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What else is the Tate hiding? This time last year The Jackdaw caught out the Tate telling lies. The gallery had stated publicly, in respect of their shady purchase of serving trustee Chris Ofili's work (about which many questions remain unanswered), that acquisitions from sitting trustees were made only in “very exceptional circumstances”. They weren't. On the contrary, we showed it was a routine occurrence. Not only did they buy works from artist trustees and permit them to be 'presented' by private collectors, but they also allowed these same trustees to donate their own works to the collection, a shocking piece of opportunism which the artists involved must have known couldn't without embarrassment be refused. Both Christopher Le Brun and Peter Doig were guilty of this; Le Brun presented 50 works during his trusteeship and Doig 28 during his. The Charity Commission rapped the Tate's knuckles for blatant impropriety and the gallery was forced to convene a press conference in order to apologise publicly. The only part of the programme sadly omitted from this Japanese-style, mea culpa declaration was the ritual self-disembowelling of the guilty. When reporting this sombre occasion, newspaper correspondents had forgotten that a few months previously the Tate had already been forced to apologise for having misled a charity, The Art Fund, from which it was begging money to buy, as it happened, a serving trustee's work. These and other events led some observers to wonder why the Tate has such a cavalier attitude to protocol, not to mention the truth. What did they have to hide? The answer is now obvious. The Tate is tenaciously protecting its own narrow orthodoxy, because if they don't no one else will because no one free of State Art's tentacles and patronage cares a toss about it. The Tate is desperately keen not to have its prejudices too closely examined, for beyond the deployment of a few threadbare platitudes they offer no convincing defence. They are fighting tooth and nail to conceal for as long as possible the irrefutable fact that they collude with the commercial art market to give a skewed account of contemporary art, its true value and meaning. They are increasingly aware that their absurd partialities for anything novel, gimmicky, sprawling, inexplicable and conspicuously vacuous can't be justified. The most important aspect of The Jackdaw's revelations last year was never that concerning the purchase of serving trustees' works, although this commanded most attention. The timing of an acquisition is merely cosmetic. There are ways around it. A purchase may be brought forward or expediently deferred: this is what will happen from now on. The Tate's error was laziness born of complacency. No, the most significant point lay elsewhere. We showed how only artists from a select number of galleries, those same galleries with whom the Tate conspires to rig the market for contemporary art, are ever asked to serve as trustees. This, it seemed to me, was one of the crucial ways in which the biased system of organising contemporary art in Britain perpetuates itself unimpeded. If trustees' own careers and rising prices are reliant on the status quo they are unlikely to rock the boat. This dependable servility of carefully chosen trustees ensures that there is no one in any position of authority to ask difficult questions. Thus is the regulatory function of a trustee emasculated. Indeed, I can't see what, if any, useful function an artist trustee at the Tate serves if all they do is follow orders like concentration camp guards. Any suspicion that the Tate were worried by close attention to their sleazier activities was confirmed when on the last working day before Christmas they slipped out quietly that Anish Kapoor would replace the discredited Chris Ofili as an artist trustee. The Jackdaw had drawn attention the previous month to the apparent and inexplicable stranglehold Lisson Gallery artists exert over trusteeships at the Tate. When appointing Kapoor, the Tate proved compellingly our point, that only those artists already operating within the paranoid coterie of State Art are ever appointed as trustees. Kapoor, of course, is also represented by Lisson Gallery, a private company which also happens to represent one of the two other serving artist trustees, Julian Opie. The deliberate announcement immediately before last Christmas ensured that Kapoor's appointment would pass unnoticed, and doubtless to the delight of the Tate's spinning jennies not a soul commented. They got away with it. But they remain decidedly edgy. Recent pertinent events necessitate a slight digression at this point. In the last few days it was announced that the Tate have admitted to the controversial acquisition for £30,000 of a shop receipt. Apparently, this masterpiece documents the purchase of kitchen equipment and is one of a number of similar dockets, it turns out, flogged to other gullible European galleries. This is a stunt by Ceal Floyer, who is represented by - yes - Lisson Gallery. Small world. Additionally, in the Tate's recent biennial report in which it listed for the first time its acquisitions (though curiously not Floyer's chit), and the prices paid for them, it reveals that since 2004 at least 25 works were acquired from 9 Lisson Gallery artists for a total of £1,208,000. Let me remind you that this same gallery represents two of the three currently serving artist trustees at the Tate. The real point of this month's stricture is that the Tate has recently been caught out telling another lie and, furthermore, perpetrating yetanother calculated deception. The gallery made the daft mistake of appointing a journalist, the Observer's Lynn Barber, as a judge of this year's Turner Prize. On her own admission Barber knows bugger all about art, which is scarcely a disadvantage when dealing with the unjudgeable, anything-goes whimsies of the Turner Prize: let's face it, if there are no known criteria of judgement realistically anyone can be a judge. One can only conclude that the Tate