The other evening, my wife and I slipped into a rear pew for the culminating concert in this year's Southern Cathedrals Festival, given by the combined choirs of Chichester, Salisbury and Winchester. Next to us, a homeless woman was volubly praising the cathedral for giving her a ticket. Within the first anthem we, by contrast, were rather less delighted, as the woman proceeded to give a running, rustling commentary on the proceedings. After half an hour, risking a scolding from the glowering stewards, we withdrew to a safe distance.
For a while, I felt bad about having moved, for two reasons. One was the rueful reflection that cathedrals were meant precisely to accommodate all of society. In the Middle Ages, the rear part of the nave, where we were sitting, would have been a rolling livestock market; it seemed hypocritical to balk now at noise and odour. Second, there is always a feeling that one should suffer for one's art - not only the art you make, as Paul McCartney might have put it, but also the art you take. Moments of transcendence are always richer and sweeter if they have to be fought for.
The physical indignities of large rock festivals are well-rehearsed, not least in these pages. (They, of course, are dictated as much by economics as by the nobility of squalor.) But a degree of shared hardship features in many other arts as well. It has been widely remarked how different the atmosphere at the reconstructed Globe Theatre is for the actors, able to see and relate to the audience, to that of indoor theatres with proscenium arches. But the experience for the aching-footed groundlings is different too: pressed up against each other like Tube passengers, they crane to see the action, and when a moment of silence and stillness comes, it is all the more real.
Cinema was once almost a parody of luxury, with red velvet seats and uniformed usherettes. But it has become downgraded, with dull, blurred pictures and the constant sibilance of the consumption of the food that gives cinemas their real margins. Manners and concentration have suffered from the example set by watching television. At the same time, the experience of watching a film at home has improved hugely, thanks to DVDs and home cinemas. Save for the lowest-common-denominator blockbusters, where the point is not to see them but to have seen them, the better experience is to be had at home.
Land art provides the opportunity for deferred gratification: climbing along a dark tunnel to the very centre of an extinct volcano in Arizona in James Turrell's Roden Crater, for example, in order finally to look up at the sky. Something of the same spirit, of the feeling that art too easily seen is too coarse in gratification, must animate the rise of outdoor sculpture gardens: strolling through the gardens of the Kröller-Müller museum, deep in the Hoge Veluwe park in the Netherlands, to be suddenly confronted with a giant kitchen utensil by Claes Oldenburg behind a clump of trees, provides the right balance of exertion and excitement.
In his book A Pattern Language, Christopher Alexander tells of the house of a Buddhist monk that overlooked the ocean. But this view could be seen only fleetingly, through a diagonal slit in the wall, as a visitor walked through the courtyard. "If there is a beautiful view," counsels Alexander to anyone designing a house, "don't spoil it by building huge windows that gape incessantly at it. Instead, put the windows which look on to the view at places of transition."
Perhaps we are spoilt for perfection. We expect choral music in a cathedral to be performed with the razor-sharp accuracy of an Anonymous 4 compact disc. But in its original form, it would have sounded nothing like that: the churches would have echoed with chatter, the choirs would have been selected according to nepotism rather than talent, the moments of transcendence would have been chancy and unpredictable rather than smoothly guaranteed. And they would have been all the sweeter for it.
