Detours: Songs of the Open Road

by Salil Tripathi

Art not for art’s sake, but for its commercial spin-offs was the agenda. Unlike great arts cities of the world, Singapore worked on a Faustian bargain, which swapped political and artistic freedom for profit. In the 1949 film The Third Man, Orson Welles had ad-libbed: ‘In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love—they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.’ Apply that to Singapore, and you might hear him say: ‘Indonesia had a bloody revolution, a militant insurgency, and three decades of Suharto’s dictatorship and a million died, and yet it produced Balinese dances, wayang kulit, and the fiction of Pramoedya Ananta Toer. Singapore had 30 years of peace and stability, and what did it produce? The disk drive of personal computers.’

The fallacy of intentional art