Ruaridh Nicoll
He may be yellow, non-existent and have deformed hands, but Bart Simpson, cartoon dude most excellent, is one of Time magazine’s 20 most influential artists and entertainers of our century.
The American news magazine has released its second top 20 list, this time looking at the arts, in the run- up to naming the most influential figure of the century. Americans abound in this most American pursuit of the American century: Frank Sinatra, Oprah Winfrey, Rodgers and Hammerstein are there.
“It’s interesting that Bart Simpson makes it,” said author Fay Weldon. “It is the most sophisticated cartoon.”
It was Bart who once hugged a television, then turned to his father and said: “It’s done more to raise me than you have.” A fine comment on a culture in film-making that lists Steven Spielberg before Ingmar Bergman. And Orson Welles is not even mentioned.
“No director or producer has ever put together a more popular body of work,” the magazine argues in Spielberg’s favour.
In January, BBC Radio 3 carried out a similar exercise based on the judgment of novelist AS Byatt, art curator Bryan Robertson, and Oxford professors John Carey and Jean Aitchison. They produced a list of which 80% were dead and the rest over 60 – except for Damien Hirst, whom the programme’s editor added -to the fury of the panel.
Hirst does not make the American list, but Radio 3’s controller Nicholas Kenyon said he was surprised by some of the choices made by Time. “It would be amazing if the British and American views of the culturally important people of our century coincided absolutely, but some of Time’s choices make my eyebrows rise.”
Christopher John Farley, a senior writer at Time, made few excuses for the list, which he said was drawn up by a wide variety of the magazine’s critics.
“These lists are often very personal. All but one of my picks – Aretha Franklin – didn’t make it, I would have really liked to see Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Bob Marley in there. It would have been nice if these people brought the world into the list.”
Television’s influence could not be ignored. “It was a choice between Samuel Beckett and Bart Simpson and so of course we chose Bart in the end.”
The inclusion of TS Eliot as the most influential poet raised sighs of pleasure on both sides of the Atlantic. Time wrote: “Serious poetry was about to be eclipsed by fiction. [Eliot] provided the stark salvation of The Waste Land”.
Weldon was delighted. “Thank God they’ve heard of T S Eliot,” she said.
The inclusion of Oprah Winfrey would never have crossed the British panel’s mind, but given the deluge of talk shows that have flooded the world it is difficult to resist her advance.
Walter Isaacson, Time’s managing editor, justified putting Le Corbusier in front of Frank Lloyd Wright. “Look out your window, and what do you see? Le Corbusier, not Wright,” he said.
The magazine caused controversy earlier when its 20 most politically influential figures omitted Joseph Stalin and John F Kennedy.