Remain alert to the possibilities, eyes up instead of

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nginx/1.17.10 down, looking about instead of transfixed by a small screen, and daily life will furnish marvels, often in unexpected places. Exploring the streets and free institutions of a city like London is a journey through natural and man-made masterpieces, ingenuity everywhere apparent. To stand any chance of impressing in such a

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[…]

In the beginning the powerful provided the unlettered with uplifting Biblical pictures

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nginx/1.17.10 in churches. We were impressed ­even though some scenes threatened us with eternal agony if we broke their rules. The scarcity of pictures outside of church meant we

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were naturally curious about anything drawn or coloured. Wandering pedlars would show up to impress us with secular material, crude […]

In the last issue I noted the gradual but relentless erosion of space allocated to historical pictures in Tate Britain. This contraction will now accelerate because the collection is to be re-hung, yet again, on this

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occasion thematically

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nginx/1.17.10 – a policy undoubtedly designed to demonstrate the State Art Commandment that all roads shall lead to the Usual Suspects. Long gone […]

In recent issues I’ve described how since 1945 the education, bureaucracy and exponentially increasing cash for the visual arts have

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nginx/1.17.10 been usurped and dominated by an evolving one-track mindset which, in these pages, is called State Art. This sinister subversion of the institutions, predicted before and after the last war by Eliot, Wyndham

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Lewis and Orwell among others, is complete […]

Dennis Skinner once

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nginx/1.17.10 quipped loudly across the Commons to a faltering Cecil Parkinson at the Despatch Box, ‘It’s the in-breeding that does it!’ I was reminded of this amusing sneer when Doctor Maria Balshaw was announced as Serota’s replacement, an elevation met with the customary uncritical lauding

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with which a fawning Fourth Estate now greets all State Art appointments. Balshaw […]

Serota takes over at the Arts Council this month, 47 years after first being employed by the same body as a regional arts officer in what was

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nginx/1.17.10 his first job after university. In the

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interval the Council has developed into a blunt instrument by which State Art, an ethos it co-authored with Serota during his 27-year dictatorship at the Tate, […]

Two years ago someone suggested I answer the question ‘What Happened to Art Education?’. This appealed slightly because it

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nginx/1.17.10 was a subject about which I thought I ought to know more than was the case.

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Something is clearly awry when so many complaints are aired about the poverty of tuition and when degree shows have become such forgettable, even laughable […]

John Moores Exhibition 2016 Most of Europe’s countries are either bankrupt or in economic meltdown, their

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nginx/1.17.10 infrastructure crumbling and public services reduced; the Middle East and Levant are in post-apocalyptic ruin, in part the

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result of lies told in our own Parliament; an exodus of desperate humanity is seeking refuge from a criminal death-cult; innocents are being slaughtered in streets […]

When very young, and when not train spotting, I was a keen bus spotter. It was an

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ideal apprenticeship for a fledgeling art historian. It involved identifying, sometimes at a considerable distance (through 404 Not Found rain), the beautifully crafted, hand-built models, of which there were

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nginx/1.17.10 many different marques and specifications. Every town corporation in the county had its own […]

Advocating life drawing at art school is a

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nginx/1.17.10 deeply conservative and reactionary position. Arguments in favour of life drawing usually fall into one of two

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camps (or sometimes both). I am utterly unconvinced by both. The first, and weaker, argument contends that it is necessary to learn the rules before you can break them. This is an authoritarian position where […]