Including everybody

Well perhaps one redeeming feature of Shakespeare is that he did famously point out that there are more things in heaven than philosophy, which is a piece of wisdom we could all learn from.

One other thing that’s going on is we’re sponsoring art as huge sharing events where everybody can join in—living art, not the macho, modernist, control freak tradition of object making. And we’re also trying to create a sense of identity, encouraging ethnic music, so that recent guests feel welcomed. And folk music and Morris dancing, of course, so white Anglo-Saxon peoples don’t feel excluded—exclusion breeds resentment. Community art wrests cultural capital away from the elite and shares it among the community, involving everyone, and that means less tension of the kind we’ve been seeing recently. Though the fascists are now trying to get a foothold even in the Morris dance classes, just as they appropriated our old flag. But our programme for cultural inclusion and diversity aims to undermine their schemes.

Hard Data

Quite right. As a scientist I look in despair at some of the garbage that passes for knowledge in academia these days. I admit the arts may have a socializing function through their ability to incite spontaneous responses in the evolutionary primitive areas of the brain. But as for philosophy, literary theory, history and so on, I ask: where are the facts, the empirical data, where's the verification and objectivity?

Educating for the New Age

Yes, Dr Douce is quite right, and in schools OfTru are now teaching books which relate to children’s life experience, not the so-called ‘classics’ that the old middle-class elites used to force upon them. So I’m afraid the Eliot you did at school would look a bit old-fashioned now, Clary. Many of those old books were simply full of snobbery and about very privileged people with concerns very different from ordinary children. Some of them were even from a different age altogether! Now, children are reading to build up a sense of identity and to promote equal opportunities. OfTru are proactively encouraging works of art that represent excluded groups and cultures. OfTru is committed to public art and to anti-elitism, but there’s a huge struggle with the conservatism and vested interests of academics and those who are taken in by their jargon. So it’s no bad thing, too, that there’s a decline in subjects like philosophy and history in the academic world—we should be educating people for real life, not idle dreams.

Big Boy

We didn’t mean to make you feel small Joseph. You’re clever and interesting.

Dead White Males

That’s not at all surprising, Joseph. Shakespeare, like so many of those dead, white males, was a sexist and a racist, who makes fun of the mentally ill, and an elitist who defended the hierarchical class system. And no wonder you feel small: that’s precisely what these so-called experts in academia want you to feel. The whole idea of ‘art’ and ‘literature’ is to intimidate ordinary people and keep them in their place while the elite mock popular culture (which is far more valid than any of that fusty poetry and dull painting and complicated music). Our new meritocratic age has no room for the likes of Shakespeare; we’ve moved on. Though we’ve retained some of the British heroism of that first Elizabethan era, with its struggles—so similar to ours—against fanaticism and intolerance. In the second Elizabethan age, enormous gains have been made against old-fashioned patriarchal values, led by heroic women such as Princess Diana. But perhaps we can see her ancestor in Elizabeth the First herself, one of the great feminists of all time, who was also worshipped by the community and who united the British nation against a common threat.

feel small

God you’ve read loads! I like Terry Pratchett and Clive Barker. I like that Escher. I didn’t really get Shakespeare.

My Favourite Poets

Yeah, or Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. And Carol Ann Duffy—we did her at school too. And T.S. Eliot, I loved the language there.

Language

Changemakers. Right. It didn’t sound like the language of Shakespeare or James Joyce or Charlotte Bronte—my own favourite.

Community Art, not Modern Art

New art indeed, but community art, not what you’d call ‘modern’ art. I think we could learn from Prince Charles here. There’s a group of obscure and offensive artists who call themselves ‘modernists’—James Joyce and T.S. Eliot, Stravinsky and Picasso, and so on—I’m sure you’ve heard of them. Really, they just show contempt for ordinary people with their ugly buildings, discordant music, unreadable books, childish paintings. Some people fool themselves into thinking it’s all very meaningful and that they’re superior to us ordinary folks because they can appreciate it. True modernism is more about welcoming the changes that are happening right now and fighting the conservatives who would take us back decades.

New Art

So it’s new art, like modern art—Picasso and Damien Hirst and Messiaen? Cool.

New Speech

It’s a metaphor, Roxanne. Like my bears. It’s drawn from the dynamic language of the business sector. We’re inspired by them to develop New Speech for a New Society. It’s the language of changemakers and visionaries.

Monkey Business

What’s this monkey you’re on about? Is it one of those chimps in P Wing?

Relevant Art

Well, no, not really—if I can join in—I think we’re more concerned with art that has relevance to people’s lives. That sort of stuff means nothing to ethnics or women on council estates. Now I’m just throwing a monkey into the room here, but what if we think of, say, toilet graffiti as being no different from Rembrandt’s drawings? That may sound a shockingly new thing to say but we have to have the courage to embrace the new. We call that sort of outmoded ‘culture’ ‘bourgeois’—that’s middle-class—snobbish—and it’s only meaningful to people in that group.

Great Art

You mean like Michelangelo and Mozart, Shakespeare and Rembrandt and all that?

Creative Arts and the Community

A marvellous idea, Joseph. We’re really keen on promoting the therapeutic aspect of our Creative Arts Programme—both here and in the wider community (which sometimes seems as much in need of therapy as our little community here!). Art is one of the most powerful forces for renewing society that we have. We at OfCare respect the arts enormously.

Fantasy

Well, I thought maybe I could do the art or the writing ones with you too. Then I can write that fantasy.

Regression Class for Prince

Hey Joseph are you joining my class or what?