We were on the way to Wembley once in the van. We wrote on a piece of paper 'Which way to Wembley.' We spoke in a foreign language and pointed to map of Wales. Everybody went mad putting us right.... I still feel an urge to do that but you can't. It would be Beatles Play Tricks. This Will Give You a Laugh."

"We know we're conning them, because we know people want to be conned. They've given us the freedom to con them." --JOHN LENNON

"We're not learning to be architects, or painters or writers. We're learning to be. That's all."   --PAUL MCCARTNEY

THERE is a kind of art--playful art let us call it--that is becoming more and more popular as the West declines. This kind of art--it includes Camp, Pop, and a lot of other things I'll talk about later--creates a nervousness in reviewers, an anxiety that the artist is trying to take him in, or put something over on him; he fears he is going to make an ass of himself.

The high-brow way of manifesting fear is for the critic to become moralistic, as if such art were not a personal affront, no, but an affront to the Western Tradition, frivolous, you see, considering the Nature of the Times We Live In.

Perhaps the critic is honestly angry at the artist, or perhaps this is just another way of showing the old anxiety and confusion, an uncertainty as to what he's expected to say in the face of this...this genius?...this prank...this outrage! For every time the critic becomes serious the artist giggles, and when our critic laughs along with him the artist suddenly turns spooky, funeral. The critic feels like a bug and strikes back with "if we should dignify it by the name of art at all in poor taste unwashed ill mannered self-indulgent...adolescent...childish....infantile."

I sympathize. I can understand why someone shot Andy Warhol. Seeing picture of, (or by) that smug silvered hair fairy with his dark eye glasses I've felt the same impulse. That's not art, I want to say, you're not artist. Leonardo is an artist, Dostoyevsky, Michelangelo, Rilke...in a phrase, the Western Tradition of High Seriousness.

HIGH SERIOUSNESS. Matthew Arnold, you remember, said the greatest art displayed a High Seriousness. That's not to exclude the serious masquerading as comic, or even the outright Slapstick farcical comic. It may not be the greatest art, Arnold said, but we-all-love-a-good-joke-hey-boys?

But Matthew Arnold forgot to leave any guidelines for dealing with Warhol say, or Godard, or Frank O'Hara. They are artists of the serious as comic. They display a kind of consciousness in which profound truths, new, original insights are seen as funny, not screamingly funny perhaps, but funny nonetheless. "It's true but it's still a joke," as George Harrison says,"...It's serious and it's not serious."

"It's serious and it's not serious." You understand? Of course. This kind of consciousness has produced a lot of the art of our time, playful art as I have called it. It includes Camp to start with though it is greater than Camp. It includes Pop Art. ("Why that looks like a picture of a soup can, Karen." "Well it is a picture of a soup can." "Oh.") But it is greater than Pop Art. Richard Lester is in the tradition. Bob Dylan is part of it; the Bob Dylan that Joan Baez called the Dada King. (Everybody Must Get Stoned.) It includes writers like Nabokov, (or, in another way) Donald Barthelme (Snow White, Come Back Dr. Caligari, Unnatural Practices, Unspeakable Acts), and several New York School Poets (Koch, Ashberry, O'Hara). It includes such Zen masters as Joshu, who was given to putting his shoes on his head in reply to weighty theological questions. And it includes my spiritual advisors, the starts of Help, sgt. Pepper's, and The Authorized Biography by Hunter Davies--The Beatles.

THIS consciousness, which has as antecedents such early avatars, as Jean Cocteau, Dada, Joyce, and the Marx Brothers, is to say the least, playful. All art is, of course, to some extent, playful, or draws on elements of the mind that serious people don't take seriously, but these artists are more playful than most. A gallery instillation that has you walk down a long dark tunnel to confront a white painting with the words You Are Here neatly lettered in black, certainly is more playful than the Sistine Chapel. (It was done this summer in London by John Lennon and his new mistress.) It is a kind of art that seems to ignore or to have moved beyond moral considerations (which is in part what makes it so infuriating for a criticism which is still involved with moral standards and Matthew Arnolds' How to Live.!

This attitude towards moral considerations--the child so involved in a game that he does not notice its consequences on the "real world" outside the world of the game--gives us a clue towards the origins of this kind of consciousness. We can approach it, I think, if we imagine a child playing, totally involved, and then imagine an adult playing at that game, or at some game adults consider equaly childish like painting, writing, or Rock and Roll. The artist develops a kind of dual consciousness totally involved and serious with one part of his mind, very detached and half-mocking with the other.

II.

WHAT first attracted many of us to the Beatles, as public personalities rather than as musicians, was their public manner. "How did you find America?" one reporter asked them. "Turn left at Greenland," John said. "We were funny at press conferences because it was all a joke...you can't put over how you really are. Newspapers always get things wrong." Newspapers always get things wrong; a truth we all learned from Rosenthal's hilarious reporting from Columbia. So why not put them on. "What do you think of Beethoven?" "I love him," said Ringo. "Especially his poems." Fuck them all if they think we're stupid.

"For one number John asked the audience to clap their hands in time. Nodding toward the royal box he added: 'Those upstairs just rattle your jewelry.'" They think we're here to entertain them. Well we are, but fuck them anyway.