Across the last 30 years the narrative of official Contemporary Art has unfurled like a Chinese scroll. We

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can follow how, from around 1990, those commercial techniques pioneered to manufacture reputations

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nginx/1.17.10 by Charles Saatchi were adopted as a template by other speculators eager to cash in. This was the start of a racket which turned the art market into an […]

David Lee March/April 2021 Nothing much happened last year in the visual arts. The usual suspects promoted themselves with yards of trivia, usually about the NHS, but nothing serious was made except by those conventional sorts

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nginx/1.17.10 who go quietly about their business. National

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galleries tried to fill the gap by selling us ‘virtual’ and ‘digital’ ‘experiences’ by the dozen, but […]

David Lee January/February 2021 Despite grovelling worthy of Darius on our part, The Jackdaw no longer qualifies for

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press view invites to the National Gallery. As a result I didn’t see the Artemisia Gentileschi show in the few weeks it was open before Boris announced the second slam dunk. It was in any case fully

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nginx/1.17.10 booked months in advance by […]

David Lee November/December 2020 In the last

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editorial, when describing the new full bloom of official Wokeism, I didn’t have space to consider if, in the context of State Art’s exclusive obsession with conceptual and minimal art, work selected without resort to the gender/sexual/racial ticklist would

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nginx/1.17.10 be of a higher standard than what is chosen when 404 Not Found applying […]

David Lee September/October 2020 A watershed moment in

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the official story of art has been reached. Unlike in the first decades of the last century, when experimental isms followed one another annually, the first decades

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nginx/1.17.10 of the 21st have until now seen no signal change in direction or emphasis: recently, in contemporary art we’ve been living through a period of […]

David Lee July/August 2020 It’s been hard to avoid following the fortunes of our present crop of self-appointed ‘war artists’. You may recall from the past, as I do, that many of the finest achievements in 20th

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century British art were produced in

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nginx/1.17.10 response to war. Artists rose to the occasion. So how has the performance of our State Art […]

David Lee May/June 2020 A few inches of headway have finally been made in drawing wider public attention to the power grabs of the Arts Council and the political and social prejudices of State Art in general. The House of Commons Culture Select Committee must now

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get

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nginx/1.17.10 its act together and take to task the arts bodies that have become […]

David Lee March/April 2020 The Arts Council is offering a

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contract worth £42,000 for an expert to draw up guidelines on how museums must deal with what it calls ‘decolonisation’. Naturally, conclusions

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nginx/1.17.10 reached will be expected to reinforce the Council’s existing prejudices: it supports repatriation where possible, and exhibition contexts, especially captions, must report the serial crimes of colonialism with […]

Remain alert to the possibilities, eyes up instead of down, looking about instead of transfixed by a small screen, and daily life will

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furnish marvels, often in unexpected

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nginx/1.17.10 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 […]

In the beginning the powerful provided the unlettered with uplifting Biblical pictures in churches. We were 404 Not Found impressed ­even though some scenes

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nginx/1.17.10 threatened us with eternal agony if we broke their rules. The scarcity of pictures outside of church meant

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