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JANUARY/FEBRUARY, 2024

I read recently on the New York Times website a reference to the opening of exhibitions by two artists, one of whom I’d never heard and the other being our own ubiquitous Tracey Emin. Both were referred to – in the US’s newspaper of record, mark – as ‘well-known brands’. For some reason on this occasion the ‘b’ word hit me like an emetic. Would I walk even a yard to see work by a ‘brand’, any more than I’d enter a supermarket to admire a soup label? And yet here the phrase was used to signal the individuals’ importance and high status. ‘Brand’ is a word I’ve often read in reference to State Artists, especially the ones who strain every sinew to keep themselves in the news. Most often they do this by giving the same interview over and over again, or, in repeated exhibitions, by pushing lines of over-familiar merchandise as though they were their own souvenir industry. But I’d never before now thought of ‘brand’ as quite so repellent a notion in relation to art. On the other hand State Art’s usual suspects, those masters and mistresses of flannel over form, doubtless welcome it as an accolade, a career stepping-stone like winning a prize, getting cancer or being awarded an undeserved honour.

How did we reach a point where artists are referred to as ‘brands’? You won’t be surprised to learn that branding in contemporary art is yet another of State Art’s perverse inventions. Indeed, the brief history of State Art overlaps exactly with the calculated creation of artistic reputations as ‘brands’. Using the language of advertising must make the art establishment feel different and appealing. Or perhaps they don’t care, if only because words when used by them have a tendency to mean anything other than the OED’s definition.
In the UK this process began in the early 1990s with the emergence of the so-called ‘young British artists’, for whom becoming known and achieving visibility and wealth was more important than the insight of what they, or, more accurately, their craftsmen contractors, actually produced. We might place the beginning of our officially sanctioned policy of branding to the moment when Serota and dealer Jopling convened a meeting in 1991 whose attendees were tasked with devising a means of marketing the current art they were all desperate to see advanced if not appreciated. (Serota once observed that he preferred an artist to be “validated by the trade” before the Tate acquired work: an admission right there that he couldn’t trust his eye. Not a good recommendation, you might think, for a Tate Director.)

Their main vehicle would be a revised (and rigged) Turner Prize, itself now in a permanent vegetative state requiring life-support. No tactic, they decided, would be too underhand or offensive. It was as brazen as feeding juicy, usually salacious stories to tabloids in order to generate controversy. Notoriety breeds Brand. It was advantageous to them that on their side they had an advertising executive and art dealer, Charles Saatchi, who was uniquely qualified to know the value of appearance over substance. What they in fact achieved was to create a brand not just for individual artists but for ‘Contemporary Art’ per se. Branding, as advertisers know, creates quality out of nothing, its success causing prices to inflate disproportionately to the cost of manufacture. You pay for the name. Among other absurdities, this process has created the magical paradox by which in, say, Minimalism, the less you see the more you pay; that is, until the reductio ad absurdum is reached when the collector forks out telephone numbers for a typed sheet of A4.

Curiously, the establishment of a name as a brand also places it beyond criticism; a reputation soon becomes taken for granted. As has happened with so much fashionable Contemporary Art, constant exposure is essential to the value of the brand, hence, post-1991, dealers employed armies of treacherous clerks dedicated to the purpose of keeping each ‘name’ before the public whatever the context. The more it appears in print or on the television, the more likely the reader is to accept without hindrance the quality of what is being sold. It’s the name that counts. I hope we may one day return to a time when the work proclaims the name, not the other way round.

I’m not hopeful this will happen any time soon because brands receiving relentless promotion (which is, after all, State Art’s principle job – courtesy of your money of course) have a habit of enduring. Well-managed, they create an unstoppable momentum for themselves; a demoralising thought. In the 1960s when former Ireland rugby international, Tony O’Reilly, marketed Kerrygold as distinct from other identical butters, he made branding an essential part of achieving commodity success and longevity. Today, Kerrygold still sells faster in German supermarkets than any other brand on their shelves, and not just butter.

NOVEMBER/DECEMDER 2023

In his valedictory address when vacating his post as Chairman of the Arts Council in 1970, Lord Goodman admitted to mistakes as well as conceding failure to achieve important objectives. He referred specifically to the need for people in his position to avoid “cloying self-satisfaction”. Few in the arts sector since have followed his wise counsel. How better we would now be served by the art establishment if it returned to the Goodman days of honesty, variety and realism. His Lordship concluded that whilst it couldn’t please everyone all the time the Arts Council was in general “a good and worthy institution in a wicked world”. And so it was; indeed, compared to what it is now it was exemplary. The list of its activities from its founding in 1946 to the establishment of the second gallery it created – the Serpentine in 1970 (its first had been the Hayward in 1968) – is a flawless record of what the state should provide for a protean public, with its balance of the historical, the modern and the contemporary … not to mention the explanations thereof in lucid English by important scholars and artists whose reputations have stood the test of time.

For those wishing to know what “cloying self-satisfaction” feels like when you tread in it, go no further than any Arts Council statement today, and especially the annual reports of those many galleries it now finances to promote its private limited ethic. You will discover there that truth is sacrificed for the most risible hyperbole. I had cause a few issues ago to mention the latest annual fanfare from the Serpentine in which modesty is unknown. Everything they do is, by their own definition, perfect. They are an example, par excellence, of those who are not just allowed but encouraged to mark their own homework, only for it to be received uncritically by a ‘critical’ establishment which ought to know better and a political class which couldn’t care less.

This caused me to realise, yet again, that the Arts Council’s initial versatility has metamorphosed into an invulnerable monolith dedicated only to its own survival. Naturally, this contradicts the Arts Council’s original charter. In their early annual reports they refer to the necessity of maintaining distance between themselves and galleries, and therefore between public subsidy and the market. The fear, they stated, was that such a marriage might cause it to “monopolise taste” … precisely the trap it soon conveniently forgot about and then fell into.

