the brilliantly leaping gazelle

I like Jane Austen.

Actually, I’ve only read ‘Pride and Prejudice’ and that was at school for ‘O’ Level English, but I have seen most of the TV and film adaptations of her books and I like those. Which is almost as good. That’s why this headline caught my eye;

‘Winchester plan for £100,000 Jane Austen statue triggers ‘Disneyfication’ fears’, before going on to report that ‘People at public meeting raise concerns that sculpture in cathedral grounds will attract tourists taking selfies‘

As one might imagine, my first thought upon reading this was how big was this statue going to be if it cost £100,000. Secondly, and more problematic for the sculptor I would’ve thought, is the fact that no likeness of her actually exists. But then I remembered we are living in 2024 and that doesn’t matter in an age ofArtificial Intelligence, of ‘remixing’ photo’s on our ‘phones, of deepfake revenge porn, and now with Google Gemini and its black Nazi’s, the end of historical accuracy. This quote, from the sculptor Martin Jennings, after unveiling his preliminary model, is a damning critique of a culture that places the now over the past.

Welcome to now, where it is always now, and the past only exists as something to be re-imagined, re-contextualised and ultimately re-cycled in a continuous process of re-evaluation, and where there is no future, only a now that hasn’t happened yet, the pre-re.

“In life, she may have been aghast at being represented in this way. But after death, she belongs to all of us.”

‘In death she belongs to all of us.’ And that, boys and girls, sums up perfectly an ever more prevalent artistic aesthetic, one that has more to do with the the values of now, of some cultural commissars, than of the work itself. The notion that once a piece of art has been created, the artist then relinquishes any say over how it is interpreted because then it enters the public domain and the public can then be told by cultural commissars if it is either good or bad.

Welcome to now, where it is always now, and the past only exists as something to be re-imagined, re-contextualised and ultimately re-cycled in a continuous process of re-evaluation, and where there is no future, only a now that hasn’t happened yet, the pre-re.

In my wilder flights of fancy I can easily imagine an artist creating a work of art now – be it music, a painting, a book – and thinking to themselves ‘ Sure, it’ll pass muster now, now it’s fine, but what about in 50 or 100 years from now, when attitudes will have changed. What then?’ Perhaps artists will have to put a moratorium of sorts on their work, a legally binding stipulation in their will that after their death all their works are to be destroyed and consigned to the dustbin of history.

If only A.A.Milne had thought to do that, then the Pooh books would never fallen out of copyright, entering the public domain, resulting in ‘Winnie-the Pooh; Blood and Honey’, a 2023 slasher movie, that follows Pooh and Piglet, who – obviously – have become feral and bloodthirsty murderers, as they terrorise a group of young university women and Christopher Robin when he returns to the Hundred Acre Wood five years later after leaving for college. Despite being widely acknowledged as one of the worst films ever made, the numbers don’t lie – made for $100,000 but with box office of about $5 Million – and a sequel is planned.

I was foolishly then that thinking that Jane Austen had got off lightly, until I remembered 2016’s ‘Pride and Prejudice and Zombies..’…