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IS THE ARTS COUNCIL BRAVE ENOUGH FOR SUICIDE? The Arts Council is trumpeting yet another consultation process, this one called The Arts Debate. Suggestions made to their website (www.theartsdebate.org.uk) by the great unwashed will, they promise, help them understand how better to meet our expectations. How very laudable. Or perhaps not. Over the last two decades the Arts Council has wasted millions commissioning and writing policy documents following consultations similar to the latest one. I have a shelf full of the resulting, pointless reports, each with its clarion title and all of them stuffed with more pie-charts than Mr Kipling's bakery. It's all part of an elaborate game they play to make it seem that that they're fully interactive when really they couldn't give a monkey's. These consultations never lead to the necessary changes. The Council listens, agonises, seeks clarifications, convenes more round tables than King Arthur, publishes the glossy report in a slipcase, calls press conferences ... and then returns quietly to making the same mistakes as before. So, on the basis that institutional incompetents will never recognise their own shortcomings and need to be pushed, I have no faith whatsoever that the current enquiry will lead to anything other than a further rubber-stamping of a disgraceful and discredited status quo. As far as the visual arts are concerned virtually any change would be an improvement. Don't forget, this is an organisation which isn't elected, is not answerable to anyone, spends approaching half a billion of taxpayers' money and whose meetings are conducted in secret. Neither, incidentally, are we allowed to know beyond the most insulting platitudes what criteria inform their assumptions and judgements about art. Even its former Chairman, draconian Irish businessman Gerry Robinson, who at least had the common sense to extirpate the more blatant duplications in bureaucracy, could do nothing about the shocking staff prejudices under which it operates. What we need in the visual arts is not a re-tuned version of what happens now but something completely new in which none of those responsible for the present cesspit play any part. Some of its senior jobsworths have already been sacked and paid off with eye-watering pensions: this is the organisation which is supposed to look after artists whose average annual incomes, according to one of its previous 'consultations', was established at under £10,000 a year. As in all other walks of life penpushers fare handsomely whilst those they are supposedly nurturing subsist as best they can. Few serious commentators think the Arts Council should survive. Over its 61-year existence, and especially during the last 25 years when it has allowed itself to become the main motor and cash cow for State Art, it has become madly infected with immature student Leftyness, political correctness, unexplained bias, ageism and a deep revulsion for anything historical. In the visual arts this has led to the waste of many millions on projects which had nothing to do with art but everything to do with a misguided desire to kowtow to ethnic minorities and juvenile graduates claiming to be battering the bourgeois and shattering taboos. Additionally, by meddling in every art process it has caused incalculable damage to art education and particularly to the careers of artists who work in styles, materials and genres for which it reserves trendy abhorrence. It has squandered even more millions on insulting projects of no artistic merit, most of them forgotten as soon as completed. It has nailed its colours to a mast flagged “Challenging Contemporary Art”, an obsession which it first refused to acknowledge existed and which it still avoids defining properly. It spends three quarters of the money it receives for visual art on galleries dedicated to showing only 'innovative' works by youngsters, and too frequently by young foreign artists of no discernible merit. Why taxpayers should bankroll exhibitions of these foreigners when we already have too many unexhibited artists of our own remains a baffling mystery. I will return to the Arts Council but before making my own recommendations to 'The Arts Debate', I wish to illustrate a couple of important points by introducing an old friend. We called him Cherub and we knew him as a very considerable expert, a connoisseur of a type the Arts Council would mock. By the way, one of the Arts Council's other failings is that it harbours a built-in distrust of any connoisseur because the discipline of their insight, their independence of mind and accumulated knowledge frightens them so much they no longer employ any. There is no such thing as a connoisseur of contemporary art, indeed the phrase is oxymoronic. You have to believe in it like a religion, keep your trap shut and slavishly follow the procession towards consensus. Only then will you prosper. Cherub's eye for detail was acute, his dedication and love unmatched. He seemed to know everything and remained in the best sense an amateur. His connoisseurship owed nothing to money, position or ambition. It was his ability to distinguish between two or more apparently identical objects that was the wellspring of his impressive expertise. My first encounter with Cherub was on a monochrome winter's day in 1960 on Preston railway station. He was 12 I was 8. A class chum of my brother, he was the Bunter of the local grammar school - hence his nickname. Even though still so young he was already a veteran of looking and long study, as a result of which he had accumulated an encyclopedic knowledge of London, Midland and Scottish steam locomotives. You could quiz him on the relative merits of Walschaerts and Caprotti valve gear, inside and outside cylinder combinations, Poppets, wheel alignments, names, tractive efforts, numbers, shedplates and he could even tell you the various stages of coloured livery and streamlining through which locos had passed in their history as their power, functions and performance were tweaked in search of greater efficiency. Cherub was an education, although half the time I confess I was clueless what he was on about. Most important