The difference between the early Arts Council and its current manifestation, that is since it took its present theological turn, couldn’t be more stark. The first annual report of the AC in 1946 notes 13 members of its arts panel; all were artists, art historians or critics, the only businessman being Samuel Courtauld, an art collector of just a little distinction. Kenneth Clark was chairman. In 1970, the year of the Serpentine’s birth, the Council’s art panel comprised 27 members, all of these also artists, critics and art historians (covering all periods). The token businessman was Robert Sainsbury, present not because of his business savvy but because he too was a discerning collector of the non-speculating kind we don’t seem to produce today. Compare these with the 14 trustees of today’s Serpentine. All are merchant bankers, stockbrokers, CEOs, heirs to industrial fortunes and one token artist of no distinction. The chairman is an American financier worth £95 billion. Small wonder that there is daily a plethora of internet articles dedicated to “the most bankable artists”. The subversion of purpose and the conversion of the Arts Council into State Art is complete: you can’t see the join between the market and what is promoted courtesy of supposedly ‘independent’ public finance. When the Arts Council was founded it received £235,000 in government subsidy for all of the arts; the Serpentine Gallery alone now receives five times this amount annually, as well as, at the last count, 14 lottery awards.

The Serpentine’s current exhibition is of wooden sculptures (illustrated) made between 2011 and 2015 by Georg Baselitz (until January 7th). This demonstrates precisely the happy marriage existing between state subsidy and the general conspiracy to create artistic reputations and inflate prices. The one thing Baselitz does not need is an exhibition in a subsidised gallery. He shows widely many times every year including annually at his own dealership, Thaddeus Ropac (TR), which has huge rooms in London, Paris, Salzburg and Seoul. Already over-exhibited, Baselitz has additionally enjoyed surveys at the Royal Academy, Whitechapel Art Gallery and the Saatchi Gallery – the ad man was the first to promote Baselitz heavily by buying his work in bulk, showing and lending it before unloading it at a profit. This present show might have been staged at TR’s Mayfair gallery, a 5-minute bike ride from the Serpentine. So why wasn’t it? It is of course accidental that when the previous long-term director of the Serpentine retired from her post she immediately accepted a directorship at … Thaddeus Ropac. Obviously an unfortunate coincidence.

State Art is useful to commercial galleries with large stables of artists because they provide an additional outlet which is free at the point of use (at least on the face of it). Dealers can’t lose by such a relationship, not least because lazy critics tend to write disproportionately about shows in the major public galleries.
Notwithstanding that there is no visible evidence of sculptural merit in Baselitz’s crude wood carvings (just look at them!), these works are said to have come from his studio. They were left there because initially they were intended, we are informed, as maquettes for editions to be cast in bronze. These are, therefore, works new to the market which surely makes this venture a selling opportunity. A gallery with charitable status is being used as a showroom for works not yet sold through the artist’s dealer. And it seems a rather one-sided transaction, the benefits all favouring Baselitz and Thaddeus Ropac. All of this can’t have anything to do with the fact that a year ago an equally coarse Baselitz carving, appropriately called Mrs Paganism, sold at Christie’s for £4.6 million.

On the face of it there are no sculptural qualities in these chopped trunks. How, for example, does he decide when something that looks like this is finished? Perhaps, whilst taking a breather from swinging his axe, he stands back, wipes the sweat from his brow, fingers his Teutonic beard and muses ‘How can I make this even uglier?’. Promoters of work like this can only convey its alleged ‘qualities’ through writing, always hoping the intended recipient is either blind or gullible enough to disbelieve their eyes. So what do our ‘cloying’ gallery scribblers have to say about this “ground-breaking artist”? These works “provide new insights into the artist’s process, and how his works inform one another across different mediums”. Eh? New insights? No they don’t. He takes whole limewood tree trunks and attacks them with a chain saw or (when requiring more sensitive detail) an axe. It’s that simple. Baselitz has been hacking at wood like a lumberjack for 45 years with no evidence of any increase in subtlety or stylistic development. Among the 69 works by Baselitz it has acquired for the national collection, the Tate owns an eight-foot wood carving from 1987. This was acquired in 1993 as a part-gift, courtesy of a bulk collector of the artist’s work, by the President-for-Life, who in a previous incarnation had organised Baselitz’s show at the Whitechapel. Once he was represented in the Tate there was no going back.

The Serpentine, let’s remember, was started with the sound purpose of showing work by homegrown artists without previous opportunity to exhibit in London. In its first year, and it was open only during summer months, it exhibited 38 British artists “more than half of them living and working outside London”. More than ever we need the Serpentine for this same purpose today. We need it to show works by accomplished artists who don’t show in the globally-branded commercial galleries or often anywhere else. In this way subsidy would help those who need it, not those who don’t. If this is not to be the future, the Serpentine should be leased to the private sector and funded entirely by the rich investors and private galleries who profit from its existence. It has no interest for the rest of us.

