Category: Editorials

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2021

Concern has been expressed from museums that visitors are not returning quickly enough following recent extended closures. No wonder if the main galleries in Manchester are typical of the rest. At the Whitworth and City Art Galleries, which although distinct institutions now share the same director, activists have replaced curators and scholarship has been supplanted by agitation. Visitors enter, it seems, only to furnish captive audiences for political indoctrination. There is no room for pleasure in the activists’ tedious agenda, where no opportunity is lost to advance their creed.
An additional disadvantage of employing exclusively activist curators is that they choose like-minded artists whose devotion to the preferred propaganda far exceeds any ability to make anything remotely artistic.

In the last issue we mentioned a Whitworth exhibition by a collective based at Goldsmiths’ College called Forensic Architecture (FA), who have become the State Art-approved go-to group for work of a Wokeist persuasion. Their display made the papers because it sided openly with Palestinians in their 73-year dispute with Israel. It was a naked abuse of regulations stipulating charities remain politically objective, a principle State Art now routinely ignores. Meanwhile, the Charity Commission just hides; cowards all, terrified of making a decision. FA threatened to pull their work if it was censored, but eventually a compromise was reached. They still openly state support for the Palestinians while a letter from a Jewish body is included highlighting their concerns over inaccuracies and one-sidedness.
The whole of the Whitworth’s ground floor is given over to FA. One large gallery is empty except for a couple of tiny pictures and a notice announcing ‘This sign exists to make you see the wall better’. In another gallery dull, monochrome wallpaper illustrating the myth of Cupid and Psyche is used to demonstrate the dominance of white power and “overwhelming whiteness”. Anything more joyless you couldn’t imagine. Such urgent insistence took me back to playing football in the ’70s for a Socialist Workers Party team. A humourless lot, they were incapable of understanding how off-putting were their robotic broadsides about Class War. When we played Old Etonians away it was a bloodbath, bone on bone, Red versus White Guards on the playing fields of England.

FA’s main ‘exhibit’ is a projection called Cloud Studies. As film it’s pretty much what we expect of artists’ efforts i.e not much cop. There’s a confusing tendency to overlay too rapidly images and complicated charts, and in parts the voiceover is unclear. In half an hour it addresses the many ways in which we poison the air, whether by chemical weapons, manufacturing, travel, corruption, fossil fuels, consumption or power generation. If Cloud Studies was re-jigged by a decent editor, and its Spartist volume turned down, one could see it as a short documentary on BBC4. Of the three people who watched this film with me I was the only one who persevered to the bitter end. I agreed with all its basic premises, and its examples, testifying that we are slowly killing ourselves – to be honest the evidence is so overwhelming I don’t know anyone sensible who could now disagree. All FA’s shocking points have merit. What I don’t understand is why this needs showing in an art gallery where an audience of the already converted is in single figures.
And if after this you need convalescence with painting and sculpture none is offered because all the Whitworth’s upstairs galleries, where the art is, are closed.

At the main art gallery hectoring is turned up to eleven. Every room has its blackboard urging appreciation in terms of feminism, race, gender, sexuality or colonialism. A gallery of pictures by Turner and Constable is being re-jigged for use as a discussion on climate change. The Pre-Raphaelite section is an excuse for an ear-bashing about low pay, immigration and unskilled labour. Herkomer’s Hard Times provides an introduction to the effects of Covid on employment. Landseer’s dead lion, whose outline was used on a Tate & Lyle syrup tin (you know what’s coming!), provides a convenient opportunity to bring up sugar and slavery. It’s relentless. It’s like walking round a corner and suddenly finding yourself kettled in a demo you can’t escape from. They won’t leave you alone. And after a while you feel as if you’re being secretly observed by thought police for compliance.

It turns out this is not just Manchester. The director of Tate Britain, an unbelievable idiot, recently used Turner to bring up climate change in what was a stupendous piece of hypocrisy. Notwithstanding the brass neck of charging £22 for a show – Turner and the Modern World – nearly all of whose works you should be seeing free of charge anyway, the Tate trucked in at least 15 pictures. That’s not so bad, but 96 works are being air-freighted 4,800 miles to Texas and then 1,800 miles further on to Massachusetts … and then dispersed back to where they all came from. What on earth is the carbon footprint of this exhibition?

