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Nationalisation: The Enemy of British Art and Design If the State decided to nationalise the supply of vegetables so that in future all you could buy in Morrison’s in place of its present elaborate range was cabbages, you’d complain. By jingo you’d give them what for. This might be because, like me, although you’ve nothing against a firm Fenland cabbage you’re partial to the odd carrot and leek and some buttered sprouts and parsnips at Christmas... It occurs to me, in passing, that such choicelessness in veg was what life was like in the wonderful old Soviet Union. When I was there under Brezhnev Leningrad was paradise; if, that is, you liked pickled gherkins, for there was nothing else on the shelves. You could daily eat ten times your fill and enjoy a blissfully happy life expectancy pushing a full 34 years. And when you’d finished mainlining vinegar you could nurse your corroded tripes in the company of some rousing Socialist Realism which, like those delicious pickles, was also a state monopoly. For art to prosper it needs competition and the appeal of a varied diet, but in British art there is only one vegetable in town. In these pages we call it State Art and it dominates everything all the year round. Alternative produce is discouraged. Anything exotically foreign is worshiped whilst anything traditionally home grown is derided as common, coarse and vulgar. One could be forgiven, for example, for thinking there are today only a dozen artists working in Britain so tediously familiar are those accorded notice in the papers. All the money allocated by Government for the visual arts is spent by the chief believers in and promoters of State Art. No one else gets a farthing. State Art’s motto is ́Challenging Contemporary Artî and, as we’ve illustrated in these pages so often, no one considered as other than falling into this category counts. State Art decides who will exhibit in the main galleries and, shockingly, even effectively blackmails the young into its clutches by promising obscurity to apostates. In ‘art education’ the iniquitous meddling of State Art saw to it that there was neither ‘art’ nor ‘education’. Those who don’t desert art colleges because of their easily demonstrated incompetence complain constantly of the poverty of teaching they receive (see, yet again, our Letters page). This is because State Art is an unteachable, skill-free zone. The Turner Prize, those Oscars of official taste, is now routinely third rate, baffling in its randomness, and mysterious in the rambling and flexible criteria used to judge it. Thus, State Art supplies a limited menu whilst denying access to a potentially much richer cuisine. The cause of this dead end is easy to find. With the creation of the Arts Council in August, 1946 visual art was nationalised, although the grip of those versed only in Modernism and the Avant-Garde was at first slow to start tightening. By 1980 the Council had been comprehensively infiltrated by State Art ideologues and subverted to one end only. As with everything else it touched, nationalisation has meant the stifling of competition and the countrywide diaspora of the lowest common denominator. Disgraceful standards don’t matter that much when everybody is subjected to them equally: this is the perennial failure of the Left. Paradoxically, the underpinning axiom of nationalisation is that monopoly benefits the majority. Well, we have lived through over sixty years now of nationalisation and, as far as the appearance of the country is concerned, it has meant catastrophe. Visually, Britain is a wreck. No other European country has allowed its historic towns, cities and infrastructure to be so ruthlessly vandalised by short-termism and built-in obsolescence chiefly in the name of cheap shopping and alleged greater ease of movement. Anything state run limits opportunities, demoralises with its administrative complacency and indifference, thwarts genuine originality, distrusts potential genius, is under-invested and never takes chances. Nationalisation could never produce anything remotely aesthetically satisfying because such an ingredient would be suspected of adding to costs. Faceless bean counters are rather keen on multiplying their own image. Nationalisation of the car industry gave us those famous committee camels the Austin Allegro and the Morris Marina: the oeuvres of Ferdinand Porsche, Flaminio Bertoni, Walter da’Silva and their followers were done elsewhere. In aircraft manufacture where once were Fairey, Handley Page, Armstrong Whitworth, Vickers, Supermarine, A V Roe, Hawker Siddeley, Bristol – names evocative of curious, inspiring shapes thrillingly developed according to rapidly evolving technologies by the likes of Sidney Camm, Roy Chadwick, Barnes Wallis and Reginald Mitchell, artists all to my way of looking – now there is British Aerospace, who make parts for aircraft designed and constructed in other countries and who soon may not even be contributing those. The creative industries that affect the visual world we must inhabit have lost out under nationalisation – art and architecture especially. Bland is our middle name. My point is best made by reference to another industry nationalised, like visual art, by Attlee’s ‘modernisers’. The railways, wrecked during the war by their own heroic feats of subsistence and ‘austerity’ designs as much as by the Luftwaffe, passed from private ownership to form the British Rail monolith on January 1st, 1948. By 1945 the infrastructure of track and rolling stock had deteriorated to the extent that no private operation could possibly afford the capital investment needed to correct the damage let alone commit to the new opportunities provided by cheap electricity and free-flowing oil. Before 1939 regional private railway companies competed with one another. To a degree they shared advances in technology because an esprit de corps existed amongst top engineers who were mostly respectful friends, but each sought competitive advantage and recognition in the distinct way it presented itself to the public. Each needed to be perceived positively and distinctly and, therefore, cared passionately about its ‘look’. (Monopolies don’t care about appearances in the same way, for there is no incentive.) Companies proudly nurtured their own marques and nowhere was this more evident than in the design of its top link express locomotives, of which the 1930s marked a most splendid apogee. This high point coincided