Tell-Tale Heart

(The National Theatre, 21 December 2018)

The play begins with a provocative assertion: art is created by the not very smart as a safe space for the not very smart; art normalises mediocrity. A visit to many a modern art gallery or an exhibition would appear to support this hypothesis. Plays are not immune to mediocrity either, although playwrights do have to pass a literacy test. (Some of the mediocrity one encounters, however, is accidental: the impressionist canon was purchased by Gustave Caillebotte, a patron and himself an artist, on the grounds that it was not good enough to appeal to regular collectors. Caillebotte later bequeathed this canon to the public, while some of the better works remained in private collections.)

Mediocrity in art has three redeeming features. The acceptance of mediocrity unsettles existing social hierarchies by helping a greater number of individuals discover a source of self-esteem. The exposure of the public to mediocrity also illustrates that good art is hard, liable to false starts, and relies on nurturing a flow of ideas, only a fraction of which end up having some merit. Acceptance of mediocre art, on balance, encourages more individuals to engage in art. To the extent that engagement in and with art promotes social cohesion, this sacrifice of quality for quantity is welcome.

Should the government be in the business of promoting mediocre art? Perhaps indirectly so, the way venture capitalists promote more bad entrepreneurs by virtue of promoting more entrepreneurs, (ex-post) good or bad. The case relies on the assumption that markets alone would not provide artists with the funding commensurate with the social benefit that artistic activity generates, and that this under-provision is more severe in art than in, say, biotech.

The government may do more for art by investing in infrastructure and growth-friendly policies than by directly investing in art.

The provocative opening line is the play's high-point. Does the play itself illustrate the value of mediocrity? Is it an NT-worthy failure? Not quite.