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER, 2021

I took a wrong turn on my bike recently near Russell Square and came upon Wallis Gilbert’s 1931 Daimler car hire garage in Herbrand Street. Set back almost hidden, and only yards from where I attended university, I had never suspected its existence. It now pleases me so much I regularly detour past it. Now used as offices it is attractively maintained in pristine white. Those arriving to work here must feel lifted and lucky as they approach. I would. Mr Wallis’s masterpiece is the Hoover building on the A40, now more or less just a facade. Passing this on school trips into London in the early ’60s was for me always an anticipated treat, a major capital landmark. Art Deco architecture is not everyone’s cup of tea but to me it is deluxe English Breakfast. I love its simple shapes and generous reticulated windows, its echoes of classical detailing from Egyptian to Greek, the courage of unusual forms not always symmetrical and the pride taken in its construction – look up Harry Weedon’s Odeon in York, it is a monumental poem in small bricks.

I also discovered recently, while being driven out of London, that one route north passes Charles Holden’s early ’30s stations for the Piccadilly Line; Wood Green, Turnpike Lane, Southgate, Arnos Grove, Cockfosters. These original and ingenious buildings stand out as beacons in often messy urban settings. I’d not been up this way for years but now find the stations falling into blistered, crumbling disrepair, lengths of concrete moulding chipped and eroded away, especially at Cockfosters. Restored and painted they would surely become central to the street experience of open-eyed commuters and local people, and undoubtedly a quiet source of pride that there was indeed a time when modern architecture was capable of visibly improving a locality.

Claiming poverty as a reason for neglecting good buildings is no excuse. Two recent examples of huge sums squandered by the Mayor of London come to mind. At Marble Arch, the old execution site of Tyburn tree, £6 million (the cost doubled in months due to maladministration) has been spent constructing a mound 75 feet high. The lack of judgement involved in this hideous intrusion astounds. Whoever dreamed it up should be barred from public office. The presiding committee must have sat on their fat behinds washing down blueberry muffins with caramel lattes like a circle of nodding dogs. ‘This’ll bring the shoppers back to Oxford Street all right!’ Cue more nodding: ‘Definitely!’. But how? How could a hillock skirted in plants and saplings uncomfortably vertical on steep slopes achieve this? Sadiq Khan, a man with a sixth sense for wasting money on barmy schemes, should have spent £6 million improving the capital’s air quality which is now worse than it’s ever been. The mound promises “unparalleled views”, a barefaced lie. It’s not even as tall as nearby Selfridges and the mature planes across the road at Speakers’ Corner look down on its summit so you probably can’t see much of Hyde Park either. Inevitably, this absurdity is referred to as ‘public art’ even though it has nothing to do with art and one member of the public described it as ‘The worst thing ever done in London’ – an exaggeration when considering Boris Johnson’s cancelled Garden Bridge which spent over £40 million without a spade of earth being dug. When public servants refer to money being tight you can only look at stupid piles like this and cry laughing in disbelief.

The second waste of money, part of a £7 million scheme of ‘public art’ (again) to boost tourism, is a series of bland banners and pedestrian crossings in Piccadilly painted in gaudy abstract patterns; a joint venture between the Royal Academy and Art of London (“a new cultural initiative” set up by the Mayor). In trecento Tuscany it was demanded of artists that they could devise an exciting public pageant. More recently, in the 1930s, Paul Nash might turn his skills to designing seat material for buses. Few artists nowadays are trained to do anything communally useful or entertaining. You look at these dreary RA efforts and wonder why they bothered; it is a waste of time, energy and resources. I spent half an hour walking up and down and no one paid any attention to any of it … because it was just there and is unrecognisable as anything which reaches out. Attract tourism? Talk about self-delusion.

Too much is spent in the visual arts on instantly forgettable temporary stunts serving only to line the pockets of the usual suspects and allow the Mayor’s office to pen self-congratulatory press releases. We waste millions on feeble diversions presented as art but without artistic content.

They should have painted Holden’s stations instead.
P.S. May I humbly refer you to my interpolation in the letters’ pages.

