Tag: Archive

David Lee
November/December 2020

In the last editorial, when describing the new full bloom of official Wokeism, I didn’t have space to consider if, in the context of State Art’s exclusive obsession with conceptual and minimal art, work selected without resort to the gender/sexual/racial ticklist would be of a higher standard than what is chosen when applying it. Over the years I’ve seen no convincing evidence that it would. Wokeism is offensive, but there’s no mileage in kidding ourselves we are missing much as a result of its now universal adoption. Yes it is unfair, patronising, predictable and crassly discriminatory but it doesn’t matter how you choose most State Art work because, in terms of its judgeable quality, there isn’t that much to choose between anything by anyone. 

State Art is a charlatan’s charter, the clapped out, undying endgame of Modernism where anything goes. It is the one approach in which no artist can be seen to be better than any other. Thus a majority of such work comes and goes but leaves neither trace nor afterglow. Even works hyped as masterpieces, as almost everything routinely is nowadays, are instantly unmemorable and forgotten as soon as seen. And because working in this area is so easy to get away with, there is no shortage of it. The best known and most expensive artists – those written up with uncritical servility in the posh papers – are not actually the best, they are merely the most cleverly and assiduously promoted; and the less said about the risible flannel used to justify their unwarranted status the better.

Knowing which works are any good, and which are not, has always been a problem with State Art because you can’t judge conceptualism by the criteria used to evaluate previous art. Even when it comes in the form of painting and sculpture all traditional values are not just overturned but discouraged. Conspicuous incompetence becomes a positive attribute (see Moping Owl, p. 9): I need only draw your attention to the forthcoming exhibition at the Tate of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s paintings which, judged against traditional standards of figuration, are abysmal.

Having nothing else to go on, critical response to conceptual art can, therefore, only be informed by personal whim. We must always take on trust the opinion of those we assume must be better informed. A comprehensive traditional training in art history, for example, is no use at all when dealing with State Art, where no such inconvenience as connoisseurship exists.

It was a brilliant achievement of conceptualism’s original promoters to shift the onus of finding meaning from artist to viewer. How they managed this with so little complaint or objection remains a mystery; the salesmen must have been magicians, or bullies, and the rest of us cowed by a dread of appearing backward. As one influential devotee pointed out at the time: “Depending on one’s energy and interest one can get into lots of different levels of association.” I think this meant that if you look for long enough and you have a sufficiently fertile imagination you can make anything at all mean anything you like. By force of will and personality alone you might convince yourself that an arrangement of nothing much is the Rondanini Pietà. And many do indeed convince themselves of such absurdities.

Additionally, every conceptual artist’s work is so individual it renders comparisons impossible. This is a tremendous advantage. What difference does it make how you select artists if there is no way of evaluating convincingly what they do? Consider the recent joint winners of the Turner Prize. Except for the selectors’ tedious obsessions with colonialism, slavery, gayness, blackness, disability, and assorted permutations thereof, the recipients seem as equally indifferent in quality of work as might hundreds of other potential candidates, or indeed any previous Turner winners. Irrespective of any physical trait or sexual leaning, you might just as well throw the names of all eligible candidates into a hat and play lucky dip because, I suggest, the standard of what emerged would be unaffected.

Such conclusions are never more obvious than when considering ‘visual artists’ who use film. Regrettably for them, their efforts are instantly comparable to the work of true professionals. Film was the most serious new art form of the 20th century. Nothing in painting and sculpture came near to it in visual quality and especially in its popular appeal. If you judge video artists’ projections by the standards of cinema, the only possible conclusion is that they are all amateurish, pretentious tripe playable only where demanding criteria are ignored, namely in State Art galleries.

David Lee
September/October 2020

A watershed moment in the official story of art has been reached. Unlike in the first decades of the last century, when experimental isms followed one another annually, the first decades of the 21st have until now seen no signal change in direction or emphasis: recently, in contemporary art we’ve been living through a period of dreary status quo.