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER, 2023

After even a short stint of filling this space one is soon re-heating the same few ideas, whilst hoping no one notices. In my case, after over 30 years of editorials, I’m approaching lap 15 of the same threadbare circuit. I don’t know about you, but it’s getting boring for me …
Photographs of a sculpture museum in Sofia showing work of the Soviet era were recently sent to me by my son (pp. 22-25). He had recently visited it, there not being much else to do, he claims, in that grey, corrupt, theoretically post-Soviet city. A couple of years ago we published a set of images he sent from a similarly themed museum in Budapest, where, in one case, all that remains of a gigantic statue of Uncle Joe is the tyrant’s “vast and trunkless” legs; Ozymandias redux. After 1990, when dividing walls tumbled, these same countries of former Marxist influence expressed new freedoms by, in among other ways, removing sculptures erected by their former overlords to the greatness of themselves and their failed ideology – a conspicuous and perhaps hasty demonstration of throwing off the chains of oppression. This was a mistake, understandable perhaps but nevertheless short-sighted, and certainly costly in terms of lost art. In acknowledgement that their painful history should not be completely erased, some former Soviet satellites are bravely trying to preserve sculptures for their historical truth and artistic accomplishments.

I spent three weeks in the Soviet Union soon after that living waxwork Leonid Brezhnev died. How any of the Communist-leaning academics who visited the USSR could return home still supporting the Soviets while seeking to expand their influence is an enduring mystery to me. They had to have been blackmailed. (Night after night I sat longingly in the Kocmoc Hotel bar for a Bond-style honey trap, but never got a sniff.) If you hadn’t seen it you wouldn’t believe what a dump the USSR was, its populace grubby, permanently half cut, pasty-faced and with a life expectancy of what we’d now consider early middle age. Existence there was grim, the few shops empty, the food disgusting (even for a northerner) and the air near factories darkly noxious and gritty – “It’s steam”, I was informed by my Intourist minder, an unbalanced Ukrainian who one night became so drunk he tried to strangle me before collapsing unconscious on the tiles of a Siberian airport. But every cloud has a silver lining, and their public sculptures knocked spots off ours. I couldn’t get over how impressive they were. Virtually every example was worth a detour to examine it close up. I’d been conditioned by education to believe that crude spot welding and maroon I-beams zig-zagging across floors, not to mention circles of stones sold to me as “the best landscape art since Constable”, were the last word in progress. I’m now ashamed to admit that I fell for this rot. Sure, the Soviet pieces were bombastic, but nevertheless always ambitious and often elaborate in planning and execution. They really meant it. They were made with no hint of either fashion or planned obsolescence, and a generally sympathetic public seemed proud of them. Their war memorials and narrative tableaux – many daring in form – were easily as good as our best in those genres. These moving works embodied belief; the materials they used – chiefly granite and assorted metals – seemed imbued with it, as if they’d been forged for this very purpose. Even Siegfried Sassoon might have agreed that there was nothing ‘peace-complacent’ about this stone. If you had placed the war memorial in Tashkent – I can’t now find my snaps of it – next to one of those bloated ‘sheep pieces’ by Moore, or one of Hepworth’s enormous punctured spatulas, you couldn’t come to any other conclusion than that for all our artists’ freedoms to do whatever they liked, it was us who had taken the wrong road and deceived ourselves, not them. The worst of this is that State Art, having demolished anything resembling art education, couldn’t now provide us with even a Moore or Hepworth, deprived as students now are of any skills and materials necessary to communicate with a wide audience. Why didn’t we think of this intelligent system 700 years ago? We could have saved ourselves the burden of looking at artless trash by noodles like the Pisani, Donatello, Bernini, Rysbrack or Grinling Gibbons.

You know instantly when a maker of art believes that what they are doing is worthwhile. You can smell it, and Soviet sculpture reeks of it. It achieved the best of art for the worst and most misguided of reasons. To me, this all underlined the obvious truth of Harry Lime’s contention that the cruellest tyrants made the most memorable art … It doesn’t, for example, seem to bother Greece (or the British Museum) that the Parthenon Marbles were only achievable in the highly developed slave society ruled by Pericles – of course, I mean ‘Democracy’.

Many remarkable pieces in the former USSR have probably been lost and the history of 20th century sculpture denuded by the impetuous damage thus inflicted. In the wake of the Colston vandalism, with its perverse exoneration of the guilty perpetrators, there is a lesson for us all here.

Stalin’s 1930s’ edicts insisting on Socialist Realism were no more prescriptive than the trash we now get dumped upon us by our own State Art presidium. Socialist Realism promoted a lie. It was supposed to “depict life truthfully”, the last thing it did. Realism was replaced by idealism, that magnificent fantasy of eternal happiness through hard labour and self-sacrifice. Also, its purpose was “to educate the masses in the spirit of Socialism”. If nothing else, for some it probably did achieve this. In contrast, for all the interest the British public exhibit in art, and especially in recent public works, the State Art industry might just as well take place on Mars.
The greatest, most modern sculpture of the 20th century I’ve ever seen is the 26-yard high, stainless steel Worker and Female Farmworker monument (opposite top) made by Vera Mukhina (1889-1953) for the 1937 World’s Fair in Paris. Following a decade-long restoration and uncertainty about its future, it now resides in the national monument park of north Moscow. State Art take note: here’s a foreign female artist you might ‘rediscover’ for an exhibition.
Why, for all its ideological shortcomings, do I still like this work so much? The emptiness and artlessness of our own contemporary efforts undoubtedly has much to do with it – virtually anything looks impressive against most of this junk. Soviet sculpture stands and falls on its merits. Direct in its aim, it doesn’t need special pleading or convoluted justifications. It looks ‘made’ and meant-to-be and never looks trivial. Its shapes strive. The attraction of art which understands and conveys its purpose forces anyone to take it seriously whatever its dubious origins might have been. Art which has no other purpose than to exist for itself or to illustrate a theory or grievance, or simply to advance a career, and which requires incomprehensible explanation, is insulting to one of even limited intelligence. And this redundancy is why State Art id doomed to failure.
Art will never really add up to much without an underpining by a commonly held and understood belief. And it helps appreciation when everyone can instantly recognise it as Art, as something special.

