He reminds us that such prizes exist to 'promote the kind of work which audiences are reluctant to find otherwise', and that the Booker 'is a marketing device for fiction that doesn't get an advertising budget.'
He points out too that many writers who are now bestsellers only gained attention through being shortlisted for the Booker, and that 'almost all art now considered significant could have been condemned for being "out of touch" with the bourgeoisie of the period.'
And this is the cause of such a mistaken assumption, he says:
'What has happened is that the spread of market economics across most political shadings has encouraged scepticism about cultural subsidy, whether it's the BBC licence fee or Arts Council grants. The result is that works of art are judged by the weight of public interest.'
6 comments:
I couldn't agree more and what's good about the Booker is that they (almost) never play to the gallery.
I think there is a medium ground to be found. If something is wholly unpenetrable (as oppose to merely 'challenging' or 'difficult'), then it could be said to have failed as a work of either art or literature.
If something doesn't have a market, this is either a failure of marketing nounce (more often the case admittedly), or the work just doesn't work! And however exclusive, everything needs to have a market, however small.
It's true that things that might find a small but nicely formed market don't, for want of marketing nous. But marketing takes money and/or expert time, both of which are in short supply in the hard-driven economics of publishing. The books that look set to make serious money will always get more of both. Nor can we condemn that fact too comprehensively, because it's the money they make that makes it possible to publish the less sure-fire hits at all.
Emma
Yes, Emma, it's a complicated issue.
Oh dear! That a work of art should be judged by 'the weight of public interest'! Does Mark Lawson never reflect on how his public utterances sound? Blogging on a not unrelated issue, Susan Hill recently investigated the sales figures of 12 randomly chosen titles published by 4 small publishers supported by the Arts Council. The numbers of copies sold were as follows: 2, 33, 19, 26, 101, 4, 40, 11, 52, 19, 13 and the very best figure of all 237. She calculated that the public subsidy to be £250 a book and asked how, in a world where patients were denied drugs on the grounds of expense, this could be justified. Yet people will clamour to justify it. Why? Because they accept without question Mark Lawson's thesis that difficult, unpopular and impenetrable equals good. But all too often it simply equals self-indulgent.
Yes, I've just blogged about Susan Hill's little experiment:
http://fictionbitch.blogspot.com
/2008/02/how-to-sell-literature.html
I think that both assumptions need questioning: ie that populist is bad and also that 'difficult' is self-indulgent.
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