Remain alert to the possibilities, eyes up instead of down, looking about instead of

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transfixed by a small screen, and daily life will 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 impressed ­even though some scenes threatened us with eternal

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nginx/1.17.10 agony if we broke their rules. The scarcity of pictures outside 404 Not Found of church meant we

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were naturally curious about anything nginx/1.17.10 drawn or coloured. Wandering pedlars would show up to impress us […]

In the last issue I noted the gradual but relentless erosion of

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nginx/1.17.10 space allocated to historical pictures in Tate Britain. This contraction will now accelerate because the collection is to

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be re-hung, yet again, on this occasion thematically – 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

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cash for the visual arts have been usurped and dominated by an evolving one-track mindset which, in these pages, is called State Art.

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nginx/1.17.10 This sinister subversion of the institutions, predicted before and after the last war by Eliot, Wyndham Lewis and Orwell among others, is complete […]

Dennis Skinner once quipped loudly across the Commons to

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nginx/1.17.10 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 with which a fawning Fourth Estate now

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greets all State Art appointments. Balshaw […]

Serota takes over at the Arts Council this month,

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nginx/1.17.10 47 years after first being employed by the same body as a regional arts officer in what was his first job after university. In the interval the Council has developed into a

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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 was a subject about

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which I thought I ought to know more than was the case. Something is clearly awry when so many complaints are aired about the poverty of tuition

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

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told in our own Parliament; an exodus of desperate humanity is seeking refuge from a criminal death-cult;

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nginx/1.17.10 innocents are being slaughtered in streets […]

When very young, and when not train spotting, I was a keen bus spotter. It was an ideal apprenticeship for a fledgeling art historian. It involved identifying, sometimes at a considerable distance (through rain), the beautifully crafted, hand-built models, of which there were many different marques

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and specifications. Every town corporation in the county had

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nginx/1.17.10 its own company, each with […]

Despite the best efforts of the state-art establishment visual intelligence survives, argues Eric Coombes In 1941, Augustus John contributed A Note on Drawing (from which I quoted a few words in the previous issue) to

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a book edited by Lillian Browse, containing reproductions of his own drawings. John records his sense of good fortune in

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nginx/1.17.10 having been a student at […]