Now compare, say, Mukhina with an over-indulged market phenomenon like Ulrich Ruckriem. Visiting a Cartier château outside Cahors 30 years ago (one of my last press junkets), the jewellers had in the middle of their grand lawn some big rocks, and very proud of them they were. In reverential whispers I was informed that this work was by … Ruckriem. ‘Wow, not him?’ I didn’t say. The rich will believe any old rubbish a silvertongue hawker tells them. To me it just looked like boulders which had taken root where they fell from the sky. Little did I realise that, following an invitation from one of State Art’s ruling apostles, Ruckriem would soon land near where I was brought up in Lancashire. Courtesy of nearly half a million of your money Ruckriem deposited this, opposite below, on my doorstep. It was dropped on the site of the abandoned Outwood Colliery whose disused railway line serves as a rural-ish path down to Agecroft, another dead pit and a site now occupied by a prison. This entire scheme was mad. You couldn’t have made it up. 400 tons of Spanish granite was shipped to an area peppered with its own quarries. Nobody can remember now what this ‘henge’ was supposed, if anything, to symbolise. It’s just there – here, where men had worked miles underground since 1830. It represents nothing more than another line on a CV to impress the gullible. I’ve never met any neighbour or local who thinks it was other than a shocking waste of money. Nature, so brilliant at regrouping, was here best left alone.

Unfortunately State Art’s tail was now up. They hadn’t finished with me, oh no. Ten years ago a sculpture (above left) described as “of world importance” by the current supremo of the Tate no less (“A woman who really ought to know, For she is paid for saying so…”, apologies to J. Betjeman), was unveiled alongside a dual carriageway passing over the site of Beswick pit and the massive BICC cable works in east Manchester, coincidently within earshot of where I was born. And, yes, I do feel proprietorial about this place, it is my area, it owns my past and my family’s history and I resent the likes of Dr Quack turning up and telling me what’s good for me.

Ignored by passers-by, there is no way anyone sensible could possibly believe this is an important sculpture, unless they were as credulous as those academics who visited Soviet Russia and returned home announcing continued dedication to its vileness. We live in a staggeringly delusional age. With its echoes of Stalinism, our art establishment expects us to swallow any rubbish it chooses to spout.

What would you rather have on your doorstep, an overblown shiny bollard, or this, below left? I came across this work while trawling the internet for the detailed information on the Ukraine war which the BBC should provide but doesn’t. In the Donbas is a town called Kadiivka. Straddling the current front line, it’s being fought over now as I type with horrible casualties on both sides. Hundreds of Russian deaths occurred here a while ago when Ukrainian cruise missiles hit a Wagner barracks – I believe even the BBC referred in passing to this tragedy. Under the Soviets Kadiivka was renamed Stakhanov – its name having been changed back in 2016. As readers of Animal Farm know, Alexei Stakhanov (Boxer the horse in Orwell’s novella) was a hard worker said to have cut 227 tons of coal by himself in one day. His productivity, probably falsified with Putin- and Trump-like disregard for fact, was paraded as an example to other Soviet workers. Heroised, Alexei toured extensively exhorting greater effort. They set up a massive statue to him in this his home town. It’s a marvellous thing by the looks of it. If it hasn’t been destroyed already I do hope it survives.

Loss of the impositions at Outwood and Beswick would worry no one. Nobody would miss them, or demand them back. They are the worthless products of talentless artists promoted and bought by a collection of religious fanatics with perverse priorities. They mean absolutely nothing to anyone anywhere except for State Art crusaders. On the other hand Stakhanov’s statue, conceived and made with passion, would be a loss because it has the nerve to believe in something, to promote an ideal and, most of all, to look impressive.

When art is placed in a public setting everyone should be able to recognise it and form an opinion as to its merits. In order to achieve this art must first return to basics.

JULY/AUGUST, 2023

The latest press release arrives from the Serpentine, a place, we are told, with a “robust programme”, which sounds slightly threatening. It begins: “From 1 June to 10 September 2023, Serpentine will present Web(s) of Life, the first major exhibition in the UK of artist Tomás Saraceno and collaborators, including spider/webs; the communities of Salinas Grandes and Laguna de Guayatayoc, Argentina; spider diviners in Somié, Cameroon; the ongoing research-driven community projects Aerocene and Arachnophilia initiated by the artist; as well as the life forms of the Royal Parks.”

You may notice they’ve taken a leaf out of the Tate’s book and dropped both the definite article and ‘Gallery’ from their name. Very cool. Delving deeper, what ‘Serpentine’ hopes to achieve is “building connections between art and society”. We are not informed which particular ‘society’ this might be, but it probably enjoys the seaweed soda bread they sell in their ugly café of which they are so proud it gains honourable mention in the current annual report … which goes on: “We aim to diversify our audiences and increase audience retention, through an emphasis on different visitor experiences informed by data. We will do this by strengthening our brand, vision and mission, implementing a three-year audience framework and diversifying media reach and creative partnerships.” Brands, missions, visions, media reach … You’d think you were dealing with Burger King or John Lewis, but this corporate claptrap comes from an art gallery!

