another reason to love westwood

Vivienne Westwood has apparently shocked the respectable journalists of the Guardian with her Hay-on-Wye antics. You can understand that: she's kind of a long way from your usual Hay type, the Sebastian Faulkes or even Mariella Frostrup.

And while she was shocking them with her fashionable strops (not that kind of strop - please! Or you'll be shocking the rest of us too) she was also recasting herself as a 'thinker'. Well, I don't see why not. She is definitely an artist. And while artists are notoriously not always intellectuals, they are at the vanguard of cultural life. So let her be a thinker.

Here's what she says (taken from an article in the Independent):

"In Active Resistance to Propaganda, she called on people to eschew trash television and magazines and encouraged them to read and visit galleries and concerts instead. The human race had never appeared as ugly to her as it did today, she said.

"It must be to do with mass marketing that is producing a whole sea of clones across the world," she said. In her lecture, No Art, No Progress, she identified two social evils: "organised lying" and "non-stop distraction", which she described as filling people's minds with rubbish so that no one could think. But by viewing the world through culture and by becoming more cultivated, people would become more human."

I can only applaud that. That Westwood prizes civilisation above all else is evident in the gorgeous cutting of her garments, the way she has taken the celebration of human form which is high fashion and made it something new, strange and wonderful. At 66 she is still alarming, and that is as it should be.

The most interesting thing to me about Westwood's above-stated position - aside from the fact that I agree 150%, and aside from her wonderful turn of phrase regarding distraction - is how similar it sounds to what Philip Pullman - who really is an intellectual - was saying the other day.

Pullman is talking specifically about the decline in children's television programming - both in quantity of non-commercial programming and in the overall quality, and in fact the intention of it. This is, in one small area, exactly what Westwood is talking about on a more macro level.

Pullman says (I quote from the Observer):

"'Children are regarded by broadcasters as a marketing opportunity at best, a dangerous and feral threat at worst, and an expensive nuisance otherwise,' Pullman said. 'This social poison goes much deeper than broadcasting, of course, but it's particularly visible there....

"But Pullman is concerned the damage done to children's television has gone too far to be corrected without more effort. 'The ideology of "profit before everything" in children's television is toxic,' he said. 'When young audiences are regarded as customers to be separated from their money as quickly and efficiently as possible, there is no chance for life-enhancing work to flourish.'"

The best thing of all - that Westwood was so much more eloquent!

This post has been brough to you as an elegantly dressed Wednesday special*

* I say special - that could also be The Specials...