read it aloud on Book of the Week? (Two points.)
No? Not even her interview with Mark Lawson on Front Row? (One Point.)
What about Avatar, The Road, A Prophet, Precious? (One point each.)
How’d you score? I make it eleven and a half out of a possible twenty-four and I’m supposed to be good at this sort of thing.
I get pangs about missing the supposedly unmissable. I suffer guilty flashbacks about going Christmas shopping on the last day of the RA’s Anish Kapoor exhibition: ‘Five stars,’ ‘joyful,’ ‘a master of sexy audience manipulation,’ etc. etc. The Wire has caused me endless anguish. Over the holidays I tried to plug this gap in my cultural landscape with the Series One box set. By episode two I was already suffering from sweaty-palmed, ‘oh just one more episode’ syndrome. I took a pre-emptive strike and turned it off. I’ve got finals in five months. The Wire represents sixty hours of library time. I’ll watch it next year when I’m unemployed.
I’m thinking of extending this culture ban. Five different arts podcasts a week and two newspapers a day have fuelled my sense of cultural inadequacy. I’ve not seen the new Legally Blonde Musical, tickets are sold-out to the National’s production of The Cat in the Hat, I’ve never read a Booker Prize-winning book, I missed Carlos Acosta in the Kenneth Macmillan revival of Romeo and Juliet, I don’t think I can face Precious. I’m still recovering from The Road.
I’m tempted by philistinism. Give up HBO dramas for re-runs of Snog, Marry or Avoid. Stop chastising myself for missing some seminal production of War and Peace: The Ballet, performed by an all-male dance company, in a church. Trade in the ADC late-show for an early night. Cancel my subscription to the Tate magazine. Ask “James Cameron: what have I see him in?” Take up sport.
I’m off to see An Education. My cultural diet starts tomorrow.
Topics: Art, Culture, Film, Radio
