On 31 August and 1 September a digital installation called Connecting Light will turn Hadrian's Wall into an artwork. At last, boring old history will become acceptable contemporary culture!
Sorry. I don't get it. Why is it so great or valuable or necessary to turn Hadrian's Wall into modern art for a couple of nights? Because it will stimulate news coverage like these words you are reading, that's why, and for no other reason.
That is also, I suspect, why artist Glenn Brown has been invited to show his subversive paintings among a collection of old masters at the National Trust's Upton House. It is the motivation for most events that juxtapose current culture with history. We are becoming a nation of present-minded narcissists. We only seem to see the historic monuments and rich heritage of premodern art that are found all over the British Isles when these treasures are repackaged and re-presented as modern culture.
At least that's how it looks through the lens of the media. In reality, the cultural behaviour of modern Britons is varied and historically eclectic. I can bet that if you go for a walk on Hadrian's Wall any day of the year you'll encounter plenty of people of all ages who have come to imagine Roman Britain without any need for digital art to update it. Similarly I was recently astounded by the crowds on a rainy weekday morning at Chatsworth in Derbyshire, and while Hampton Court Palace near London recently got a moment in the news thanks to Bradley Wiggins, it gets masses of visitors every day.
Meanwhile, readers are doting on Hilary Mantel's second book in her series of historical novels about the Tudor Reformation. Why is it, when Mantel's audience are lapping up details about 16th-century life, that we in the media can only get excited about today and, at a pinch, yesterday?
Obviously it goes with the territory – news is new – but coverage of the arts ought to be more responsive to the diversity and richness of cultural life, which is not bounded by immediate events unless you are the shallowest metropolitan caricature imaginable. A real reader dances from Mantel's or Self's latest to a Henry James or Agatha Christie or Lucretius. An art lover might visit the ICA and the Wallace Collection on the same day.
There should be space in our public cultural debates and meditations to imagine other times as well as our own. The trouble with a light show on Hadrian's Wall is that it actively gets in the way of picturing the Romans walking on their battlements. And I can't see any reason to care about this monument if we don't want to dream of the past.