of all was the affection in his devotion. For him trainspotting wasn't a nervous tic or a mindless accumulation of underlined numbers. Each different engine, from the most common workhouse tank to the fastest pacific, was an individual of equal fascination: each had its story, its quirk. I don't know, perhaps he considered some of them works of art. In those days, almost half a century ago, Preston was a fruitful station for a trainspotter. It was a busy intersection for the plodding traffic criss-crossing Lancashire. This comprised stoppers to the Fylde coastal resorts from Pennine cotton towns and feeders for the West Coast expresses racing between London and Scotland. It was this mainline through traffic which principally captured our interest. Up and down Mid-Day Scots, the Caledonian and Thames-Clyde Expresses and other emblazoned screamers were usually pulled by William Stanier's Coronation and Princess pacifics and the same engineer's adaptations of Henry Fowler's Royal Scots, which were frequently double-headed - great excitement! - for the slog up Shap. The Scots, built in Glasgow, were the fleetest of machines, their stepped windshields and tapered boilers pictures of racy black elegance besides which the maroon and green Princess and Coronation classes, those most powerful passenger engines yet built, came across as all balls and brusque with it. On this particular grey afternoon of petering light, Cherub, my brother and myself stood at the end of the platform looking south down the mainline. Fingers of goods sidings spread out either side of the tracks way beyond the station. Cherub peered into the distant mist and immediately announced that there was a Semi (Coronation) shunting goods. A Semi in Preston was unlikely, ridiculous even. They were built for nonstop speed and their huge driving wheels couldn't have been less suited to the tighter corners on goods routes. Besides, there was nothing there, just trucks. But Cherub knew better. He'd glimpsed fleetingly the lines of the squat smokebox flanked by taut, inward windshields suggestive of a Coronation. Only when, in a filthy state portending its imminent scrapping and replacement by diesel electricity, City of Lichfield chugged indifferently into the station hauling empty boxcars and clanking flatbeds, did I believe it. It stopped, as if for our personal examination, then rolled slowly back where it came from. Cherub might have seen any of a dozen types of goods engine, most likely an unreconstructed Patriot or a Black 5 “mickey”, but his attuned eye recognised immediately the drawing of something more refined. I was pleasantly reminded of Cherub recently because a painting of a sister engine to Lichfield was advertised by a Duke Street gallery. It was by Terence Cuneo, whose centenary falls this year. I have a soft spot for this belittled artist. Although he painted hundreds of trains - and also designed splendid posters for British Rail - his original oils are rarely seen. Like so much of supposedly reactionary figurative painting, there is not a single example of his work in any public art collection. The best ones change hands between worshippers of such delights for small fortunes, for Cuneo is without doubt the world's greatest painter of locomotives. No one can touch him, although creditable examples exist by David Shepherd and, surprisingly, by the teenage Ken Howard RA. Cuneo was not only accurate but he had the trainspotter's developed eye for a sexy line and a rousing vantage point - like all engine aficionados he knew an evocative fast bend when he saw one. He too was inspired by the sculpture of engines and especially by how they might develop character when seen in relation to the architecture of sheds, stations and bridges - some of his best action shots exploit Brunel's Saltash suspension across the Tamar. The only thing his paintings can't convey is the steam engine's unique perfume, that delicious cocktail of boiling water, hot oil, sticky tar, warm dirt and burning coal. Yes, Cuneo shovels on the sentiment but as surfaces his pictures are more interesting than their immediately illustrative qualities suggest. Creamy licks of highlight as precise as any on a William Nicholson teapot, and slick passages of worked impasto to texture the surface, make for perfect paintings of their type. In a work depicting a bullnosed Canadian diesel, also included in the recent selection at McConnal Mason, the handling of dirty snow and arctic air are as bravura as the same effects in any wintry scene by Monet or Millais. As they have specifically requested my input, what do I want from the Arts Council? Well, for one thing, they will be doing a better job when it is possible for a Terence Cuneo centenary retrospective to appear on the same exhibition programme as installations by Mike Nelson, videos by Tacita Dean, paintings by Mark Shields and a career retrospective for, among others, Evelyn Williams. Then, and only then, may the Arts Council claim true representation. They should reflect taste and excellence and not prescribe and censor, which is what too often they do now. In more detail then, here is my contribution to the great debate: 1. The Arts Council must stop being secretive. They hide too much. They must be open about their policies and criteria and stop fearing criticism. At present the Arts Council is an impenetrable, Kafkaesque castle, running itself like a self-contained fief, funding its own galleries which are, naturally, run by its own former staff. Neither new light nor fresh air is allowed in. The Tory party is proverbially accused of in-breeding but it's got nothing on the Arts Council. 