MARCH/APRIL 2021

Nothing much happened last year in the visual arts. The usual suspects promoted themselves with yards of trivia, usually about the NHS, but nothing serious was made except by those conventional sorts who go quietly about their business. National galleries tried to fill the gap by selling us ‘virtual’ and ‘digital’ ‘experiences’ by the dozen, but no one who relishes looking at art will be satisfied by that. Viewing a ‘virtual’ painting is about as satisfying as eating a ‘virtual’ Mars bar. Imagine, though, how much cheaper it would be if ‘virtual’ was enough. We could treat the National Gallery like Debenhams or Topshop ­– put the collection online, asset strip it and flog the real estate to a Russian crook. Art made easy, and no overheads.
Apart from a couple of agreeable jaunts, each of them to a deliciously empty National Gallery, V&A and a half-closed British Museum (no change there, the Bassae frieze and the galleries displaying architectural fragments were as ever roped off), I can’t say I missed anything – a shocking admission but true. Certainly, I haven’t agonised over the closing of Arts Council galleries, the Serpentine, ICA, Hayward, Whitechapel, or the other predictable troughers jostling at Rishi’s steaming gravy boat (borrowed).

2020 ought really to stand as one of those benchmark years, after which everything altered. The series of lockdowns provided perfect conditions for thoughtful realignment. And as far as debt, bankruptcies, blameless victims and especially unemployment are concerned, 2020 will indeed become a year like those historical benchmarks surrounding which there is a definite sense of before and after; 43, 1066, 1689, 1789, 1815, 1832, 1929, 1948, 1969 and, more recently, 9/11 and fiddling with the offside rule.

If anything in 2020 needed a thick black line drawing under it it was State Art, so conspicuously has it abandoned any pretence to be taken seriously. Conceptual art, its preferred approach, has been belly up for years. Only the mutual interests of selected curators, artists, dealers and collectors, plus a few reliably supportive hacks (and not forgetting the millions in public subsidy) have seen to it that it survived well beyond its sell-by date irrespective of growing public mockery and indifference. Recent Turner Prizes and Fourth Plinths, which continued their annual mummified parades like El Cid, came and went and nobody cared who won … Well go on then, name one! We could tell that State Art didn’t really believe in all of this themselves because the explanations of ‘experts’ had to be written in a foreign language only they understood. And when all else failed there was special pleading, threats of an imminent return to savagery and the resort to quasi-religious bullying – the vehement insistence that there is something ‘innovative’ and ‘challenging’ there when there isn’t. We’d get the hang of it eventually, they kept telling us from a great height. Except we didn’t.

It would be reassuring to believe that the void of 2020 supplied the potential crucible for a new structure in the visual arts, but it doesn’t look likely. Not even a worldwide slaughter of innocents can deflect the rightness of those in charge here. During the last decade, in parallel with their devotion to an embalmed conceptualism, has evolved their own special Creed. Every day their happy-clappy Wokeism selects the dubious and undeserving (some of them barely literate; see Moping Owl), while their shameless political grandstanding exhibits a disregard for anything recognisable as Art.
No one in 2020 missed State Art. Its High Priests tell us we are being starved of culture, but in truth they only miss themselves. Robbed of their addiction to publicity, only lying makes them feel better, and as ever wishful thinking is presented as fact. To be honest I couldn’t care less if I never visit the Hayward again. I won’t feel deprived or hunger at the loss. There is always the nationals, cherished buildings, bookshelves, film and Sky Sports.

Will the hiatus of 2020 stop these monomaniacs giving us more of the same? No. Why? Because Wokeist State Art resides in an impregnable soundproofed fortress without windows. They neither see nor hear us. We exist only to pay their wages. Ignoring the opportunities for change presented on a plate during 2020, State Art is, like the Chinese Communist Party, a self-perpetuating elite which only distributes patronage to reliable fellow believers while punishing everyone else for thinking differently.

For most people throughout our whole sad world 2020 was an unforgettable watershed, but not for State Art.

JULY/AUGUST 2025

Across two weekends in April 160 artists in York, a city with a population smaller than Islington’s, opened their studios and homes to the public. A useful 60-page colour booklet with a detailed map locating participants was published to coincide with the event. Then, in June, again over consecutive weekends, 209 artists in rural North Yorkshire likewise opened their doors to the public. An 80-page booklet with a detailed tipped-in map was published to assist visitors. Both these events were efficiently organised by artists themselves.
The work on display was of a surprisingly high standard, usually employing a range of styles in mostly ancestral forms of painting, printmaking, sculpture and pottery. Much was impressive not least because it was born in the sort of modest houses one cycles past, never assuming for a second that serious art is cooking behind the curtains. Nearly all the work was domestic in scale, mainly because of where it was made, and therefore capable of accommodation in the houses of other modest-living, discerning people.

