Liking and Making

Some of the best sports' commentators are people who have themselves played games to a high standard. This does not necessarilly mean that they know more about looking intelligently at games than the spectator; indeed, it might mean that they know less because, while they have been in the mill of the game, or often in the maul of the game, they can hardly say that they have seen it from a perspective that is objective. In some cases they have seen it from a certain fixed angle: take a front row forward who is engaged in the hard graft of mauling and shoving and, often, brawling rather than watching the finer points from the touchline. Also, having been a player does not nesessarilly mean that you will be able to write better than the watchful spectator, one trained in journalism perhaps or one with a flair for the apt, maybe also, the well formed poetic phrase.
I once attended a conference on film study. Present were people from film study courses in colleges and writers of articles on film in certain magazines like "Sight and Sound". The aim of the conference was to project the idea that film should be studied in schools at GCSE level and above. Someone thought that it might be useful if part of the course was devoted to the making of films as well as their study. This idea was instantly denounced as decidely unhelpful: this was meant to be a study of film as an art form not the teaching of a craft. When I supported the man who had suggested the idea I too was denounced as a sort of charlatan. Wasn't I aware that English Literature was studied and that there was no part in that study for creative writing? I didn't know that because at that time I was a teacher of science.
So I thought they must be right and we two outcasts quite wrong.
Liking literature has nothing to do with making it. Liking painting has nothing to do with making it.
But doesn't the act of making something involve the artist in a critically creative task in which his/her mental processers are active in analytical decisions as well as mechanical ones like laying on the brushstrokes.
A man from the Ministry of Education (I think) came to the conference to listen and then to give his view (which became a decision). I have scarcely heard such a superb demolition of the arguments put forward to him by this group of ardent film lovers. He fairly squashed them into nothingness. It was beautiful performance, almost a work of art in itself.
What his argument amounted was really quite simple: could you expect the general public to let their children attend a school which spent a good deal of time watching films with John Wayne in them?
Though I knew a man who was a university lecturer who, at a morning's staff meeting, heard the film study lecturer give his reason for wearing a black tie that day: in respect for the memory of John Wayne who had died the day before.