2. They must immediately stop changing the way they present their annual report in order to prevent critics from comparing one year's accounts with another. It is a tactic they have been using successfully for nearly a decade in order to thwart criticism. In former days annual reports were consistently presented and easy to follow but such transparency invited analysis. Once critics of their activities, predominantly revelations from the fearless Brian Sewell in the Evening Standard, began to identify their sleaziest activities whereby members of committees voted themselves increasingly large annual amounts of cash, the door was effectively shut and barred and a bunker mentality adopted. Their annual reports should clearly list every grant they issue in the visual arts and not just, as at present, those above a high threshold. This information should be placed on their website. Details of each award, with relevant dossiers, should also be made available in their library, which has now been closed to the public for several years. The library should be re-opened for use by all. Additionally, press releases should not be deliberately withheld from their critics as they are at the moment. 3. As the majority of taxpayers' cash for the visual arts is earmarked for the Arts Council's own network of galleries, the exhibition policies of these should reflect the full diversity of visual art not just those which staff members deem 'challenging'. They must distance themselves from the current view they hold which is that there are “the right kinds of artists” (their own phrase) and the rest - the wrong ones. Accomplishment, wherever it alights on the spectrum of artistic activity, should be recognised, even if it is popular excellence of a kind currently unpalatable to them, such as in the work of Terence Cuneo. 4. Their galleries should reflect that art has a longer history than ten minutes ago. A major aspect of their duty should be to mount retrospective surveys of important senior British artists. These are currently neglected because of the Council's tyrannical obsession with youth and an avant garde in which they persist in believing even though it's been demonstrably dead and rotting for years. In order to meet this need they will have to open their doors to individuals of a persuasion they've previously run a mile from. 5. The bulk of the 7,500-strong Arts Council collection, those works which are neither shown nor loaned (in many cases because they were purchased by idiots in the first place) must be sold or given away to regional museums who express interest in them. If they can't even be given away they might be returned to the artist, or recycled for Spitfires. 6. The Arts Council should stop funding art magazines. Over the decades the sums involved have been enormous, and they've been wasted. Few but crawlers read these rags because they are indigestible and blatantly self-serving. No art magazine will make any effort to be readable to a wide and educated audience if it doesn't have to make a business-like effort to sell copies. This is unlikely when public subsidy breeds complacency in all its recipients. 7. The Arts Council should within hours of them taking place publish on its website minutes of all meetings at which decisions in respect of policy and funding are made. 8. All travel grants should cease immediately. If curators and artists want to travel abroad for the purpose of “forging links with Senegal”, or whatever other excuse for a free holiday they can dream up, they should pay for it themselves like the rest of us. 9. The Arts Council should have everything to do with art and nothing to do with welfare, social engineering, do-gooding, the disabled or social policy. For example, grants should be awarded to any photography collective because it serves a visible function and not to a 'black' photography collective which performs no function whatsoever but is considered worthwhile only because it is 'black'. Exhibitions staged in the name of 'Black Art' have been, to my eye, insulting and fatuous, little above the level of adult education. The Council's obsequious indulgence of minorities in general has seen the needless squandering of many millions for no memorable, visible result. Instead, the rest of us have been served up this mediocre trash and invited to applaud its merit. 10. Nobody who serves on any Arts Council committee should be in receipt of money from that committee or any other Arts Council committee. Ever. Or from the lottery. And that goes for ten years before they serve and ten years after they leave. 11. The lottery allocation to the visual arts should be separately administered from Government revenue funding. The worst decision made in the history of visual arts funding was the one allowing an already corrupt and corrupting Arts Council to swallow lottery money which (surprise surprise) was then doled out to the usual suspects. 12. The Arts Council must appoint a team of literate editors to add flavour to the putty which passes for English in the exhibition catalogues and information put out by their funded galleries and other clients. 13. Instead of focusing on its own galleries the Arts Council must broaden its activities to help regional museums redress their present lamentable record in scholarship. Researched exhibitions in regional galleries have more or less ceased. It should be a matter of priority that junior scholars are encouraged to be ambitious in their research and exhibition programmes. 14. The Council should make a bonfire of all documents, brochures and directives containing the words 'disability', 'diversity', 'access' and 'internationalism' - not least because they have fuck all to do with art. 15. There should be a moratorium on all grants for public art, which in its present form is a waste of scarce resources. There is not a single recent example of public art on which the money wouldn't have been better spent on a tree. The Arts Council has wasted millions on schemes which have been destroyed by vandals or have never worked properly because the chosen genius was incompetent. 16. When an established artist who is backed by a major dealer exhibits in an Arts Council gallery, they should be expected to foot the whole cost of the exhibition. 17. If they could get away with it the Arts Council, State Art and the Department of Culture would make contemporary art compulsory. This self-importance must cease. They should stop assuming that the half of the population who never go anywhere near an art gallery are in some way deprived. They are not. They may instead be devotees of other pursuits which inspire them and drive their imaginations; for example, Cherub and his locomotives. David Lee | ||||
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