My lifetime has witnessed few moments of paradigm shift. Pop and Op were the first I was aware of. They were part of the same liberating ethos of the ’60s as The Beatles, Emma Peel and drugs. I became aware of the new visual age at boarding school when, in 1964, our dorm curtains were swapped from drab to a bright pattern of pastel bubbles, like magnified spittle – we had nowt like them in Manchester. Ten years later, when ‘sculptors’ started hiking and burying themselves, Conceptualism swept Pop away. There were no criteria for judging this baffling stuff, we simply accepted it on the supposedly better informed say-so of those who were, one way or another, flogging it to us. Like all allegedly avant-garde developments it was written about in code and as though it was the only thing in existence. Then, in the early ’90s, came the yBas with their publicity seeking and a clapped out recapitulation of Duchamp and Warhol. This frivolous Opportunism was still really just boring old Conceptualism, but at least it had its tits out. Alas, the gene pool of Opportunism was limited, its few ideas thin and repeated, its protagonists squalidly on the make. A re-jigged Turner Prize helped drag out the yBa tendency for longer than it was actually alive. Far from being ‘cutting edge’, as was claimed, this deeply conservative, post-mortem phase outstayed its welcome. Art seemed bogged down, this year’s genius as forgettable as last’s: what could possibly follow the ultimate freedom to do anything you fancy?

The answer turns out to be Politics. During the Turner’s self-composting demise, the emphasis of official interest mutated, virus-like, away from what artists did to who they were, where they came from and what they looked like. But what started as a social engineering fad organised by a defeated Left has now metamorphosed into a fully-formed political party fixated on hatred of the past. This new ism, invented by curators, is inspired by political events and a non-negotiable moral code based on a fantasy of equality. Thus relegated from driving seat to boot, artists either conform or starve.

The rise of the curator is now complete. In 1945 the Tate had one of them, now it has scores dealing exclusively with contemporary work – god knows what they all do. Dire warnings of the inevitable dictatorship that would follow upon “the revolutionary act of public subsidy” after its introduction in 1946 have come to pass. And so it is that the authorised version of contemporary art has evolved into one of Orwell’s “smelly little orthodoxies”.

All careerist curators subscribe to Wokeism. They have to because adherence to the cause is the chief qualification for any museum job. The Wokeist curator believes in “cultural democratisation”, a mouthful intended to hide more than it reveals. In practice this means a policy menu giving precedence to gender, sexual persuasion, foreignness, disability and especially skin colour – all characteristics previously considered irrelevant when evaluating artistic ability. Now having attained its full flowering, Wokeism is a self-perpetuating club recognising no alternatives which (whilst ironically preaching tolerance) proscribes debate or opposition. The ease with which Wokeists are provoked to over-reaction by assumed transgressions against their beliefs has become reminiscent of an Inquisition. Indeed, Wokeism marks the first time since the USSR’s Socialist Realism that a political prescription has assumed total control of a country’s art. And like Stalin’s mandates, Wokeism’s flagrant denial of free thought and speech trump any attempt to satirise them.

This state is undesirable for all manner of sound reasons but – the Wokeist march through the institutions now being complete – it’s not easily reversible, so powerful, well-funded and self-righteous is its control. Opposition is made almost impossible because media organisations are onside and those who might object are silenced by the disproportionate consequences of speaking out. This deep fear and reticence, recently identified in an independent survey of gallery staff, is understandable when any even casual denunciation by a prominent Wokeist is likely to mean you won’t work again. Time to stand up and be counted. 

David Lee
July/August 2020

It’s been hard to avoid following the fortunes of our present crop of self-appointed ‘war artists’. You may recall from the past, as I do, that many of the finest achievements in 20th century British art were produced in response to war. Artists rose to the occasion. So how has the performance of our State Art stars measured up during the most socially disruptive, deadly and economically disastrous crisis since 1945?

Chancers to the last, during solitary the Usual Suspects have left no stone unturned to keep their names up in flashing lights (while masquerading as benefactors naturally). Thousands may die – how sad – but there are points to be scored, positions to be consolidated and the whiff of medals in the air. 

