Entertainment and Art

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 483, 24 September 1948, Page 5

Entertainment and Art

B. SHAW wrote to The Times recently suggesting that civilisation was doomed unless it provided itself with ‘a new political dictionary. Though civilisation has a habit of surviving its dooms, Shaw was right in saying that one of the causes of world strife is confusion in the meaning of words-or as he put it, the pot calling the kettle black and neither knowing what black is, And he need not have said political words only. A cable message last week made Lord Samuel say that "art has become non-moral" now that "crime ‘is entertainment and murder a parlour game." Though it is not ‘likely that Lord Samuel said it in precisely that way it is signifi-. cant that this was found to be the easiest way of reporting him. It was the easiest because it was the least accurate. Crime may be entertainment, if we have a kink that way, but when it is entertainment only it is certainly not art. It of course can be art; but it is mot art when it begins and ends as a parlour game. ‘There are as many definitions of art as there are of goodness and . of truth; none of them quite satisfying. But art is always in some important way an expression of life itself and not of some hollow imitation of life. . Murders and adulteries can be the material of art because they are among the experiences of life that the human race so far has not been able to avoid. They are art not because they are inevitable, but when they are inevitable and are worked by genius into the pattern of existence. If entering into the result is entertainment, we can’t use the word for the shallower forms of sensation, the mere shocks and thrills and sensual titillations that Lord Samuel was thinking about when he made his protest.