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

404 Not Found

any case fully booked

---

nginx/1.17.10 months in advance by […]

David Lee

---

nginx/1.17.10 November/December 2020 In the last editorial,

404 Not Found

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 404 Not Found selected without resort to the gender/sexual/racial ticklist would be of a higher standard than what is chosen when applying […]

David Lee September/October 2020 A watershed moment in the official story of art has been reached. Unlike in the first 404 Not Found decades of the last century, when experimental isms followed one another annually, the first decades of the 21st have until now seen no signal change in direction or

---

nginx/1.17.10 emphasis: recently, in contemporary art we’ve been living

404 Not Found

through […]

David Lee July/August 2020 It’s been hard to avoid following the fortunes of our present crop of self-appointed ‘war artists’. You

---

nginx/1.17.10 may recall from the past, as I do, that many of the finest achievements in 20th century British art were produced

404 Not Found

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

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

---

nginx/1.17.10 and social prejudices of

404 Not Found

State Art in general. The House of Commons Culture Select Committee 404 Not Found must now get its act together and take to task the arts bodies […]

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

404 Not Found

£42,000 for an expert to draw up guidelines on how museums must deal with what it calls ‘decolonisation’. Naturally, conclusions reached will be expected to reinforce the Council’s existing

---

nginx/1.17.10 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 furnish marvels, often in unexpected places. Exploring the streets and free institutions of a city like London

---

nginx/1.17.10 is a journey through natural and man-made masterpieces, ingenuity everywhere apparent. To stand

404 Not Found

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 agony if we broke

404 Not Found

their rules.

---

nginx/1.17.10 The scarcity of pictures outside of church nginx/1.17.10 meant we were naturally curious about anything drawn or coloured. Wandering pedlars would show up to impress us with secular material, […]

In the last issue I noted

---

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

404 Not Found

to 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

404 Not Found

education, bureaucracy and exponentially increasing cash for the visual arts have 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 Lewis and Orwell among

---

nginx/1.17.10 others, is complete […]