Surprise your audience a little more often. Making the audience aware of what is out there is tough but it can be rewarding. And if there are any publishers out there – it is not worth an editor’s while to veil the bright rage of an entertaining writer for the sake of your advertising revenue. No economic force compels the vice of amiability. It springs from a faintness of the spirit, from a convention of pleasantness that when attacked for the monstrous things it permits to enter the mind of the world, excuses itself by protesting that it is a pity to waste fierceness on things that do not matter.
‘Journalists need to get out more,
editors need to demand more, readers need to challenge more, everyone needs to just push. The “great names” need confronting’
at a couple of dinners, written off in their 30s and 40s they are rediscovered, and finally recognised as a long-lost genius just in time to mark their last gasp. Was it ever thus. (Of course, if you were a woman or from an ethnic minority, forget it before the 21st century.) But, it is all too easy. Just as the answers are more complicated; the creative talent more widely spread; the clients more enterprising; the planners more risk averse; local, regional and national government less prepared to open up projects to real competition; the money-grabbing constructors more… don’t go there. Belief that in being really excellent at your craft you will become renowned and rewarded is sadly naive; it is not that simple. Excellence is a requirement but it is never enough.
Journalists used to act like cynics but at heart we were idealists. Now we are often cynics masquerading as idealists. Journalists need to get out more, editors need to demand more, readers need to challenge more, everyone needs to just push. Te ‘great names’ need confronting. In the Vatican there is a joke that the Pope is always well until he dies, and even a bit after that. So it goes with the big firms. Critics need to dig deeper. Rebecca West called for ‘a new abusive school of criticism’. Lamenting the fact that there was no real criticism, she said that what existed ‘is merely a chorus of weak cheers, a piping note of appreciation’. Publishers need to appreciate there is mileage in previously unknown individuals working in previously unheard of places, on previously unconsidered projects.
People do not rely on their own judgements, they think in social networks, and therein lies another tale. Some years ago when I arrived at a hotel in the US the woman at reception remarked that I spoke English ‘kinda funny’ and asked where I was from. ‘England,’ I replied. She frowned for a moment, and then her face cleared. ‘Oh yeah, England,’ she said. ‘Tat’s part of France, isn’t it?’ I was reminded of this encounter with ignorance when speaking recently to someone responsible for public relations at an award- winning architectural practice in London. It was AA Gill who summed up his feelings about similar encounters saying: ‘I think PR is a ridiculous job. Tey are the headlice of civilisation. And boy, can they talk, it’s like car salesmen.’ In the humourless world of woke, trying to argue with them is like arguing with the radio. If there are three words that need to be used more by people in PR it is the magic words, ‘I don’t know’ – they are expert at saying nothing. Most of them seem to have graduated with degrees from universities that enable one to qualify by majoring in water skiing, either that or they must reconcile themselves to an arts degree of uncertain provenance. Now, journalism could be described as turning one’s enemies into money, and I know that many a good story has been ruined by over-verification, but there is a limit, and public relations is one of them. Blood out of a stone is not in it. Trying to determine what is going on in their world by reading press releases is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock. Asked to shine a light on some fustian new project, they will try to cut through the surrounding verbiage like a laser beam through fudge. But, more often they can be seen as ‘into’ a project in the sense that a bull is ‘into’ a china shop.
Te ones who know nothing, have not been briefed, properly or not at all, communicating with them is a little like those fundraising emails from American politicians: ‘You’re one of my father’s VERY BEST supporters, and he REALLY wants to meet you, Friend. All you have to do is enter.’ George Orwell had it about right: ‘Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.’ Whereas, in fact, it reveals (or should) the pettiness of great men and the greatness of little people. Gerald Priestland had a different take on it: ‘journalists belong in the gutter because that is where the ruling classes throw their guilty secrets’. Woke me when it’s all over. Tere’s a whole genre of essays about what reviewing architecture and design should be, that is just like books: usually appearing in the guise of laments about what is wrong with book reviewing. Tis has encouraged some reviewers to spend more time tearing down creative endeavour than thinking about what they liked and why. Whereas of course, what is important about criticism is that good criticism should attempt to establish what is at stake in a project – that there is something worth arguing about. Rebecca West was right a century ago, ‘ it is our duty to practice harsh criticism’. She still is.
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