with unprecedented speed and the introduction of Depression-defying aerodynamics. A half-hearted exhibition at the National Railway Museum in York addresses this issue of streamlining. The two main exhibits, shown separately so they can’t be directly compared, are a Coronation class pacific designed by William Stanier to haul west coast mainline flyers and a Nigel Gresley A4 pacific, used for the equivalent service on the east coast main line. Both are solutions to the same criteria, the latter obviously being the more elegant. Few living will have seen the Stanier operating in its exhibited guise – I certainly didn’t as the streamlining was quickly stripped off after the war in the search for greater efficiency. Interestingly, there no evidence to suggest that streamlining significantly improved performance: it was there chiefly to impress an identity by using art. With nationalisation in 1948 the standardising of locomotive design took over. The accumulated collective genius of the companies’ great Chief Mechanical Engineers, again artists all to my eye, Churchward, Maunsell, Collett, Fowler, Ivatt, Stanier, and Gresley was stuffed into the bureaucratic sausage machine and emerged in the clipboard-person of Robert Riddles, the Man from the Ministry whose dream was to make every engine look the same. It was proposed to reduce the existing 413 bespoke designs to 12, all called ‘Standards’. This may have been economical for servicing and spares but it wasn’t nearly as visually exciting. In the post-war years if you look from the Merchant Navy pacific of Oliver Bulleid – it too was quickly flayed of its so-called ‘Spam-can’ streamlining – to Stanier’s Duchesses stripped of their bustles and stripes, to the A1 and A2 re-jigs of Arthur Peppercorn, and to Riddles’s own offspring, the horrid new Britannias (which true to form for this appalling fellow didn’t work), try squinting a little and there’s scarcely an atom of difference between them all. Only the colours change, and even these were more often than not concealed by filth as maintenance rosters collapsed. Only Gresley’s A4s survived largely unaltered. The same designer’s proportionally unimprovable A3s, of which The Flying Scotsman is the sole survivor, were constantly fiddled with in the attempt to force official will upon aesthetic perfection. Monopoly, especially state monopoly, is the kiss of death to those divers forms which make our visual experience of the world inspiring and worthy of our constant attention. The variety of the 1930s was thrilling. After that decade steam died a slow death until the fire was finally doused in 1968. Flash forward to 2009 and all the main line electrics and diesels look the same because they are the same. And not a single one of the new advanced trains is built in Britain. Virtually all new freight diesels are from Canada or the USA and the fast passenger locomotives and rakes are ex-Japan. The former resemble corrugated skips on wheels and the latter novelty dildos with fuck-fast transfers down the side. When we need new trains Peter Mandelson – the great artist and design expert who, will we ever forget, brought us the Dome – buys them in. In no other discipline has nationalisation by the Arts Council been as monopolistic as it has been in the visual arts. And in no other example of nationalisation has there been such resistance to scrutiny. The Chinese government is more open than the Arts Council, which is unaccountable and secretive and staffed by those willing lackeys trained under the Council’s own ‘education’ (indoctrination) programmes. Small wonder then they can’t see further than what the President-For-Life at the Tate – who himself began his career at the Council – wants them to see. And what they like to see is only a tiny segment of the large constituency for which State Art has been given responsibility. With the exception of some of those in London with passing trade, usually tourists, its revenue-funded galleries are empty. The public have rejected its restricted supply of rotten vegetables but the Council doesn’t need to sharpen up its act because it receives cash every year by standing order. Arts ministers, who use their department as a sort of revolving door slingshot to another higher profile job, are customarily ignorant of the arts in general and keep their heads down preferring to leave bad alone. As one of them once told me: ́You don’t realise, the Arts Council is untouchable.î The depressing result of art’s nationalisation by the Arts Council could be seen loudly and clearly by default in this year’s Threadneedle Prize. Figurative art of the more traditional sort has been the major casualty of the State Art monopoly. Its principles are now hardly taught anywhere, except privately, because State Art, which requires neither tools nor materials nor teaching, is much cheaper to inflict. For the same money and dedication required to train properly a dozen figurative painters and sculptors you can certify with degrees hundreds in State Art and pretend they are all well educated. The effect of this scandal on figuration has been shattering. It has survived, yes, but only in an apologetic, wounded form with neither guts nor ambition. A few promising works were submitted among the 2,000 entries to this year’s Threadneedle but so many poor pieces featured in the final selection one feared imagining what the 1,900 rejected items must have looked like. There are, of course, better figurative artists than these who don’t submit work for consideration. The task of the organisers is to tempt these out, as indeed they used to be teased out during the great days of the prestigious biennial John Moores in Liverpool (itself now subverted to State Art), when all the big names competed. The Threadneedle deserves to survive, if only as an antidote to all the nationalised equivalents, but I fear that the truth surrounding this year’s lacklustre submission is a painful one. The prize is hosted by Mall Galleries. An enthusiastic and even shrewd new regime at the Mall deserve better than to be saddled with the historical reputation of the old one, but saddled they are. It will take time for the new administration to alter perceptions of the gallery as a place where hopeful amateurism and strident ineptitude are no longer tolerated. Until that time arrives the Threadneedle must be supported against our better judgement of the trivia revealed to us this year. David Lee | |||||
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