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Fiddling the figures: The inevitable result We are so used to deceit in the visual arts that we live it. Some don’t notice it any more. We accept routinely, for example, that most conceptual art will demand that we disbelieve the negligible evidence presented to our eyes and instead ‘see’ a masterpiece. We are asked as a matter of long-established precedent to suspend normal literary judgement and pretend to understand what curators write when much of their output is unintelligible drivel and unfailingly partisan. We are asked to believe that fashionable contemporary art is popular when plainly it isn’t: for all the energy spent publicising it 59.2 million of us didn’t visit last year’s Turner Prize exhibition. We are asked to believe that British art has taken the world by storm, an assertion self-evidently ridiculous to anyone but those living at the bottom of a deep well. We are asked to believe that there are many collectors of trendy contemporary art when we really know, as every dealer will endorse, that for all its relentless advertisement by the State Art system, and not to mention the many millions in public money spent promoting it to the exclusion of everything else, that it has only a handful of buyers and brokers whose trade, what’s more, bears startling resemblances to the junk-bond phenomenon of the 1980s. Religious fanatics tithed to the State Art faith apart, the rest of us accept all this prejudicial nonsense with the same cynical resignation we employ when watching politicians lying on the television; we know they’re lying, the interviewer knows they’re lying, they know they’re lying. We arrive at a rough semblance of the truth by reading between the lies. Since Spin was crowned king and ‘Spot The Truth’ became the parlour game of choice among the chattering classes, it was ever thus. Just as we know with certainty that Sir Nicholas Serota will tell us that anything dead in his gallery is “challenging notions of mortality”, or similar folderol, politicians insist on denying what to everyone else is a blindingly obvious fact. And so our Government is blessed with the visual arts it deserves, an art apparatus in its own image – a bunch of liars, fixers, charlatans and stringalongs eager to preen their own egos whilst clinging on to influence. Even the Government’s obsession with measuring performance in order to provide statistics substantiating their self-deceptions has infected the arts, as indeed it has forced every other arena of public life to exist in a murk of half-truth. Evidence of deception is ubiquitous. In transport we’ve had railways that were privately owned, then nationalised and are now a bit of both, but which still fail to meet expectations whilst gobbling up ever greater public subsidies. Train operators fiddle the figures so their services appear more punctual than weary passengers know them to be. In the health service (“free at the point of use” unless of course you’ve died waiting for that point to be reached) authorities fiddle the figures to meet the dictated reductions in waiting lists and waiting times. Ambulance services, who must also meet targets, have recently been caught fiddling the figures concerning their speed of response to emergency calls. So zealous was their fiddling that some ambulances arrived at incidents before they left the station. In education it would take a tome thicker than the Book of Kells to list the manipulations, but suffice to report that in the past few months we’ve had teachers and heads censured for fiddling and rigging SATs results and tampering with exam papers, all in order to meet arbitrary performance targets. The same is true in business, where fiddling figures is at such epidemic proportions it caused a stock market crash last year. Annually escalating targets for middle management encourage fiddling if they look like being missed and, more importantly, contingent bonuses lost. A fiddle in this year’s reported figures is carried forward next year as a double fiddle and then a triple one, and the year after that you’re overstating revenue by so much you rename the company Enron and scarper to Tijuana. Read the business pages, they are dense with companies revising down revenue forecasts which pressures on their share price frightened them into overstating and fiddling in the first place. The Government is guilty too, forever fiddling numbers and methods of calculation in order to meet its manifesto commitments or off-the-cuff promises. On the day I’m writing this, it is reported that the Home Office has been caught fiddling the figures for re-offenders in order to substantiate the whopper-of-all-whoppers that prison deters. So according to the figures the overall picture is of Albion closing on Utopia: the NHS is on the mend; education is achieving higher standards; railways are reliable; business is confident; crime is a thing of the past; Tracey Emin is a great artist. Fiddling the figures is the medicine we swallow to help us disbelieve our eyes and experiences, which persist in reporting inconvenient truths. Which brings me, at last, to the figures for attendance during the first year of universal free admission to national museums. Thank god they don’t matter anyway because I don’t believe a word of them. They were recently published