David Lee January/February 2021 Despite grovelling worthy of Darius on our part,

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nginx The Jackdaw no

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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 booked months in advance by […]

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

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nginx if, in the context

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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 have until now seen no signal change in direction or emphasis: recently, in contemporary art

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we’ve

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nginx been living through a period of […]

David Lee July/August 2020 It’s been hard to avoid following the fortunes of

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our present crop of self-appointed ‘war artists’. You may recall from the past, as

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nginx I do, that many of the finest achievements in 20th century British art were produced in response to war. Artists rose nginx 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 301 Moved Permanently the Arts Council and the political and social prejudices of State Art in general. The House of Commons Culture Select Committee must

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nginx now

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get its act together and take to task the arts bodies […]

David Lee March/April 2020

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nginx 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

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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

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nginx in unexpected places. Exploring the streets and free institutions of a city

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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 agony if we broke their rules. The scarcity of pictures outside of church

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meant we were naturally curious about anything drawn or coloured. Wandering pedlars would show up to impress us

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nginx with secular material, crude […]

In the last issue I noted the gradual but relentless

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nginx erosion of space allocated to historical pictures in Tate Britain. This contraction will now accelerate because the collection is to be re-hung, yet again, on this occasion thematically – a

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policy undoubtedly designed to demonstrate the State Art Commandment that all roads nginx shall lead to the Usual Suspects. Long […]

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. This sinister subversion of the institutions, predicted before

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nginx and after the last war by Eliot, Wyndham Lewis and Orwell among others, is complete […]