In what way is literature 'superior'?

I came across this quote: ‘Literature is the greatest of artistic forms because it is capable of incredible subtlety’. There’s so much wrong with that, where do you start? The misuse of the word ‘incredible’ is a bit of a giveaway – lacking subtlety, one might say. And is it being suggested that the masses of Palestrina, say, or Beethoven’s last quartets or a Rembrandt drawing, lack subtelty?

Here are some other quotes that are, similarly, just as likely to be conversation-stoppers as conversation-starters:

• ‘Words are often so ambiguous, so vague, so easily misunderstood in comparison to music’ – Felix Mendelssohn.

• ‘All the arts live by words’ (‘Tous les arts vivent de paroles’) – Paul Valéry.

• ‘Painting is the most artificial of the arts’ – Francis Bacon.

There are flaws in all of these, illustrating how inadequate language is (what is meant by ‘misunderstood’ here, or ‘vivent’, or ‘artificial’…?). The inadequacy of language in ennabling humans to communicate effectively with one another – for example in attempts to arrest the decline we have brought to the planet – reflects the muddle of our partial evolution, and I fear the contribution of literature is relatively trivial.

I think there is great value in reflecting on any art in relation to any other art; but no value whatsoever in claiming one to be superior to others.

Having nothing to say (and getting paid for saying something)

London’s Southbank Centre recently published a piece promoting their Anish Kapoor exhibition, beginning with this:

"Anish Kapoor has nothing to say. Kapoor insists that he has nothing to say about his art...". 

https://www.lissongallery.com/artists/anish-kapoor

At the foot of the article, we’re then given the opportunity to attend an event (Wed 8 Jul 2026, 8pm) headlined Anish Kapoor in conversation with Darian Leader. Just in case you were wondering, “the internationally celebrated artist shares rare insight into his remarkable work”.

Well I suppose that having previously been reassured that he doesn’t do anything of the sort, we are saved the trouble of paying money and going along. I hear an echo, presumably unintentional, of John Cage’s famous remark — “I have nothing to say and I am saying it”.

In the case of the Southbank Centre, the crass and desperate commercialisation of art seems relentless. And there’s another point to reflect on. I had a conversation a little while ago with a friend, regarding the chance to hear Raymond Antrobus and Ilya Kaminsky in person next month. (There are so-called ‘masterclasses’ too, if you’re interested: as if writing poetry were like carpentry). My friend was determined to be there and to defy the maxim ‘never meet your heroes’ but in the end he won’t be able to make it. I won’t be there either: I dislike hearing artists speaking in public about their work, in settings designed to attract groupies and promote sales. Such events are seldom likely to avoid accusations of saccharine sycophancy.

I’m old enough to remember very clearly, as a schoolboy, hearing Ted Hughes speaking at the time of the publication of Crow in the early 1970s. I suspect not much has changed, except maybe a poet’s display of bling. Artists discussing their work in private, or reflecting on it online, seems to me to be quite different, the purpose being less vulnerable to commercial distortion.

I read or heard recently, the observation that a successful poet can earn more from speaking about their work than from sales of their output, and perhaps that helps to explain these appearances. This means that they are being valued less for what they do, than for what they say about what they do. Being a poet may be a way of life, but that’s not the same as a way of earning a living. Should we expect society to be structured so that just writing poetry can be a way of earning a living?

Artists of all kinds tend to have to supplement their income from their work, through teaching, writing reviews or doing something unrelated. The capitalist context is unavoidable, at least for now, and artistic endeavour is subject to it. I guess it’s a question of the extent to which you succumb to it or resist it.

Thou shalt not omit commas

Here’s one of the oddest requirements for submitting to literary journals that I’ve ever come across:

‘Ensure that poems are properly and fully punctuated’.

So at a stroke this particular journal would presumably have excluded, for example, e e cummings, T S Eliot, Sylvia Plath, Nick Laird and Ilya Kaminsky, to name just a few that come to mind.

I suppose it’s a good way of reducing the amount of submissions they have to read. But glancing through a print issue I happen to have, I note that one or two seem to have slipped past the editor’s attention.