And so … and so we must return wistfully to the umpteenth singing of a favourite old hymn of ours. Why is the Serpentine so obsessed with showing anything from abroad and scarcely anything originating at home. What, for example, does the above flea circus inspired by the eight-legged say to native British artists with nowhere prominent to exhibit their paintings or in which to expect a retrospective?
In the Serpentine’s last published accounts the gallery received £3.142 millions in public subsidy via the Arts Council. This amount included their annual ‘on the nod’ subsidy of a million-plus, nearly two millions from the Cultural Recovery Fund (recovery from what exactly?), plus a wedge from the last of the Covid furloughing of its 75 employees. And what the blazes do 75 full-time staff do in a converted tearoom with an annexe? As usual with their annual reports, in order to find out anything one must wade through more than 200 pages of cringe-inducing self-congratulation – ‘modesty’ is not a word Hans O’Bisto, the Swiss director (£130,000 a year), has come across in any of the languages in which he claims fluency, albeit mostly in artbollocks. State Art is a career ladder well worth shoving others off in order to scramble upwards. Last year, for example, the Serpentine had only one person (O’Bisto naturally) earning more than a hundred grand, now they have four. One wonders how British artists, whose average earnings is around £12,000 pa (below the poverty line note), must feel about a Treasury-supported gallery which hardly ever shows British work, and where curators can earn ten times more than the average artist. Personally, I’ve never come across a curator, or indeed a critic or gallery director, who is worth more than an artist. I can’t recall any ‘Contemporary Art’ curator ever telling me anything I considered worth knowing. Contemporary Art curating is, in any case, not a real ‘profession’ precisely because it is a charlatan’s charter. No scholarship is involved, you just make it up so that anything at all becomes relevant. In any worthwhile art industry the artist would stand at the pinnacle. After all, it is their work that will last. Alas, the State Art pyramid balances on its point, with the fattest penpushers on the plateau crushing the breath out of the rest. Where is a satirist like Gillray when you need him?

And what of the trustees, those supposed guardians of the public interest, up to? Nothing. Placing genuine artists and art historians on these boards is avoided. They might muddy the water with common sense while encouraging more traditional forms of excellence. No, trustees are chosen mainly because they are rich and, we discover, may provide loan guarantees when wolves comes howling. Between them the Serpentine’s trustees contributed to the gallery’s coffers £2.5 million in cash in the last reported year, much of it from one trustee alone. So don’t be under any illusions that the State Art club is not self-contained and self-perpetuating. It is. What no one asks about the Serpentine, and others aboard the Arts Council’s Bisto Express, is why it should receive a ha’penny of public subsidy at all, given that it does almost nothing for the majority of British artists while expecting the public to cough up in support of its prejudices. It is obvious why State Art protects this corrupt system so avidly while defending itself with lies about how popular and successful it is. Why should any of us support a gallery which “has long stood at the forefront of global convenings across cultures and disciplines”? Who are the jobsworths who scribble this tripe … and why are they paid so much?

MAY/JUNE, 2023

Three things, related after a fashion. First. Every day The Jackdaw receives scores of unsolicited emails of little interest. Many of these messages promote young artists, each of whom is announced with a loud fanfare of adjectives suggesting genius of global reach. Their promoters specialise (or so they assert) in spotting ‘rising stars’ – any green, Fine Art BA is no one these days if not a ‘rising star’. And if you’re in the market for ‘collecting’, that deceitful euphemism for ‘investing’, you must climb aboard now, they urge, while you can still afford them. But beware the lingo, if you dare, for ‘Ones to watch’, another commonly used devious phrase, rarely has anything to do with ‘Ones to actually look at’. The implied promise here is that your ‘support’ of these stellar names may multiply once the artist is swept up by a dealer capable of pulling more strings than Quasimodo so that prices rise, critics drool, buyers queue, billionaires punt, auctioneers hype, then Bingo! It’s time to cash in and buy that e-type. Sweeping aside the flannel, the fundamental here is Greed. The market in contemporary art rarely discusses quality of work, not least because, conveniently, there is no longer any way of relatively appraising it. On the other hand, investment you can definitely measure. This reminds me: decades ago virtuoso guitarist, Eric Clapton, bought abstract works by Gerhard Richter. He was well advised; perhaps he even liked them. In recent times these canvases sold for tens of millions. It caused me to speculate that Slowhand made more from investing in art than ever he did riffing so brilliantly with Jack and Ginger. For such is the dividend offered for spotting ‘rising stars’.

Second. Parallel to the above is the marketing of fashionable trends which appeal to the less discerning (but morally ever-so-superior) younger audience. Today, and especially because students are not trained in any way to stand out technically from their peers, artists are likely selected for promotion based on criteria distant from any originality or special competence in what they produce. Because similarly minded people as those they seek to attract are in charge of our public galleries, such considerations and topics are hammered home to the exclusion of all others. Preaching to the easily converted is a cinch. These are generally not the conditions for work attractive to older audiences, those who are used to demanding of art more than mere lip service to their political persuasions. And here lies the answer to a question I was recently posed about why those of my pensioner generation no longer attend State Art outlets with the frequency they once did, if at all. The ICA, Hayward, Serpentine, Whitechapel have all sacrificed a discerning audience in pursuit of another one which is more sympathetic to the social and political obsessions of their staff.

Third. In John Rattigan’s article (p. 22) he mentions an artist, Thomas Denny (shamingly I hadn’t heard of him), whose work, he writes, will still be admired centuries after most of the modern charlatans currently crowing have been silenced and their works condemned to permanent storage outside Swindon. I agree with him; to me this belief in the inevitable failure of almost anything fashionable is a self-evident truth, almost a Commandment. He cites a major commission completed by Denny, a designer and maker of stained glass, for the church of Burton Percy, a Yorkshire hamlet south of Tadcaster neighbouring the 1461 Roses’ battlefield of Towton, with its infamous distinction of being the bloodiest ever fought on our soil. This is a 500–year–old perpendicular Gothic church of quite beautiful proportions with carved box pews throughout. The surrounding area is an English idyll of streams, willows and yews, flood meadows, rooks, lapwings and, presently, the golden glow of flowering rape. Inside the church (if you’re lucky), its stained glass, including a recognisable Burne-Jones’s figure, Charity, flanked each side by an angel, sings courtesy of bright sunshine. Denny’s three tall lancet windows at the rear was a commission to celebrate the millennium. Foliage flames dance skywards. Hidden in their patterns, twists and turns are details of spirits, animals, fishes, birds and people celebrating peace, goodwill and respect for all creatures great and small. I don’t normally care for modernistic windows in old churches because they appear insensitive, so gratingly out of tune – Hockney’s disfigurement of Westminster Abbey is the superlative example of this – but I was won over by this one, whose subject is optimistic in so dark an age. Its decent secular themes complement the compatible religiously-inspired ones nearby. And the craft, all Denny’s own work of course, is at least on a par with theirs.