What struck me forcefully about these events was that many contributors were professionally trained at reputable art schools and were making impressive work under difficult circumstances with few outlets for sale. And I’d never heard of any of them. Despite their lack of national or even regional profile they made work because they needed to. Pleasingly, they were nice people, not one in my experience infected by bitterness, exaggeration, self-importance or vaulting ambition. The pleasure so many derived from their compulsion to make work, often in snatched hours after full-time jobs and at weekends, and their desire to share it with others, was impressive, touching even. And not one made daft claims for what they did, relying instead on the obvious fact that the work required little or no explanation, no special pleading, no ‘artist’s statement’. The work existed to be enjoyed for what it is: the assumption being that most visitors who had taken the trouble to come would get it. The joy of the work is there in the truth of what you could see with nothing remotely ‘conceptual’ about it. Here quality is visible. Most do not feel the necessity to ‘challenge’ or ‘subvert’ although this doesn’t thwart in many a quest for originality, subtlety and a distinctive character in what they produce.

Contrast this wholesome attitude to that of the Arts Council with the type of art it promotes and the perverse criteria by which its favoured artists are selected; and particularly the fact that in many cases what is allegedly so good about it is not actually visible but needs explanation (or excuses) by someone with allegedly better insight (eyesight) than one’s own. Such superior sorcery ought to be included amongst the OED’s definitions of ‘patronising’. Neither of the above Open Studios, by the way, is supported by the Arts Council. I found this omission baffling. Shouldn’t occasions like this be precisely, at least in part, why an arts council, and especially a regional arts association, exists? An encouragement of amateur and professional alike?

The reality is that the majority of this country’s art exists outside of the tiny ‘Official Contemporary Art’ bubble which is reported boringly, exclusively and repetitively in the papers and on the television. Bombarded as we are by the hype of reputations inflated artificially by publicity and market manipulation, one tends to forget that art continues to thrive, unpromoted and ignored, elsewhere. There are many thousands amongst us who need to make things, and do it well.

In the end I concluded that in the two-tier system which exists in the visual arts, the local art scene is at least as stimulating as in the State Art one. The only genuine area of interest in the national arena is the politics of it – Why this artist? Why now? And why the same few ‘brands’ so often?

What the Arts Council and State Art provides us with is a serious distortion of what actually takes place in the visual arts. The rest of the population have little or no interest in, never see and probably haven’t heard of the art they promote, which isn’t surprising when you look at most of it. It’s their own remote prejudice and no one else’s. And no official body takes them to task for this exclusiveness. Is the minority work State Art promotes, with their limited conception of what is fashionable, really better than the unacknowledged rest of what is happening over the horizon? I don’t think so. This two-tier system is reinforced when reading commentaries of, for example, the mad world of international art fairs which command massive coverage in newspapers and on websites although they are of no interest to any public I’ve ever come across. These circuses take place in the parallel universe of wealthy watering holes where tat and kitsch bear ridiculous price tags and are bought by gullible twerps whose lives seem to comprise jetting about speculating huge sums on nothing much.

Baroness Margaret Hodge’s panel is currently looking into the activities of the Arts Council, for which read State Art. It’s purpose is to “explore how to improve access to arts and culture in all areas of the country to drive access to opportunity”. Nothing changes. These words echo almost verbatim those expressed in Jennie Lee’s first Labour White Paper on the Arts in 1965, and which have been repeated in a blizzard of official policy documents since. But will this new panel also consider why the Arts Council fails to support, promote, represent, all excellent artists wherever they alight on the artistic spectrum instead of the rarefied, allegedly “challenging” ones it deigns to acknowledge.

Another problem with the Arts Council is that its blackmailing tentacles have wriggled into every corner of artistic life, tainting everywhere as it goes. There’s no escaping its wretched influence. The result is that it is almost impossible to avoid its influence and to locate genuinely independent voices who are not scared of the consequences of their views.

