The crowd in Madison Square Gardens have not been this agitated for some time, but you’ll have to take my word for it. They sit in a respectful almost silence, some clean their spectacles, some read their programmes, and others whisper excitedly about the main event: the big fight. In the red corner is Alain de Botton: de Botton (I pronounce it to rhyme with bottom) rose to prominence explaining how reading Proust or Plato could change the lives of the public, but more recently has pointed out that the jobs they do are pointless and puzzled over why they do them at all (think about it Alain!). In the blue corner is Kevin McCloud, inspiration for every fledgling architectural career in the country he is the man who took Bauhaus to the British (or should that be brutish?) public. Tonight’s bout, then, is a grudge match between public intellectuals, between intelligent people (well…) that inhabit the realm of mass media, and, if you want a cheeky tip, my money’s on McCloud.
To conceive of the public-intellectual one must marry two not easily reconciled concepts: the public and the intellectual. The public, according to popular opinion at least, are stupid, susceptible to any amount of guff and balls, and seem to muddle along quite happily blanketed in ignorance. The intellectual, in stark contrast, is clever, well informed, discerning, often odds with the world, and certainly not content to take the status quo at face value. The concept of the public-intellectual, therefore, is perhaps best understood in dialectical terms. The synthesis of two out-dated and poorly thought out concepts, public intellectuals should allow us to subvert the notion that we are stupid and that big ideas and profound arguments are impenetrable or beyond us.
To his credit McCloud’s medium is television. Through his presenting work on the universally adored Grand Designs he has gone some way towards showing the public that there is more to architecture than bland shopping precincts and Barratt homes. McCloud has demonstrated that design is important, that it can profoundly influence how you live. And the programmes he presented documenting the regeneration of Castleford in Yorkshire show that this is not just the case if you can afford to build your own house: it is for and influences everyone.
In a sense Grand Designs demonstrates how abstract concepts are realised: building a house out of straw, out of glass, out of a box from Ikea, or a project that’s environmentally friendly conserves a building’s historical character, destroys it, or is radically egalitarian. As Grand Designs has done this McCloud has introduced countless people to architectural and design history, demonstrating how this influences current practice. There must be people who would never have heard of modernism, minimalism, environmentalism, Le Corbusier, Bauhaus or even Gothic and classical architecture if it wasn’t for Kevin McCloud.
Alain de Botton aims to be relevant, informative and interesting too; he has tried to show that Plato and Proust are for everyone, but really shown how they could be for people who are a bit like him. Sadly, I’m not sure that Charlie Brooker’s analysis is too far off the mark: ‘a pop philosopher, who’s forged a lucrative career stating the bleeding obvious in a series of poncey, lighter-than-air books, aimed at smug Sunday supplement pseuds looking for something clever-looking to read on the plane.’ To his credit de Botton has tried to branch out to talk to the rest of us, but he has managed to say nothing at all.
Recently, for instance, as well as lending his brain to the problems of work Alain has spent a lot of time at the airport. He believes that airports are a grand metaphor for contemporary life and has ventured into the ant farm to tell us about it. Here, sadly, dwells the problem: we’ve all been to airports/had crappy jobs/stayed in travel lodges/got a bus/DONE NORMAL STUFF. For Alain these things are a treat, he either thinks they’re fantastic or wonders why we do them at all, but we know they’re fucking rubbish and do them every day because we have to. If you live in some shit pit of a town in the middle of nowhere or if you’re some nobody businessman who has been to Rome, but ventured no further than the business park on its outskirts, it is not helpful to have Alain tell you how lucky you are.
If he was reporting from Rome you get the feeling that Alain de Botton, walking past the Colosseum, would communicate how many people he had seen using Blackberries or iPods. Wouldn’t it be much nicer to have Kevin McCloud actually tell you about Rome in his wonderful four part series Kevin McCloud’s Grand Tour? Yes, yes it would. We want Kevin McCloud; he’s much better looking and cooler than Alain. Oh, Kevin, take us one at a time. Tell us things we didn’t know without patronising us. Talk to Italian builders and then tell us what they said. Oh Kevin…
And before we get carried away this is why Kevin wins the big fight, why he is the quintessential ‘public intellectual’. Offering escapism he allows us to feel both connected to the big ideas in a grand human history and worthy of them. Sorry, Alain de Botton, it’s nothing personal, but we know we’re rubbish really and as you alternate between glee and befuddlement in the face of our cosmic triviality we don’t feel any less trivial. You do have a role to play, I’m sure, but not that of the true public intellectual (who must make us want to study not the object of study); Kevin will hold that title for a long time yet.