MARCH/APRIL, 2023

The New Year’s Honours List once again did State Art proud. The Pantomime Dame was made a real Dame for being unable to say no to any opportunity involving rancid self-promotion. The departing head of Tate Modern got a CBE for doing her job whilst studiously policing the State Art line for backsliders. The Director of the Baltic, a venue hosting numerous major exhibitions, got an MBE, also it seems simply for turning up. Michael Landy, who once destroyed all his possessions to great acclaim, got a CBE because, well, it was probably his turn. As a serving RA you get one, it’s that easy. Ingrid Pollard accepted an MBE, the honours equivalent of a wooden spoon … Curious, isn’t it, that these supposedly anti-establishment types will accept anything even, amazingly, stuff with ‘British Empire’ tagged on the end.

John Akomfrah is knighted for being … everywhere, the human passe partout of State Art. This follows an OBE in 2008 and a CBE in 2017 – imagine that, he’s got a full set for making films no one watches. And clearly he worships a British Empire all these clones are supposed to loathe. His ‘arty’ multi-screen films are nothing remarkable. Their level of competence is the very least an audience conditioned by television and Hollywood might reasonably expect of a filmmaker. The best you can say about his work is that it’s fit only to be shown in an art gallery where normal criteria of film judgment have necessarily to be suspended. The bar in films is set very low indeed by the visual art establishment – not even the world’s most lissom limbo dancer could wriggle under the State Art film bar.

It wasn’t always thus. Carol Reed was knighted only after making The Third Man and Odd Man Out, both masterpieces; the latter among the greatest of all British films. David Lean had to have made This Happy Breed (also a masterpiece), Brief Encounter, Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago and Oliver Twist before he was knighted. Tony Richardson, who directed A Taste of Honey and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, both memorable pictures, didn’t qualify even for a rosette. And then there’s John Schlesinger, Lindsay Anderson and Karel Reisz who weren’t knighted despite directing superb films. Guy Green and Jack Cardiff, cinematographers responsible for some of the most enduring images in British art, qualified only for OBEs. Robert Krasker, a great ‘noir’ original (he filmed This Happy Breed, The Third Man and Odd Man Out), got nothing; likewise Freddie Francis. Can you name a single one of Akromfrah’s films? Me neither. So why him? And now, to add to his K, CBE and OBE he has also just been selected to represent us at the next Venice Biennale.

The deputy chief executive of the Arts Council, Simon Mellor, got an OBE ‘for services to the arts’. That is a bad joke. ‘Services to the arts’ is his job. He works for a charity which gives away billions of taxpayer’s cash and is paid the eyewatering wedge of £156,000 p.a. to do it. His boss, meanwhile, the Arts Council’s Chief Executive, Darren Henley, has previously notched up an OBE and, last year, a CBE, also for ‘services to the arts’. It’s a weird system this, because once you’ve got one medal if you stick at it long enough you’ll get another for doing the same thing. In Henley’s case he pockets £180,000 a year for turning up, not including an accumulated pension pot of four hundred grand.

Not one of these people has done anything extraordinary that couldn’t have reasonably been expected as a duty of their already handsomely remunerated positions. And performing acts of charity is no more than most of the population do quietly as routine with no expectation of either acknowledgement or reward.

A century ago Lloyd George was pilloried for the naked fraud of trafficking in titles, which led to the Honours Act of 1925. In theory this made it illegal to sell gongs. But nothing has changed. No one has ever been convicted for peddling UK honours, although a case is currently under CPS consideration concerning the Prince’s Trust which, allegedly, offered a knighthood to an Arab in exchange for a bagful of tenners. Blair is the only serving PM to have been interviewed by the fuzz for trading in medals. To you and me he would have been as guilty as Cain but, of course, he talked his way out of it. They all do it, whilst pretending they don’t and vigorously protesting their innocence. This entire squalid system should be scrapped and replaced with something untainted and which is awarded only to seriously meritorious candidates, those who have changed our lives for the better. This doesn’t apply to Akomfrah, Landy, Mellor and the rest of them whose names and works are unremarkable and unknown to almost everyone.

If Lloyd George was corrupt what does that make State Art with its widespread dispersal of unearned medals to those lickspittles who support it?
For ‘State Art’ read ‘DIRTY GREAT RACKET’.

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER, 2022

The Bassae Frieze, one of the least appreciated major works in the British Museum, is from the Temple of Apollo Epikourios at Bassae, a place which in Greek means ‘ravine’ – surrounded by them it is well named. In its spectacular location at 3,700 feet up in the Arcadian mountains and visible from 30 miles away, it is on a par for majesty with the headland Temple of Poseidon at Sounion on the southern tip of Attica. According to Pausanias (writing 600 years later) the architect of this Doric temple was Ictinus, joint author of the Parthenon. As with so many important sites in Greece its impressiveness is impaired by having been covered since 1987; more recently it has been wrapped in a shiny white circus big top. It takes hours of anticipation to reach this remote and special place with the impact on arrival one of massive disappointment. Inside the tent a potentially moving encounter is blunted further by meagre light on the dark local limestone and the further annoyance of tinny pop music blaring from the restorers’ radio. One rarely forms any impression of urgency or industry in Greek restoration projects – the Parthenon, for example, has been at least partially covered all my lifetime. And at the current rate of progress Man will have landed and grown tulips on Mars before Bassae is kissed once again by sunlight. If the Greeks care as much as they protest they do about their monuments why do their restorations take forever?