One impediment to achieving reform is the nature of the Labour Party itself, with its desire to be seen as ‘progressive’ and not in thrall to anything smelling even faintly of ‘tradition’, the existence of which it institutionally despises. It needs to avoid potential charges of conservatism and to be seen to be supporting anything allegedly ‘new’ and ‘innovative’, even though its historic grass root support has no interest in the visual arts or what the Arts Council, which Labour founded and indulges, promotes. Labour’s sympathetic attitude to official Contemporary Art is typical of the way in which its views are increasingly at variance with those of its original core support while being in tune with the attitudes of a small, educated, metropolitan elite.

When Hodge’s panel was first proposed by the Tories just before last summer’s General Election, Dame Mary Archer was chair. The new administration watered down the remit and appointed, naturally, one of their own to oversee it while getting rid of all but one of the 13 panel members. At the time The Jackdaw identified conflicts of interest affecting the panel’s composition, many of whom were recipients of grants from the Arts Council and therefore hardly reliable as independent referees of its performance. The same criticism is now applicable to the new membership all of whom are, one way or another, reliant on Arts Council hand-outs. How can one have faith in a body so riddled with partiality from the start? Do we really expect such functionaries to bite the hand that feeds them?

David Lee

Sept/Oct 2021

I took a wrong turn on my bike recently near Russell Square and came upon Wallis Gilbert’s 1931 Daimler car hire garage in Herbrand Street. Set back almost hidden, and only yards from where I attended university, I had never suspected its existence. It now pleases me so much I regularly detour past it. Now used as offices it is attractively maintained in pristine white. Those arriving to work here must feel lifted and lucky as they approach. I would. Mr Wallis’s masterpiece is the Hoover building on the A40, now more or less just a facade. Passing this on school trips into London in the early ’60s was for me always an anticipated treat, a major capital landmark. Art Deco architecture is not everyone’s cup of tea but to me it is deluxe English Breakfast. I love its simple shapes and generous reticulated windows, its echoes of classical detailing from Egyptian to Greek, the courage of unusual forms not always symmetrical and the pride taken in its construction – look up Harry Weedon’s Odeon in York, it is a monumental poem in small bricks.

I also discovered recently, while being driven out of London, that one route north passes Charles Holden’s early ’30s stations for the Piccadilly Line; Wood Green, Turnpike Lane, Southgate, Arnos Grove, Cockfosters. These original and ingenious buildings stand out as beacons in often messy urban settings. I’d not been up this way for years but now find the stations falling into blistered, crumbling disrepair, lengths of concrete moulding chipped and eroded away, especially at Cockfosters. Restored and painted they would surely become central to the street experience of open-eyed commuters and local people, and undoubtedly a quiet source of pride that there was indeed a time when modern architecture was capable of visibly improving a locality.

Claiming poverty as a reason for neglecting good buildings is no excuse. Two recent examples of huge sums squandered by the Mayor of London come to mind. At Marble Arch, the old execution site of Tyburn tree, £6 million (the cost doubled in months due to maladministration) has been spent constructing a mound 75 feet high. The lack of judgement involved in this hideous intrusion astounds. Whoever dreamed it up should be barred from public office. The presiding committee must have sat on their fat behinds washing down blueberry muffins with caramel lattes like a circle of nodding dogs. ‘This’ll bring the shoppers back to Oxford Street all right!’ Cue more nodding: ‘Definitely!’. But how? How could a hillock skirted in plants and saplings uncomfortably vertical on steep slopes achieve this? Sadiq Khan, a man with a sixth sense for wasting money on barmy schemes, should have spent £6 million improving the capital’s air quality which is now worse than it’s ever been. The mound promises “unparalleled views”, a barefaced lie. It’s not even as tall as nearby Selfridges and the mature planes across the road at Speakers’ Corner look down on its summit so you probably can’t see much of Hyde Park either. Inevitably, this absurdity is referred to as ‘public art’ even though it has nothing to do with art and one member of the public described it as ‘The worst thing ever done in London’ – an exaggeration when considering Boris Johnson’s cancelled Garden Bridge which spent over £40 million without a spade of earth being dug. When public servants refer to money being tight you can only look at stupid piles like this and cry laughing in disbelief.