has exhausted the more obvious willing dupes who might act as arbiters. Barber was presumably chosen on the strength of having written a series of uncharacteristically dozy profiles about a string of the most over-rated brand names in State Art. Given her reputation for snide mockery and a prurient interest in her subjects' private lives, her gullibility and fawning over these thick and talentless artists was as buttock-clenching to read as it was inexplicable. Anyway, the Tate's antennae obviously picked up Barber's signal and twitched excitedly at the prospect of yet another evangelical lackey to the cause. Barber, they thought, is rock-solid dependable, one of us. Fatally, they underestimated the ease with which nearly all journalists can persuade themselves into disloyally spilling the beans. They can't resist it. No hack will keep a secret if they think a betrayal will generate cracking copy. Sure enough, the day before the Turner Prize exhibition opened Barber dropped her bloomers and shat copiously on the Tate Gallery steps. Far too clever not to realise that the validation process for contemporary art is a charlatan's racket, she exposed the process of how the shortlist is arrived at. Crucially, she revealed that the seeking of public nominations is a waste of time and that the public might just as well save a stamp and throw their letters straight into the bin. “It is wrong of the Tate”, she wrote, “to suggest that the public's views will be taken into account when they are not.” Indeed. Turner-watchers have always known that this nomination charade was only devised to give a patination of democracy to what we all now know is a stitch-up. And it has to be a stitch-up otherwise the majority of Turner Prize winners would be represented by more than three art dealers, and they aren't. But, without wishing to labour what is after all only a minor point, I'd like to quibble with Barber's word 'suggest'. The Tate has never merely suggested that public nominations are taken seriously. Sir Nicholas Serota has actually stated himself that they are taken seriously and are carefully considered by the judging panel. When he said this he must have knowingly been lying, secure in the knowledge that there was no way we could discover the truth. Whereas before we couldn't prove he was lying, Barber's revelation means that we now know this for a fact. He lied! Again! Given the Tate's recent record for lying this is not a major whopper but it is, in my view, symptomatic of a seemingly institutional desire to mislead and to conceal both the contempt the Tate has for the public and their own real authoritarian agenda. This much is obvious, they have a great deal to cover up at the Tate. So how can we know when they are telling the truth? The answer is we can't. We can't take their word on trust, any more than we take the Prime Minister's on trust. The other of Barber's revelation was, on the face of it, harmless enough but is really of much greater significance than their lying about public nominations. Barber revealed that Turner judges are given a list of what she called “eligible shows”. Not in all the Turner Prize's 22-year history had we been informed of this before. If we had known, it would have instantly given the lie to the public nominations being taken seriously. How could the public's views be properly weighed if there was a pre-existing list of the eligible? (Public nominations were, of course, probably taken very seriously indeed, but only when they accidentally overlapped with the names already on the approved list.) This 'list' business stinks. What we had thought might be an open prize is in fact restricted and, at least in part, pre-judged. I am informed by a polite and helpful Tate official that this list of the eligible is drawn up in an ad hoc sort of way by Tate curators. I asked to see a copy of the list but was told that what I would be allowed to see would not include those artists who were considered worthy (by the curators, of course) for potential shortlisting but who didn't make it on to the actual shortlist, as this would be unfair. I could understand their concern but an edited version defeated the point of seeing the list. Ideally, I would have liked to have seen all the previous years' lists in order to spot repetitions and favourites. Perhaps, I mused to myself in a more cynical moment, it would be possible to calculate the average time lapse between an artist's first appearance on 'The List' and their eventual nomination or perhaps victory. Forgive me, but I'm not labouring an unimportant point here either. I ask you to consider the potential commercial value of these 'lists'. Are they, for example, commonly accessible to all Tate curators? Because knowing who is (or has been, or indeed continues to be) in the frame for a Turner Prize nomination is a sensitive piece of information. Imagine if it were possible based on these lists to pencil the probable nominees and winners of the Turner Prize over the next few years. For any speculator in contemporary art a sight of said lists would be the equivalent of being handed a schedule of stocks whose share price is almost certain to appreciate in the future, if not immediately. There are no poor artists among Turner Prize winners, and neither are there any poor collectors who invested early in their work. Lynn Barber's revelation of the existence of an approved list of artists drawn up by Tate curators to 'assist' the judges is the single most important revelation in the history of this controversial prize. One can only begin to imagine the scope this Futures market blueprint affords for insider trading. I've written this many times before but I might as well repeat it: there is no independent regulation or audit of the relationship between publicly-funded art bodies, such as the Tate and the Arts Council, and the private sector of art dealing. The omission of such procedures and checks would not be tolerated in any other sphere of business activity involving such huge sums of taxpayer's cash. | |||||
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