The sculptures, which originally ran 20 feet up around the inside of the cella, and which weren’t carved to be seen from below, were excavated in 1815 and bought by our government soon afterwards for £19,000. The Greeks have recently suggested we return them. They may have a point: on my last two visits the lights weren’t working properly obscuring two corners of the bespoke gallery.
The frieze is two feet high and the relief three inches, although the cleverness of the illusion is that the space created appears much deeper. The ordering of the 23 panels is tricky to establish because scenes rarely overlap between sections and no record was made by original excavators as to where precisely each was found in relation to the others. There appears to be no narrative drive. Two stories are told, both of them familiar from other classical friezes: there is the drunken riot over kidnapped women between Centaurs and Lapiths and, second, the hand-to-hand combat between Herakles’ Greeks and the Amazons.

Considering the travails of earthquakes and neglect blighting this vulnerable location, the sculptures are in surprisingly good nick with many details as fresh as the day they were carved. I can’t find a single unconvincing passage of form. Although subjects are mythical, the exertions of fighting figures are all too human and real. One detail of a single clenched fist thrust out by a dying warrior speaks volumes while being little bigger than a match box – indeed, all throughout, the impact of these figures belies their small size. Recently on the television a foolish critic wrongly compared these works unfavourably with the Parthenon sculptures, some of which are themselves far from first rank. Of course, it is entirely possible, indeed more than likely, that some of the same sculptors were contracted to both schemes.

At least two theories are current as to their authorship. One scholar identifies three separate hands, which seems reasonable given the division of labour employed in large decorative programmes like this one. Another suggestion is that Paionios of Mende, author of the stunning Nike which stood outside the Temple of Zeus at Olympia (now in the local museum), as the designer in overall charge. Olympia is 40 miles from Bassae and the Nike was made just after 421 BC and is therefore close in date to the project at Bassae.

The sculptures were made some time after completion (in 430BC) of the Parthenon sculptures, between 420 and 400BC; that is, at the height of the 30-year Peloponnesian Wars between Sparta and Athens so exhaustively documented by Thucydides. War was being waged close to Bassae with hoplites marching in the area. These astonishing sculptures must have been carved on site while all the time travel was dangerous, city alliances fluid, treaties worthless, and murder summary and often committed for sport. Hardly auspicious days for itinerant sculptors to be giving of their best.

I invite you to visit the British Museum … and then the open-air Frieze sculpture extravaganza in Regent’s Park to see if you agree with me that somewhere along the way those qualities exemplified by the Bassae carvings – skill, seriousness, purpose, belief and a desire to touch people profoundly across time – have been lost only to be replaced by trivia and whim.

Enjoy the Bassae Frieze while you can. It will remind you how masterful, painstaking, concentrated and moving sculpture at its best can be.

MARCH/APRIL 2022

The egoism causing so many to amend their appearance by undergoing expensive cosmetic surgery also thrives in the art establishment, which can’t stop ‘beautifying’ the appearance of its major galleries. If only these regular facelifts provided any improvement to the experience of viewing pictures.

I am now old enough to remember our main London galleries being partially or wholly closed for long periods at least twice each during my lifetime. And rarely have I thought any of these alterations necessary or anything other than vanity projects dreamed up by ambitious directors desperate for a medal. By the way, why does painting and decorating at museums take so long? 20-storey tower blocks at Finsbury Park were finished recently from scratch in just over a year, yet it takes three years for the mere nose job of moving the National Portrait Gallery’s door from the front to the side. Being a perfectly agreeable nose in the first place this wasn’t even necessary. The NPG worked fine even when considering that the last rebuild made a hash of a place that had been better before that. The Burrell in Glasgow, re-opening March 29th, has been closed five years for a £68 million renovation. And the Tate in Liverpool recently announced a £25 million full facial transplant, “a major re-imagining”, also requiring long closure, and also completely unnecessary. Yet these same institutions are perennially claiming acute poverty. At the Gladstone Museum in Stoke irreplaceable curators are being laid off to save money due to council cuts. Where is the overall plan here?
The latest gallery to have been ‘re-imagined’ is the Courtauld, always a favourite of mine with its thrills spanning the history of western art. Whilst pretending to study in the Warburg Institute library in the 1970s, I couldn’t believe my luck having the Courtauld Collection on the top floor of the same Woburn Square building. After four bobsworth of cottage pie in the church crypt opposite, I’d spend the rest of my lunchtime (and more) upstairs looking at great pictures: Jane Avril, Cézanne’s pine overhang, that stunning Renoir, the bottle of Bass, the Daddis, Rubens’ dazzling sketches, young Georges’ powder puff, even that famous bandage. God how I loved that place. I felt so privileged to have all this special work, in my case only encountered before in books, available free. Then, when the collection moved to Somerset House, it fast acquired an admission charge deterrent to casual visiting. Even so, once or twice a year, usually for their superb small exhibitions, I could re-acquaint with the favoured few at the same time. This is the way art works. Like a drug, you become addicted to such intimate friendships. Not even the current crop of young curators seem able, for all their moral soap-boxing, to re-write this fundamental contract. The fact is that good art wins out anywhere.