The second waste of money, part of a £7 million scheme of ‘public art’ (again) to boost tourism, is a series of bland banners and pedestrian crossings in Piccadilly painted in gaudy abstract patterns; a joint venture between the Royal Academy and Art of London (“a new cultural initiative” set up by the Mayor). In trecento Tuscany it was demanded of artists that they could devise an exciting public pageant. More recently, in the 1930s, Paul Nash might turn his skills to designing seat material for buses. Few artists nowadays are trained to do anything communally useful or entertaining. You look at these dreary RA efforts and wonder why they bothered; it is a waste of time, energy and resources. I spent half an hour walking up and down and no one paid any attention to any of it … because it was just there and is unrecognisable as anything which reaches out. Attract tourism? Talk about self-delusion.

Too much is spent in the visual arts on instantly forgettable temporary stunts serving only to line the pockets of the usual suspects and allow the Mayor’s office to pen self-congratulatory press releases. We waste millions on feeble diversions presented as art but without artistic content. 

They should have painted Holden’s stations instead. David Lee 

P.S. May I humbly refer you to my interpolation in the letters’ pages.

David Lee

July/August 2021

The National Gallery has prostrated itself before what Orwell called  ‘the official mind’. It must have done because the less said about Rosalind Nashashibi, their current artist-in-residence, the better … but don’t worry I’ll bore you anyway. She is exhibiting her recent efforts among the 17th century Spanish pictures to which, it is claimed, her own works are said to respond. Any connections – and they will not be obvious to anybody with normal vision – are remote and in one instance, a parody of Philip IV’s legs, positively infantile. These daubs should not have been exhibited at all, anywhere, let alone here of all places. Surely no commercial gallery would consider showing them. And I can’t believe anyone would actually buy them … but then there’s no accounting for the taste of filthy rich fools itching to be fashionable. These pictures can only be exhibited because those in authority have lost the plot and are scared to express an honest opinion about them for fear of offending State Art mores.

This phenomenon of applauding or tolerating incompetence needs to be answered. The one thing a visitor might reasonably expect of anyone showing in the National Gallery is pictorial skill, but this is precisely the qualification conspicuous by its absence. Is there really no one at the National with the nerve to speak up? Why are some of the top curators of their generation prepared to tolerate a display of such obvious and insulting crudity? There is here no drawing, colour, touch, composition or intelligent insight. If Hodgkin’s pathetic account of Seurat’s Bathers or Peter Blake’s feeble-minded versions of the NG’s bare breasts didn’t look bad enough when exhibited among the Gallery’s collection, Nashashibi’s hopeless pictures are even more embarrassing than those.

What makes it worse is that some poor minion drew the short straw and had to write accompanying (presumably explanatory) drivel. As with so much official commentary on Contemporary Art there is no relationship between what is seen and what is written. If you mixed up pictures and captions to play Pelmanism no way could you relate any one image to any sentence except by a fluke. What, for example, in relation to two flat formless figures, one allegedly dancing in front of the other (for which we have only the writer’s word), is this supposed to mean: “[A Drop of Scent] explores ways in which a single moment can be experienced on multiple physical and emotional levels.” Don’t be stupid. No it doesn’t. Nothing is ‘explored’. These works couldn’t ‘explore’ if they had a map, because the basics of picture making have not been learned. Indeed, they are done by someone who clearly hasn’t a clue such requirements exist.

How can knowledgeable curators turn a blind eye to this nonsense? By going along with the State Art tendency to pretend that ineptitude is acceptable, cowardly people are doing permanent damage to the credibility of art by institutionalising incompetence. It is beyond belief that the Director of the National Gallery can have supported this, lending authority and status to daubs so undeserving. This display is typical of our present culture of fear, the terror felt by many of speaking truth. But for as long as those who should be defending painting turn a blind eye standards will continue to plummet. 

 It seems that where establishment-approved painting after about 1980 is concerned those with a grounding in art appreciation must suspend judgement and accept any scribble anyone produces on the grounds that new and mysterious criteria apply to its appreciation. But where are those who are supposed to be explaining convincingly this mystery to a wider public?