And so it is that we’ve been deluged with slogans, printed and projected, all of them featuring the subtlety of mind typical of conceptual artists for whom even basic thinking is a Boot Camp assault course (retired hurt). So what have they done? They have: issued banal posters by the ream (that bonehead Deller to the fore here) supportive of the NHS, an unavoidable theme; phoned The Guardian at a minute past nine to give advance warning of stunts imminent; taken arty-farty self-portraits on their phones; adjusted historical masterpieces so they wear protective uniforms; confided favourite lockdown recipes; configured ‘installations’ from food tins, cartons and toilet rolls; written confessional diaries in what some had the audacity to believe was poetry  (the Margate Express ­– Sunday service only – was first in line here); collaged newspapers à la Cubism, except 110 years late and not as well; faffed about on balconies with lengths of flapping cloth and improvised stage props; knocked out knobbly caricatures and virus paintings (Marc Quinn this one) which “explored the paradox of living through a real, life-changing time with an unseen enemy that is strangely abstract”; and designed face masks in signed limited editions, some at ridiculous prices. Then there was the ubiquitous O’Bisto who ‘curated’ a programme of interviews with animals and flowers for an app, or something. Others tried desperately to be filmmakers with predictably amateurish results. Gormless, who was frightfully concerned, turned up regularly to spout bollocks, no change there. Some even showed off their pets and made miniature exhibitions for them, while others, considering their woke politics worthy of sharing, blamed a sitting-duck Government of wafflers for everything ever. Some were even suffering such acute interview cold turkey they resorted to cross-examining themselves and then each other, before airing and twittering the results. It was relentless, a daily siege. And all in the name of art.

There were lighter moments, especially when Dick Flasher popped up. In what can only have been intended as an amusing self-parody, he proffered advice to aspiring painters. That was a cracker – ‘Dick the Mahl Stick Maestro’. ‘First Commandment: Buy yourself some big brushes and a mop, load up ferkins of emulsion at Wickes and then – here’s the really clever bit! – get someone else to slap it on while you phone round the papers to tell them what you’re challenging today.’ His limited edition rainbow butterflies looked bad enough to have been knocked out by himself. Then he cropped up again trying to encourage everyone to make their own swirlers using a special switch on their phones. Surprise surprise, if the results didn’t turn out to be just as swirly as his own. “Totally mega”, declared an ecstatic Dick.

But no – there was even more. Up leapt the ‘elusive’ Banksy, and didn’t you just know he would. When a populist bandwagon skids round the corner you know that as night follows day Banksy will be running alongside in his balaklava trying to be first aboard. Stripped of his street canvas due to being forced to stay indoors (the dummy should have tried Barnard Castle, there are tempting stretches of virgin old walls there), he stencilled some rats in his bathroom to signify … something about rats I suppose.

You couldn’t keep these geniuses down. They viralled and virtualled till they were blue in the face. We will build a new world, they threatened, not realising the depressing, art-historical irony in that choice of phrase. And, guess what, it all totted up to bugger all that was either interesting or memorable. For all the help they were we might as well have resorted to the self-harm of watching a box set of Tacita Dean videos.

As usual, our finest – ‘The Few’ – have yet to produce anything of lasting worth. Where are Spencer, Sargent, Muir, Lavery, Lamb, Ravilious, Piper, Orpen, Lewis, Moore and the Nashes when you need them?

David Lee
May/June 2020

A few inches of headway have finally been made in drawing wider public attention to the power grabs of the Arts Council and the political and social prejudices of State Art in general. The House of Commons Culture Select Committee must now get its act together and take to task the arts bodies that have become breeding grounds for such obsessive beliefs. Not having any further excuse for inaction, it should pay more attention to the conditions under which £470 million is distributed.

A report just published by Arts Professional (AP) exposes the suffocating biases imposed by our major arts institutions. AP is an independent website unsupported by the Arts Council and, therefore, like The Jackdaw, immune to its menaces. If AP had been dependent on Council subsidy, as so many similar organisations are, they couldn’t have published their damning dossier of evidence into the thinking of museum staff, because any grant they received would instantly have been withdrawn. Arts commentator and music specialist, Richard Morrison of the Times, was brave enough to bring this report to wider attention otherwise, like all other criticisms of the visual art establishment, it might have been conveniently ignored. Extracts of his powerful piece are quoted on page 39. No other newspaper has touched the story, which in itself speaks volumes for their tacit complicity in what is a disgusting system.

