J'accuse

An excellent Channel 4 programme allowed art historians, journalists, musicians, and others to take a 'sacred cow' and dismantle it on TV. This ran in 1995 before Channel 4 started its love affair with fly-on-the-wall documentaries, reality TV, and other decidedly unsavoury programming. Some might question the idea of taking a much-loved building like St Paul's and the holy of holies in cinema Citizen Kane and trying to dismantle their reputations, but I enjoyed the exercise. For one thing, if you love St Paul's it's unlikely that an architect, no matter how good he is, is going to convince you otherwise. On other hand, if you feel, like me, that it's a somewhat suspect building, not to say grossly overrated, why not have a crack at its reputation. The architect in this episode felt that taste in Britain couldn't really progress much until people realised that the qualities that make St Martin in the Fields an incomparable masterpiece of English architecture are sadly lacking in St Paul's. It's also true to say that such an approach is rarely followed: we prefer to talk up works of art and enhance their stature, so a small dose of the opposite might be considered a healthy corrective. In this centenary year for Shostakovich I feel that a little scepticism might not go amiss. Having sat through all fifteen of the quartets in ideal surroundings with the world's leading interpreters to hand a few years ago, I feel that his music has been seriously overpraised. But self-pitying, tediously self-quoting, repetitive, ironic, conservative music has not always appealed to me very greatly.