The idea that the National Gallery must show work by recent artists in relation to its own collection, and especially when there is no connection at all, is wrong-headed. It is yet another instance of ‘Let’s All Pretend’ that different species share the same DNA and are as good as each other. You might as well hang Bob and Roberta Smith in the Arena Chapel or Lynette Wotsername among the Villa Valmorana’s Tiepolos. There’s no point, it’s just silly.

And why bother appointing an artist-in-residence who can’t possibly benefit from intimate daily contact with the greatest masterpieces of the past?

We now regularly land robots on Mars and yet 30,000 years ago cavemen using only sticks, fingers, spit and coloured dirt could draw and paint more expressively than today’s State Artists. David Lee (See also Moping Owl overleaf and the review of the latest John Moores on p. 10.) 

Across the last 30 years the narrative of official Contemporary Art has unfurled like a Chinese scroll. We can follow how, from around 1990, those commercial techniques pioneered to manufacture reputations by Charles Saatchi were adopted as a template by other speculators eager to cash in. This was the start of a racket which turned the art market into an investment game of chance played by billionaires and super-dealers. Public galleries went along with it hoping for free scraps and helped along by telephone numbers of taxpayer cash. More recently these same strategies have been weaponised by State Art to engineer a preferred social character to the official art landscape. For them the process is a cinch. Whereas Saatchi only had one gallery to work with, State Art oversees a score of them as well as having access to the limitless potential blackmail offered by exclusive control of public subsidy.

And so the story continues… Clicking through Christie’s results for their recent ‘20th Century Sale’, an auction in which Banksy’s (21st century) NHS drawing (see p. 29) fetched a higher price than Picasso, Modigliani or Bacon, one lot leapt from the screen. This was a lively picture of Pop Art thrust called No Wahala (No Problem in Nigeria’s Hausa tongue), by a 26-year-old British artist from Dagenham, Joy Labinjo, who is also being sold as an ‘African artist’. My interest was aroused because this painting fetched £150,000, five times its estimate. I’d never heard of her, not least, I suspect, because she’s still a student, yet here was a work clearly being exchanged as an investment bond in an auction of the usual blue chip names. The work was painted two years ago, having been exhibited in a solo show at Baltic Arts Centre; that is, local to where Labinjo took her first degree in Newcastle. A sell-out dealer display at an art fair followed with works priced at ten grand each. Within months the Government Art Collection, always wide awoke, jumped aboard with a £70,000 purchase. Barely dry, No Wahala has thus already been through three owners. Labinjo’s prices, meanwhile, have been bounced upwards by 15 times in only 18 months to a level way beyond the means of public galleries. 

Labinjo is part of a State Art policy to race especially young black women painters into prominence. This demonstrates to the world that for all our past institutional and systemic racist failings we are now, at last, ‘diverse’.

No Wahala (5’ x 6’), done in a mixture of household gloss, acrylic and oil,   concerns, we are told, ‘racial identity’. This phrase is the go-to validation now routinely attached to all works by young black artists. Used here it is clearly untrue. Labinjo’s are pictures based on snapshots from her family albums which are fed into a computer and collaged on screen. They are no more about ‘racial identity’ than paintings of white people would be. Other promotional nonsense written about this work by a Christie’s hack made me laugh out loud.

Execution is in patches of colour like stained glass or painting-by-numbers. Figures are crude, faces twisted, clothes limp, limbs disjointed and background colours Dulux bright. Because the means to achieving precise expression of a figure’s feelings are unmastered, one can’t read properly the mood or sentiment of the subjects featured. Nevertheless, and naive as it is, the picture has presence and honesty. I sense an unselfish and genuine desire to communicate. There is no suggestion here of the fashionable sloganising so wearisome in work by other artists from a similar background.

Labinjo is one of several black British women painters, of which she is the most interesting, to be subjected to this market grooming process for political, social and profitable rather than for purely artistic reasons. Incidentally, a picture by the most famous of the group, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, who is currently showing at the Tate and whose work to my eye is meritless, sold a landscape in the same sale as No Wahala for an astounding £513,000.

Is it fair to so exploit a promising student artist? One can’t blame the young for going along with a system which lines their pockets – good luck to them. But is subjecting art and reputation to artifical inflation really considerate of an artist’s long-term development and welfare? It is a process, don’t forget, which regularly fails. Consider the vapid, repetitive merchandise produced by Saatchi’s more famous discoveries, for whom as prices rocketed and publicity snowballed so the work got thinner and thinner. The fear is that Labinjo will, like them, be turned by market gamblers into a one-trick pony. 

