I had began arguing for consensus theory long before I read Hegel. For a while I had asked what was it that was good about music, about anything really, and could never come up with an answer which was intellectually satisfying. Eventually I adopted a working hypothesis which said that something is good if people say it is. By this, there is no fixed measure or absolute value that transcends the consensus as traditional religion, philosophy and science had taught. Like with Tracey Emin’s response to the question what is art, it is art if she says it is. If that is too extreme a view, consensus theory draws back from such full on solipsism and says that it is art if enough other people say it is. With this it is possible to accept market forces as a fair enough modern day measure of what is the good work. This at a stroke leaves aside all the bedroom visionaries whose creations or ideas never make a connection (me e.g.). It also increasingly ignores the would-be authorities, journalists, critics, traditionalists etc., who claim to have some absolute measure of taste in their gift.

So far so good. If the matter was to be further challenged and there be a demand to satisfy age old traditions of value, then I was able to add the need for some kind of future opinion as a subsequent requirement for defining the good in artistic work. The Spice Girls may satisfy current consensus but if no one pays them any attention thirty years from now (as will surely be the case) then their music would be downgraded, seen as just a passing curiosity.

Adopting a view like this gave me a thinking framework within which to assess my own life and work, together with a straightforward, relatively uncomplicated way of measuring success and failure, mine or anyone else’s. If these were the rules of hard reality, then I would have to go along with them, and have, with degrees of difficulty, done so. If my work sells it’s good, if it doesn’t it isn’t. Tough but simple. Get on with it.

That is roughly the intellectual setting within which I have understood my work and pursued my career since the late 1980s; that there are two central components necessary for defining good art: consensus and posterity. These can probably be synthesised further by using one single term and that term is “context”. In a broader philosophical sense, things are determined in relationship to other things, not in themselves, in other words by their context. I felt with this I was borrowing from the arguments of Hume, Hegel, Neitzsche and Wittgenstein and arriving at something that was relevant to the case. The view also seemed to work in with theories of liberalism and relativism which so dominated the intellectual mind-set of the later 20th century.

Despite my own lack of success during the 1990s, for most of it I did feel fairly well tuned in to the ethos of the age. I was able to read books, watch films and television, listen to music etc. and find stuff that confirmed my orientation; that I was living in a world, which though proved hard going and wouldn’t deliver for me personally, was nevertheless a world I recognised and understood with sufficient resignation. My complaint was not that situations didn’t exist where I could make my mark, more that I was simply unable to tap into them, that my luck would not strike where and when it needed to.

I’m still pretty much of that view but wonder if the ground is beginning to shift again. It may only be personal disorientation - a disorientation which rendered the previous generation unfit for the task of maintaining its authority - it may only be just a matter of growing older at a time of great change, but I find the culture quite offensive right now. Apart from the usual complaints of too much individualism, excessive materialism, the collapse of commonality, the triumph of style over substance etc. - all valid concerns I suppose - there is also something more sinister there, a kind of celebration of decadence, as if a whole new ethos is being born which threatens much of what is good about civilised life. In Nietzschean terms, it’s as if the spirit of Dyonisius is in rebellion against all the finer forces of Apollonian civilisation which at best only just ever manage to hold society together. I suppose this is more of a feeling than anything else but these feelings I have learned to pay attention to. I suspect too that changes at such a profound level begin to show themselves in subtle manifestation at first before growing into something which effects everyone more directly maybe a decade or two later. I believe the 60s gave birth to the society of the 90s in this way, for good and for bad. Sensitive types are often aware of such potentialities sooner than others.

The Sunday Times gave me fodder to chew on this morning in an article on the band Travis. Apart from the naive remarks you might expect from new born stars, there was much in their point of view I appreciated, like a comment on how nobody reads enough books these days, or how it seems like everyone’s on TV and must have a rock ’n’ roll attitude, or how uncool it is to be nice. “Metaphorically, it’s like everyone’s chucking a TV out of a hotel window,” said one of them. Seems similar to what I’m saying, being tired of all the poser-ish decadence.

In the same paper Brian Appleyard has been banging on for a while about similar stuff. This week he complains that celebrity mania has knocked out every artistic boundary and it no longer matters what is good or bad, only who is hot or not. I want to agree with Appleyard but he seems inclined back to the old, safer world of fixed absolutes, and I don’t think the answer lies there. Still, I agree with him when he says there is no point in being good anymore if you can’t be sold, and that the concept of good but unmarketable is quite meaningless now. The problem with his criticism of this state of affairs goes to my original philosophical question about defining good in the first place. It is difficult if not impossible to do out with a context and the context has overtaken Appleyard and his ilk. Whether it has overtaken me remains to be seen. He talks in apocalyptic terms concluding that if there is no good outside of celebrity, money and marketing, if we live in a world where everything becomes the same in the end, then civilisation is heading for its own heat-death, a uniformity where everything has its price but nothing has value. In my worst moments I might have sympathy with that but would prefer to find a better insight.

I don’t imagine it would be very helpful to go drawing inferences from last night’s broadcast of the Brit awards but it wouldn’t be difficult either. I have been supportive of these awards for some years now and felt proud of the British record industry’s contribution to pop culture. I still do. But the last while has seen a bit of a dip compared with the excellence of the mid 90s and the business is filling the void currently with even more bombastic, inflated displays, stuff which Appleyard would probably cite as examples of our degeneracy. Maybe Geri Halliwell’s hyper-glitzy performance is only making up for the paucity of what she has to offer; or Davina McCall’s brashy, laddish delivery only a decadent pretence aimed at juveniles. Perhaps no more than superficial pop-talk. Maybe pop music was always that: token subversive, but in the end quite harmless, mostly metaphorical televisions! Mercifully, not the end of civilisation as we know it. I hope.