The Artist

There is no art at all without a culture. A collection people educated alike, with similar desires and expectations.

You don't, for instance, automatically admire Mozart and Bach. You are educated into liking them; you like them because others see something in them. It's the same with all art.

But the only education which has any point is one centred on God and religion. Nothing else is certain: and we don't educated people on the basis of nothing. I have no time to prove this.

However, art such as poetry gains its value by speaking to people. It is a special type of language because it derives from the religious inclinations of the people in an inventive way.

And when there is no religion in a culture, we have poets whose task it is to create a religious atmosphere without drawing on anything religious at all. That is, like Jim Morrison or Bob Dylan, and other grand and famous poets of the twentieth century, poets must create an aura around their own self - since there is no religion on which they can draw.

Obviously, in our time, words alone do not suffice, so they also bring a repetitious and low kind of music at the same moment as they deliver their awe-inspiring words.

And when we no longer are persuaded by this religion of Dylan or of Morrison, we lose nothing; we simply gain our maturity. And we have no option but to grow nostalgic about the past.

In the past there was a culture and a religion. Today there are just little bands of poets writing for each other, a club of mutual admiration; lacking even two words of poetry to rub together between the lot of them.

The same applies in the other arts, which also lack any ground today. One does not work for recognition in this age of ours. In some respects, the worse one is (and Morrison and Dylan were pretty poor) the better. It has always been a race to the worst and the bottom in the twentieth century.

(The crap drawings of Francis Bacon's art; the intentional noise of Schoenberg's music; the aggressive ugliness of the architect Foster).