David Lee Sept/Oct 2021 I took a wrong turn on my bike recently near Russell Square and came upon Wallis Gilbert’s 1931 Daimler car hire garage in Herbrand Street. Set back almost hidden, and only yards from where I attended university, I had never suspected its existence. It now pleases me so much I regularly… Continue reading The Mound in Your Pocket
Category: Editorials
Let’s Pretend
David Lee July/August 2021 The National Gallery has prostrated itself before what Orwell called ‘the official mind’. It must have done because the less said about Rosalind Nashashibi, their current artist-in-residence, the better … but don’t worry I’ll bore you anyway. She is exhibiting her recent efforts among the 17th century Spanish pictures to which,… Continue reading Let’s Pretend
Joy Labinjo: Led To The Market
Across the last 30 years the narrative of official Contemporary Art has unfurled like a Chinese scroll. We can follow how, from around 1990, those commercial techniques pioneered to manufacture reputations by Charles Saatchi were adopted as a template by other speculators eager to cash in. This was the start of a racket which turned… Continue reading Joy Labinjo: Led To The Market
2020 Blindness
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 who go quietly about their business. National galleries tried to fill the gap by selling us ‘virtual’ and ‘digital’… Continue reading 2020 Blindness
Let’s All Pretend Part 83
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 any case fully… Continue reading Let’s All Pretend Part 83
They All Look The Same To Me
David Lee November/December 2020 In the last 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 be of a higher standard than what is chosen… Continue reading They All Look The Same To Me
Waking Up to Tyranny
David Lee September/October 2020 A watershed moment in 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 of the 21st have until now seen no signal change in direction or emphasis: recently, in contemporary art we’ve been… Continue reading Waking Up to Tyranny
Please Like Me, Please
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 century British art were produced in response to war. Artists rose to the occasion. So how has the… Continue reading Please Like Me, Please
The End of the Beginning
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 get its act together and take to task the… Continue reading The End of the Beginning
Legalised Blackmail
David Lee March/April 2020 The Arts Council is offering a contract worth £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 prejudices: it supports repatriation where possible, and exhibition contexts, especially captions, must report the… Continue reading Legalised Blackmail