So what of the new arrangement, with its inevitably hiked fee? The same pictures are still there … plus that amazing Campin which came later. But what do you get for a three-year closure and £57 million? Not much it would seem:

1. The iron filigree of the Rowlandson staircase has been painted a racy blue.
2. Some trendy lightwood parquet floors – how very ‘Contemporary Art’.
3. The inevitable wokey captions about slavery – negative karma for donor
   Gambier-Parry whose inheritance was dubiously acquired.
4. Gauguin, surprise surprise, is outed as a paedo.
5. There’s a swish hardwood ticket counter … with the same lovely SW7 gels.
6. All the rooms have been given coats of tasteful Dulux matt.
7. Oligarch Blavatsky, never known to pass a launderette, has his name in lights.
8. There is the welcome addition of a new gallery of works by Constable, Jones
   (T) and Cotman among others, from its collection of 26,000 drawings.
9. A room on the top floor is given to minor modern and contemporary stuff,
   all of it of a predictably fashionable persuasion … and not much cop.
10. In the alcove behind the stairwell has appeared a daub by Cecily Brown, which
    is easily the biggest and worst picture in the place. Whose idea was that?

As far as I’m concerned the Courtauld wasted 57 million quid that would have been far better spent on those without clean water and nothing to eat. The previous arrangement suited well enough. Did anyone complain about it? In the end it doesn’t matter how many barrels of Botox you inject, galleries are only as good as their permanent collections – “the content of their character” as Dr King expressed it so simply. The highlights today are the same as they were 50 years ago in Bloomsbury. It shouldn’t matter if the floor is scuffed or the lift rattles, you just need to look. The rest is irrelevant window dressing designed to attract the richer tourists and sippers of peppermint tea.

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2022

The third, and one assumes last, volume in Martin Bailey’s account of Van Gogh’s mature career deals with the last seventy days before the painter shot himself on July 27th, 1890, with death following two days after (Auvers: Finale, Frances Lincoln, £25) Bonus sections are tagged on the end: the first deals with the manner of his death, recently the cause of much ridiculous and deliberately sensational speculation; the second with the growth in Vincent’s artistic reputation and the coincident appeal of his work to fakers – the experimental, rushed Auvers style being a particularly easy one to rip off.

As ever with Bailey’s work this is the book of a terrier researcher doggedly in pursuit of what precisely happened at that second. Alas, the evidence is rarely as conclusive as he would like it to be, so the text is seasoned with innumerable ‘must haves’, ‘might haves’, ‘would haves’, ‘could haves’, ‘probablys’, ‘possiblys’ and ‘presumablys’. Bailey is, however, always even-handed when weighing uncertainties and he is right to be dismissive of crackpot theories concerning Vincent’s death. The only absurdity about the painter’s demise which hasn’t yet been seriously aired is that a passing alien shot his ear off and he bled to death. There can be not an atom of doubt that Van Gogh committed suicide. One thing is certain, even if you are knowledgable about the artist you’ll know considerably more by the end of this book. However, Bailey, as a devoted pupil of Mr Gradgrind, whilst sound on the facts is not so good when critically appraising pictures themselves, about which he too often errs on the side of generosity – a common failing this among commentators where established reputations are concerned. Too often the assumption, coloured by a willing surrender to romance and worship, is that because these are the last works they are imbued with special authority and represent a sort of apogee. They don’t. If anything they mark a serious tailing off involving an unapologetic retreat from any convention.

Vincent breaks the train journey from St Rémy to Auvers to spend two seemingly happy days with his brother in Paris. Considering he’d had a ‘mad’ episode as little as six weeks before – only the latest in a regular series of black-outs – all evidence suggests he is looking well and calm, some even said normal.

Always a stranger to peace of mind, outward appearances were deceptive. Wherever he had lived loneliness dogged him, his art having demanded long periods of solitary study. Isolation, drink, bad diet, a tendency to over-theorise and lack of love fuelled his worst enemy, anxiety, for which work alone (or oblivion) seemed the sole cure. Concentration kept most demons at bay. Insecurity about lack of sales and the threat of losing essential hand-outs from his financially stretched brother tried his nerves during these last weeks. A final reckoning was inevitable. Following a Sunday spent painting he walked in the evening to a spot not far from his café lodging and shot himself in the chest. He had often stated and written that the finality of death appealed to him as a release from the constant torture inflicted by his own mind. Few suspected the inner turmoil he disguised so well. Gachet, that eccentric cocktail of medical doctor and charlatan (Vincent thought him bats), who was supposed to be keeping an eye on the artist, suspected nothing. He should have looked more closely at the pictures, which were exploding all over the place.

Productivity in Auvers was intense: Vincent started on average almost a picture a day. He was a painter in a hurry and the conclusion must be that, as a most intelligent realist, his inner reason had left him in no doubt that time was short. Many pictures look slapdash and tentative, unresolved. Our own Auvers landscape in the National Gallery is clearly unfinished although there’s no acknowledgment of this obvious fact in the picture’s caption. Other works are unfocused and starkly unconventional. Continuing where he left off in St Rémy, they reject completely the traditional formulae for picture-making which Vincent had persevered so patiently to master early in his short career. Lack of inhibition takes over. He couldn’t any longer care less about local colour, straight lines or accurate topography. Everything swims in this lawlessness of complete freedom. These are paintings which, although prompted by actual motifs, are straight out of his head. Landscapes, especially the double-square canvases, become bland, wide-angle panoramas with flat, unappealing foregrounds, betraying abhorrence of the particular and with paint squelched out in either streaks or a rhythmic staccato of blunt stabs. They are either frenziedly out of control or single-mindedly in pursuit of a new way of mediating his personal world through pictures. These last works are quite unlike any other paintings done before that time.

A tiny, wild ‘portrait’ head done at some point in Auvers, in which the hair is in flames and the unresolved flesh only vaguely human, fetched $46 million at Christie’s in November.