'Loose Talk'
By Benjamin Benedict

   Community Service

The Arts are a Community Service. Sweeping the streets, talking to underprivileged kids, giving meals to old age pensioners are Community Services too, but don’t let us ever forget that however self-aggrandising stardom and celebrity may seem, at the end of the day they are also simply a Community Service.

To suggest that ‘The Sex Pistols’ were offering anything other than a Community Service is not to see them clearly. If they were so bent on oblivion, why did they present their argument on stage, rather than go for bloody insurgency? Because, my friends it was an argument, not a pistol to the head.

The Arts are an argument. If it does not confront you, however softly and subtly, it is not art. Art is confrontation of the senses and the intellect.

What is ‘Art’? It is simply the result of people dedicated to providing a Community Service. Yes, all artists would love to be recognised and feted for what they do, but the very great majority go without those accolades in the knowledge that they have played their part in serving the cause of free expression, and perhaps in making you reassess your situation in the scheme of things.

There are of course, ‘grey areas’ in art. Graffiti is one of them. It is easy to say ‘good graffiti is art, bad graffiti is not’, but it is a lot more difficult to say what is good and what is bad. There was a face sprayed onto an electrical transformer casing, who’s sardonic expression I admired for a couple of years before it was painted over with regulation beige. Then there was a slogan, which read ‘Robert Goldring Lives!’ On it’s own, it was nothing, but as you went around town, it popped up time after time and in the end you had to say, ‘OK, Robert Goldring really does live!’ He had made his mark on what must have been thousands of people. It is as meaningful and as meaningless as so many other pieces of conceptual art. All you can say is that both these graffitists promoted a reaction beyond that of an unsympathetic listlessness, and therefore I would judge them as artists, though I appreciate many would not.

I recently came across www.fanfiction.net . This site is about a lot of young people writing stories, which are extensions of their favourite comic stories and then commenting on each other’s efforts. The ‘Dad’ who told me about this site said, ‘its not Shakespeare, but quite amusing, apart from some self-indulgent ramblings - and the reviews are quite interesting.’ But is it art? Well, I hope that what I am doing merits the same description – and I get a lot fewer reviews than those kids do. We must surely appreciate all that is out there and make as much of anything as there is to be made. Art is the service and we are The Community.       

It also goes without saying that artists, more often than not, are the most self-centred, two-faced, community serving bastards that you will ever meet in your life. Which is just about all of us.

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