Meanwhile, painting that will last the test of time is being made elsewhere, out of the limelight. Not that State Art will ever let you know. David Lee

David Lee

March/April 2021

Nothing much happened last year in the visual arts. The usual suspects promoted themselves with yards of trivia, usually about the NHS, but nothing serious was made except by those conventional sorts who go quietly about their business. National galleries tried to fill the gap by selling us ‘virtual’ and ‘digital’ ‘experiences’ by the dozen, but no one who relishes looking at art will be satisfied by that. Viewing a ‘virtual’ painting is about as satisfying as eating a ‘virtual’ Mars bar. Imagine, though, how much cheaper it would be if ‘virtual’ was enough. We could treat the National Gallery like Debenhams or Topshop ­– put the collection online, asset strip it and flog the real estate to a Russian crook. Art made easy, and no overheads. 

Apart from a couple of agreeable jaunts, each of them to a deliciously empty National Gallery, V&A and a half-closed British Museum (no change there, the Bassae frieze and the galleries displaying architectural fragments were as ever roped off), I can’t say I missed anything – a shocking admission but true. Certainly, I haven’t agonised over the closing of Arts Council galleries, the Serpentine, ICA, Hayward, Whitechapel, or the other predictable troughers jostling at Rishi’s steaming gravy boat (borrowed).

2020 ought really to stand as one of those benchmark years, after which everything altered. The series of lockdowns provided perfect conditions for thoughtful realignment. And as far as debt, bankruptcies, blameless victims and especially unemployment are concerned, 2020 will indeed become a year like those historical benchmarks surrounding which there is a definite sense of before and after; 43, 1066, 1689, 1789, 1815, 1832, 1929, 1948, 1969 and, more recently, 9/11 and fiddling with the offside rule.

If anything in 2020 needed a thick black line drawing under it it was State Art, so conspicuously has it abandoned any pretence to be taken seriously. Conceptual art, its preferred approach, has been belly up for years. Only the mutual interests of selected curators, artists, dealers and collectors, plus a few reliably supportive hacks (and not forgetting the millions in public subsidy) have seen to it that it survived well beyond its sell-by date irrespective of growing public mockery and indifference. Recent Turner Prizes and Fourth Plinths, which continued their annual mummified parades like El Cid, came and went and nobody cared who won … Well go on then, name one! We could tell that State Art didn’t really believe in all of this themselves because the explanations of ‘experts’ had to be written in a foreign language only they understood. And when all else failed there was special pleading, threats of an imminent return to savagery and the resort to quasi-religious bullying – the vehement insistence that there is something ‘innovative’ and ‘challenging’ there when there isn’t. We’d get the hang of it eventually, they kept telling us from a great height. Except we didn’t.

It would be reassuring to believe that the void of 2020 supplied the potential crucible for a new structure in the visual arts, but it doesn’t look likely. Not even a worldwide slaughter of innocents can deflect the rightness of those in charge here. During the last decade, in parallel with their devotion to an embalmed conceptualism, has evolved their own special Creed. Every day their happy-clappy Wokeism selects the dubious and undeserving (some of them barely literate; see Moping Owl), while their shameless political grandstanding exhibits a disregard for anything recognisable as Art.

 No one in 2020 missed State Art. Its High Priests tell us we are being starved of culture, but in truth they only miss themselves. Robbed of their addiction to publicity, only lying makes them feel better, and as ever wishful thinking is presented as fact. To be honest I couldn’t care less if I never visit the Hayward again. I won’t feel deprived or hunger at the loss. There is always the nationals, cherished buildings, bookshelves, film and Sky Sports.

Will the hiatus of 2020 stop these monomaniacs giving us more of the same? No. Why? Because Wokeist State Art resides in an impregnable soundproofed fortress without windows. They neither see nor hear us. We exist only to pay their wages. Ignoring the opportunities for change presented on a plate during 2020, State Art is, like the Chinese Communist Party, a self-perpetuating elite which only distributes patronage to reliable fellow believers while punishing everyone else for thinking differently.

For most people throughout our whole sad world 2020 was an unforgettable watershed, but not for State Art. David Lee