Laura Gascoigne March/April 2020 Large woman to much smaller man at a party: “I love the idea

301 Moved Permanently

of there being two sexes, don’t you?” James Thurber was the Thucydides of the gender war, dissecting its battlegrounds, victories and reversals with his pen: the fight

---

nginx in the grocery, the battle on the stairs; the rout where the men have the women […]

David Lee November/December 2020 In the last editorial, when describing

301 Moved Permanently

the new full bloom of official Wokeism, I

---

nginx 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 when applying it. Over the […]

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

301 Moved Permanently

have until now seen no signal change in

---

nginx 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

---

nginx 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

301 Moved Permanently

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

---

nginx House of Commons Culture Select Committee

301 Moved Permanently

must now get its act together and take to task the arts bodies that have become […]

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

301 Moved Permanently

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

---

nginx 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

---

nginx the streets and free institutions of a city like London is a journey through natural

301 Moved Permanently

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 agony if we broke their rules. The scarcity of pictures outside of church meant we were naturally curious about anything drawn or coloured. Wandering

301 Moved Permanently

pedlars would show up to impress us with secular

---

nginx material, crude […]

In the last issue I noted the gradual but relentless erosion of space allocated to historical pictures in Tate Britain.

301 Moved Permanently

This contraction will now accelerate because the collection is to be re-hung, yet again, on this occasion thematically – a policy undoubtedly designed to demonstrate the State Art Commandment that

---

nginx 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

---

nginx been usurped and dominated by an evolving one-track mindset which, in these pages, is called

301 Moved Permanently

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