Thursday, December 14, 2006

Never so Bad

Today's Arts Guardian presents us with its Review of the year, subtitled Why we've never had it so good.

Here are their categories: Theatre, Film, Visual Art, Music (divided into four sorts, each of which forms a category of its own: Jazz, World Music, Classical and Pop), Dance, Architecture, TV.

Books? No Books. There hardly ever is in these things. Why? Why don't books (at least books of creative writing - those potential categories Novel, Poetry or Short Stories) qualify as 'Art'? Are they any less 'art' than, say, Pop or TV? Or is it, on this occasion, that the compilers believe that in the world of books we haven't had it so good this year?

Or is it that art means entertainment now and words, unlike pictures and sounds, are just too damned abstract, or even too much like damned hard work?

1 comment:

Pants said...

The only thing I can think of is Friday's G2 is themed as Film & Music. I think you're right though; if a quality paper is going to make an attempt to round up the artistic year, it might want to consider books, particularly if it's chucking art and architecture into the mix. You know The Guardian is not going to sideline books since almost all of its contributors write them. We can only hope for a more comprehensive round up in the Saturday Review section tomorrow.