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?