Jun 20, 2009
BEN FOGLE’S CONFIDENCE
Decca Aitkenhead’s recent interview with TV presenter Ben Fogle almost made an interesting point about confidence before the chip on her shoulder got in the way:
Confidence is a theme which crops up a lot with Fogle. He says that as a boy he was “the shyest person in the world. I would hide behind my parents’ legs at social events, I was even shy in front of my sisters … But the one thing I took from my public school education was confidence.”
I can feel myself bridling at this breezy description of class privilege, and ask if he thinks it’s fair for confidence to exist independently of achievement.
Fair? What a ridiculous question. It’s normal for Guardian journalists to ask interviewees to apologise for their upbringing. But Aitkenhead is asking Fogle to apologise for the nature of confidence.
The relationship between confidence and achievement is difficult to sum up. There is a relationship, certainly – if you’re good at something you’re more likely to be confident. But it’s not a direct relationship, as Fogle’s experience indicates. And he’s hardly the only one.
I’ll post more on this in the future. For the meantime, here’s a thought: that the dynamic between confidence and achievement resembles the dynamic between money and its real-life basis.
John Lanchester, who’s been one of the best and most literate commentators on the financial crisis, wrote an interesting article on this subject for the New Yorker. The piece was called “Melting into Air“:
For anyone who studied literature in college in the past few decades, there is a weird familiarity about the current crisis: value, in the realm of finance capital, evokes the elusive nature of meaning in deconstructionism. According to Jacques Derrida, the doyen of the school, meaning can never be precisely located; instead, it is always “deferred,” moved elsewhere, located in other meanings, which refer and defer to other meanings—a snake permanently and necessarily eating its own tail.
Do I detect some post structuralist stirrings? Is the siren call of deconstructionism beginning to work its magic on your Enlgish empricist soul?
Was only a matter of time.
Er… of course not. Don’t be ridiculous. Er…
Oh arse.
One of the strange developments in an inclusive Warholesque concept of art recently is that agencies that do what we’d call PR and advertising term what they’re doing art. So matching celebrity to brand is art. The party you then have is art. The conversations at the party are art, so are the publicity shots afterwards – it’s all an arranged association of signs. This is a kind of industry-wide confidence trick because the art tag is valuable.
That comment was meant to go on the one about art, ok?
As if Ben Fogle’s not art.
Do they really call what they’re doing art? Perhaps it’s just a sign of how naive I am, but I can’t quite believe that. Have you got any examples?
Well, this isn’t true across the whole marketing and PR industry, but it is true in segments of it. My friend (whom you know) was recently working for a large agency for actors, writers etc, who were researching branching out into branding agencies, and this is what he told me last week. So I’ll ask him for examples. The agencies focused on pairing celebrities with brands, thus have a vested interest in making it sound not at all distasteful. It also happens where art and marketing cross over, around the film, art and music industries. So the Tate does an exhibition about the marketing of contemporary art, Steve Stoute and Jay-Z form a marketing agency together – it’s hard to tell the difference between the branding and the art.
The most successful advertising and branding agencies are moving away from traditional marketing strategies into making random shit that apparently isn’t trying to sell anything, just create atmosphere. If you want to work at Mother or Wieden&Kennedy, you have to show up with a portfolio of artwork that isn’t really advertising in order to impress them. You basically have to demonstrate you can make art.
Media philosopher Marshall McLuhan called advertising “the greatest art form of the 20th century”, but that’s academic. The person to talk to about this topic is Alfie, who is a branding semiotician or semantics consultant or something like that. It’s like a branding witch doctor. It’s a whole world of weirdness.
OK, so I had a think about this, and I’ve got to tell you: I think old McLuhan’s right, what they’re doing can be called art.
The main reason to exclude advertising etc from the category of art, it seems to me, is that it is done for the sake of something, ie. making money, whereas art should be done for its own sake only. I find this distinction is mistaken. Firstly on philosophical grounds, because it fails to explain whether some things we do – such as listening to music – are instrumental or inherent. Second on historical grounds, because many artists in the past worked for money and to please their patrons. They were more like writers today than fine artists today.
That’s not to say that there is no difference between instrumental and inherent motivations, merely that they form a spectrum with unclear and shifting boundaries.
Getting rid of the sharp instrumental/inherent distinction ends up making a difference for the work. A lot of advertising strikes me as much better art than anything you’re likely to see in a gallery. The problem with most art today [warning: sweeping statement coming up] is that it is little more than masturbation, with no connection to people’s lives. This is due in large part, I would suggest, to the lack of constraints placed on artists: they’re told to “go create”. Frankly, if I was an artist, I’d be applying to work at Mother too (maybe I will anyway), because I’d be more likely to produce interesting work there. But then I don’t find advertising particularly disasteful, which you obviously do. It’s just one more better-paid career than mine, which is not exactly hard.
Of course that doesn’t mean that tossers like Ronojoy – last seen working in advertising – are artists; they’re not, they’re just tossers. And God knows what Alfie does. But when it comes to the theory, I’m with Marshall on this one.