 | ||||||
 | ||||||
 | ||||||
 | | | | | | |
Is Your Exhibition Really Necessary? The bigger, better Whitechapel Gallery reopening in April will include a space dedicated to showing collections not normally accessible to the public. First up is the British Council Collection, with a series of five rolling displays planned for the coming year, each selected by a celebrity guest curator. The question is – don’t answer, Grayson Perry – how can you make a newsworthy selection from 8,000 random purchases made by committees over 70 years? The Whitechapel’s first selector Michael Craig-Martin has come up with a clever answer. His opening salvo of works by now famous artists will be accompanied, not by a curatorial exegesis, but by a simple price tag showing what the British Council paid for them. Craig-Martin’s timing, as usual, is perfect. The YBA’s Svengali has his ear to the ground, and the grinding of tectonic plates as the credit crunches has told him that frugality is now sexy. Where once the media celebrated conspicuous waste, all they care about now is value for money. Prodigality may be the new prudence for HM Treasury, but for the art world tightfistedness is the new good taste. Look at Manchester Art Gallery, which has just acquired its very own avatar of Antony Gormley. Instead of shouting about the size of the cheque, there was Art Fund director David Barrie congratulating all and sundry on the acquisition having been ìachieved without a penny of public money being spentî (presumably not counting the expense of the abseilers brought in to hang it from the ceiling). How times have changed. Can it really be only 18 months since crowds queued around White Cube to slaver over the £50m price tag on Damien Hirst’s diamond skull? Then conspicuous consumption was the height of fashion, now it’s vulgar - not just vulgar but quite possibly dangerous. Even the auction houses are catching the mood. Talking up Yves Saint Laurent’s art collection in the run-up to its February auction in Paris, Christie’s international director Philippe Garner went out of his way to assure the public that yes, the collection was worth a pile of money, but no, that was not why Yves and his boyfriend bought it. ìThey were prepared to pay the price for what they liked,î he told the press. ìBut they would never have seen it as an investmentî. Naturellement, mon vieux. Avant le deluge it was all about investment art, now it’s a dirty word even at Christie’s. Meanwhile, with the tightening of the public purse strings, the poor old Public in West Brom, mired in an economic meltdown of its own making months before the credit crisis hit, has had its bung pulled by the Arts Council, which has cut its annual grant of £500,000 but – with a kindness normally only accorded to the fat cat executive directors of failed banks – given it £3m to go away. But surely, its tearful director told the BBC News, the Arts Council was set up to support great art? ErrmÖ quite. In a major downturn even ACE thinks twice before applying that description to a digital gallery that has gobbled up more public money than Blackpool Pleasure Beach’s arcades consume in a decade, and never bloody worked. As a retired teacher who had turned up to see what the fuss was about, only to find all the interactives inactive, remarked laconically: ìI’ve not seen £60 million’s worth this morning.î Perhaps the exhibition of portraits by Canadian celebrity dog snapper Shari Hatt scheduled for February, which promised to ìreally challenge personality, identity, gender, sexuality, capitalismî, might have converted him - then again, perhaps not. Now that the dog show has been cancelled, we’ll never know. In an economic climate where even the cost of snow is counted, the bottom line is all that matters, and the bottom line keeps sinking. What price the Arts Council’s Percent for Art scheme now? Asked about it at a recent meeting with the Critics Circle, Culture Secretary Andy Burnham appeared never to have heard of it - or perhaps it was just easier to pretend. The government has certainly kept suspiciously schtum about the percentage invested in its rebranded Ministry of Justice - the Department formerly known as Constitutional Affairs – now housed in the remodelled concrete tower designed in the 70s by Basil Spence for the Home Office which suddenly, with the glassing over of its car park, has acquired an atrium and an appetite for art. Since reporters started nosing around before Christmas asking questions about its £290,000 art budget, we haven’t heard a peep. At the time of writing it looks as if the building’s relaunch will go ahead without fanfares, and the new ministry HQ will slip into the world unannounced as silently as the gentle dew from heaven. And who can blame it, after the ‘What About The Workers’ protest registered in December by the assistant general secretary of the probation union NAPO – No Art, now Piss Off - over the threatened £120m cuts to the probation budget and the possible loss of 3,000 prison jobs. (With hindsight, that ministry name change was a mistake. ‘Justice’ raises expectations of fairness, whereas ‘Constitutional Affairs’ merely holds the promise of harmless hanky-panky in the embossed stationery cupboard.) But hold on, surely artists are workers too? And cheap at the price, if you measure their percent for art against the £2,745,000 invested by the Min of J in office furniture. In fact, some of the offending artworks might even be held up as proud examples of British manufacturing – notably the Tetrahelix Tower by Conrad Shawcross, who actually makes things out of wood and metal in an old-fashioned workshop in a deprived area of the East End where he keeps several assistants in employment and operates on margins that would be a model to any government ministry. OK, I’d better come clean – he’s my nephew, but what’s a bit of nepotism between friends? He makes honest-to-goodness sculptures that actually work and transform the places where they’re sited. Looking at them, I defy any retired schoolteacher from West Bromwich not to see immediately where the money went. Like Italian workers, artists should not be whipping boys for the systemic failures of global capitalism. They work hard for relatively little money with no public sector pensions, and most wouldn’t notice the advent of a three-day week as they’re used to working a full week for three days’ money. All the same, it wouldn’t hurt for them to get their heads down and think about the value of what they do. A few years ago, Peter Hall got into Pseuds’ Corner for saying that Lucian Freud ìjustifies the use of paintî. It sounded absurdly pretentious at the time, but it doesn’t sound so silly now that everything needs justifying, including the Ministry of Justice. Artists have become too used to assuming that they should be pampered ‘because they’re worth it’. It can only sharpen their game to face a public that is openly demanding to know what they’re worth – or to recognise that, when it comes to the crunch, there is a public out there with the right to an answer. Laura Gascoigne | ||||
 | ||||
 | ||||
| ||||
| ||||
Columns | ||||
| ||||
| ||||
| ||||
| ||||
| ||||
| ||||
| ||||
| ||||
| ||||
| ||||
Laura Gascoigne All of this site is | ||||
| | | | |