in a thorough report of The House of Commons Culture Committee (HMSO: £14.50), whose recommendations are sensible, informed, desperately needed and will surely find their resting place in the long grass. Average increases in attendance at museums where an admission charge was removed were 70%, and at the V&A and the Science Museums they more than doubled. Only a fifth of the increase was first-time visitors, the other 80% representing more frequent visits by regulars. Free admission has not caused the deluge of “access” by new museum visitors that the Government, who adopted a good policy for misguided reasons, hoped it would. Crude numbers such as those for attendance should never be the basis of an arts policy. Museums are concerned with higher matters, those constants unaffected by trivialities such as how many deign to show up. Attendance figures only assumed importance because the Government needs an index to show that it’s improving the cultural weal of the mob. A few months ago it was hoped that museums would at last be placed on a sound and independent financial footing. This didn’t happen because no incentive exists for it: it isn’t in the Department of Culture’s interest. If museums are properly funded and don’t annually have to beg for more, politicians have no leverage. While the Department is run along those crass PC lines which wish to see gallery audiences reflecting wider ethnic diversity, museums will be kept on the breadline and attendance figures will continue to enjoy a false significance. So: increased attendance means success, decrease failure. This crude reliance on numbers will soon assume greater importance. One recommendation of the Commons’ report acknowledges that increased use of museums caused by free admission serves to increase costs for wear and tear, which ought to be taken into account in financial settlements but aren’t. When they are taken into account, funding will have to be linked to attendance figures. And, as we’ve seen, funding linked to targets means fiddling ... or more fiddling. Conveniently for museums visitor numbers are unverifiable. Attendance figures should be banned. They mean nothing to start with and are unauditable. Unusually, I find myself in agreement with the otherwise execrable director of Baltic arts centre in Gateshead when he stated recently, much to his paymasters’ annoyance, that he couldn’t care a toss if no one came because courting popularity was not his job. In fact, in terms of attendance the Baltic is a huge success. Although auditors have recently reported that the centre has overspent on its programme, has incompetent management and financial structures and is virtually insolvent, part of its problem – one replicated at Tate Modern – is caused by unforeseen expenditure resulting from its popularity. When applied to the National Gallery, the veracity of the Baltic director’s principle becomes obvious. The National is among the world’s most recherché collections. The bulk of what is on offer is the same every year. During the 1990s attendance generally climbed but more recently it has fallen slightly. Does this denote failure? No, because it’s doing the same good job it always did, better than ever in fact, but we must accept inexplicable fluctuations. If only ten people a year visited the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, which registered a 79% increase in attendance to 1,215,277 last year, it wouldn’t signify failure. On the contrary, it is a great gallery with its collections better displayed than at any time since I first visited it in the summer of 1968. One of its appeals is the luxurious solitude one discovers there, a pleasure I found on three occasions – a Wednesday, a Friday and a Saturday – during that very year which registered an alleged doubling in its audience. On all three occasions I visited it was as deliciously empty as it has been for decades. There were no indications from my visits that the Walker attracted anywhere near as many visitors as the National Portrait Gallery with its steady flow of visitors on all floors. Based on my own experience I can only conclude, admittedly empirically, that the Walker Art Gallery fiddles its attendance figures, and while we have a petty-minded, interfering Government long may their fiddling continue. I am convinced that all museums habitually lie about visitor numbers, and if they don’t they ought to. Doubtless, the Walker will write in the strongest terms protesting that their figures are scrupulously accurate and that their chief warder clicked them all out and clicked them all back again, and that their ‘outreach programme’ has won a certificate from Sainsbury’s for “accessing” one-legged asylum seekers in Fazakerley... Sorry, but I still don’t believe you. No conclusions about anything can be drawn from admission numbers. On a Saturday in March this year Manchester City Art Gallery was crowded. I thought they must be giving away free kitchens because in over 35 years I’ve never seen it so busy. Likewise, the nearby National Museum of Science and Industry, which registered a 63% increase in visitor numbers last year to 477,000, was full. High attendance is reassuring, but it signifies nothing and only fools would make it the basis of funding or policy. David Lee | |||||
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