NOTES AND COMMENTS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22389, 8 April 1936, Page 12

NOTES AND COMMENTS

OUTLOOK FOR ART Dealing with the financial difficulties facing artists Sir Reginald Blo'rnfield said that the unwelcome fact must be recognised that these were bad times for living artists, and one could not bo very optimistic about the future. There were many things against them, both in the world outside and in the arts themselves. Indeed, if it were not for the faith one had in the resilience of the race one might be tempted to prophesy the final bankruptcy of the arts. They wore losing the place that they once held as a refuge from the storm, and storms were threatening from almost every quarter of the civilised world. Nations were living in a state of profound mistrust, each waiting to see what his neighbour would do, too anxious to be ablo to spare any attention for the arts that made life gracious and beautiful in the past. The great periods of art had been periods of unbroken peace. Our civilisation was so complex that the arts were being crowded out. The power of seeing life whole seemed to have vanished, and its place had been taken by a malaise which made people impatient of the home, sacrifice everything to tho flat and the motorcar, dash wildly about the country and spend their spare time in picturo palaces and sherry parties. If it was a choice between a motor-car and a work of art, the motor-car had it all the way.

THE ARCHITECT Mr. Edward Carter, the librarian of the Royal Institute of British Architects, stated in a Manchester speech that architects had a past to live down. "In a world crying out for architectural socialism it is no use being a Corinthian capitalist," he said. Mr. Carter was explaining that the lack of response from the public to architects was partly caused by a false attitude in architects. People thought them members of an aristocratic and gentlemanly occupation which only aristocrats and gentlemen could understand. Architectural difficulties were symptoms of the bigger disease affecting the whole of our cultured civilisation. Architects could, if they wished, allow their buildings to continue to reflect current differences and uncertainties, or they could make architecture "a dynamic influence which by its central position in the social structure can be an active and progressive influence." The duty of architects was to use the resources in front of them and to learn to react intelligently to the needs of the time. This meant something more than "doing in Rome as Rome does." The architect's professional skill meant nothing if it did not enable him to respond more readily than the multitude to. experience, "to assess not merely what the public does, but the underlying influences that dictate action." The whole social structure had now been democratised and the influence of community experience was of greater • importance than ever before.

DICTATORSHIP IN SPORT A defence of the action of the General Council of the Trades Union Congress in protesting against the visit of the German football team in December for the match against an English team on the Tottenham Hotspur ground is made by Sir Walter Citrine, the general secretary, in a pamphlet called " Under the Heel of Hitler. The Dictatorship Over Sport in Nazi Germany." " The action of the T.U.C. was a protest against the importation of politics into sport," he writes. " Our protest did not entirely prevent the visiting Germans from making a demonstration, in defiance of the assurance given to the T.U.C. deputatjon by the Home Secretary. Thousands of little Swastika flags and Nazi leaflets bearing the Swastika were scattered by the German visitors as the charabancs left the football ground. How many British sportsmen realise that in Germany Herr Lindemann holds his position as president of the German Football League at the discretion of a State official? Would the English F.A. tolerate the interference of a Home Office official in the election of officers? This is what happens in Germany. Not in football only, but in every branch of sport. The Sport Leader dictates. British sportsmen would laugh to scorn the notion that a man's political views should determine bis right to take part in any organised game; they would resent the exclusion of a player from any club or contest because his grandfather was a Jew; they would ridicule the imposition of racial or political tests in any kind of athletic competition where physical fitness and skill can alone decide pre-eminence. In Nazi Germany all these canons of sport are violatod."

THE HABIT OF SAVING Professor Henry Clay, economio adviser to the Bank of England, spoke a timely word in support of the thrifty at a meeting of the Westminster Committee of the National Savings Movement. He said that there were some who blamed the habit of saving for the depression in industry. But the evil, if there was an evil, was not the saving, but the failure to make use of savings, and the remedy was to create or restore conditions in which savings could be used. The chief influence of savings on trade depression, ho thought, was a favourable one. In every depression there was constantly going on a process of change in industry and of redistribution and redirection of the country's economic resources. The flank of trade depression was turned by the diversion of workers from fields in which their prospects were bad into those in which their services were needed. This process, the soundest and most permanent of all means of curing depression, depended on two things—an adequate supply of capital and the willingness and ability of workerß to move from the contracting to the expanding trades. Small savings favoured the first of these conditions, and had a vital influence on the second. Such a change had to be brought about by the diffused initiative and adaptability of a multitude of people and the possession of even a small cash reserve encouraged these qualities. Without savings th* worker could not take the risks of changing his trade, going to a new district, exploring new openings. With savings he could turn round, wait if necessary, and seek out and follow every new opening. It was not to be supposed, however, that the ultimate justification of savings was their purely economic effects. Their possession made a man more self-reliant, more adaptable, less liable to drift —all of them valuable economic qualities, but much more valuable as intrinsic elements in character.