The findings will terrify anyone who thought open debate, argument and consensus, fairness and equality are better ways of conducting business and making decisions than by a secretive, ‘woke’, ideologically driven clique. It discovered that museum staff are routinely ostracised, threatened and gagged and are fearful to express opinions contrary to those dominating the Arts Council and its dependent clients. Even to question State Art fixations with climate change, Brexit, quota programming, sexuality and gender matters, is a passport to career stall or worse. For curators, adherence to political correctness is a more important qualification than scholarship. Since this system began to evolve 30 years ago, the AP poll is the first time that what was previously highlighted only in these pages has been independently confirmed. It shouldn’t be swept under the carpet. If the personal shock of one as eminent as Richard Morrison doesn’t carry any influence with the Culture Select Committee then we really are dealing with a self-perpetuating regime which an elected Government is too cowardly to confront.

A recent example of the prejudice with which this Leftist sect controls the Arts Council, galleries, museums and art education illustrates an intolerance of any alternative belief. Alexander Adams recently reviewed a book, Women Can’t Paint, in the current issue of an impressive new monthly journal, The Critic. Deploying his usual forensic manner, he dismantled the premises of a gender/racial/sexuality-obsessed approach to art history. Laughably, threats were made against him simply, it seemed to me, for holding views opposed to the author’s. One riposte accused Alexander as well as anyone who supports him – among others, myself – of being ‘Nazis’; a tag, in my experience, always the first resort of the intellectually slovenly.

I made the mistake of trying to read Women Can’t Paint myself. Abseiling down the Gherkin in a typhoon would have been easier than getting through the long, self-satisfied introduction. Worse was to come. I surrendered thoroughly exhausted at the end of the first sentence of Chapter 1, which reads: “In this chapter, I will reflect upon the masculinities and femininities in contemporary art.” Whatever that means. Amazing, is it not, how one short sentence, a mere fourteen words, can make the will to live crash in flames with no survivors. After reading that you just know only bottomless tedium awaits. It would have taken a bung worthy of Brian Clough to get me to start the second sentence, for the style owns all the tone-deaf inelegance typical of polytechnic feminist writing; that species of ghastly prose which makes you wonder wistfully where are the heirs to Lady Eastlake and Anita Brookner. Anyway, the point is that the author is so brainwashed by her own rectitude as to believe there is no rational opposition to her opinions and that anyone who thinks otherwise is an obvious … Nazi I suppose.

AP’s research now demonstrates compellingly that the mindset described here typifies the general attitude and demeanour of State Art. Come on Mr Committee Chairman Julian Knight MP, it’s about time you started investigating the bigotries of these undemocratic activists.

David Lee
March/April 2020

The Arts Council is offering a contract worth £42,000 for an expert to draw up guidelines on how museums must deal with what it calls ‘decolonisation’. Naturally, conclusions reached will be expected to reinforce the Council’s existing prejudices: it supports repatriation where possible, and exhibition contexts, especially captions, must report the serial crimes of colonialism with an emphasis on any potentially dubious means by which objects may have been acquired – the concerned Liberal mentality of metropolitan State Art, you understand, despises our colonial and imperial history. Once the Commandments of the resulting document are chiselled in stone, its recommendations will have to be followed. As with everything relating to the Arts Council, given its crucial position as sole Keeper of the Wallet, blackmail will be used to encourage compliance: museums failing to follow orders will be told to eat cake. 

Having first won legitimacy from an electorate, it is Governments which traditionally make laws not unelected quangos. Here is yet another example of how the ACE behaves increasingly like a Soviet Ministry of Culture, issuing diktats which must be followed at pain, in this instance, of financial penalty. Why should the Arts Council be poking its nose into formulating a code of behaviour for the ‘decolonisation’ of museums? Such matters are none of its business and were never intended to be.

For some reason fashionable obsessions with the likes of colonialism, diversity and gender remain dominant in the visual arts. They precede every other consideration. Emboldened by successive Governments’ indifference to their flagrant political activities, the Contemporary Art establishment gets further and further above itself; indeed the Art’s Council gives the impression of having the Government on the run.

When the Arts Council was founded in 1946 its purpose was to serve artists, not the other way round (see Moping Owl). Assistance included occasional purchases, and also organising touring exhibitions to parts of the country which, until that time, were uncharted territory for the work of artists living or historical. This was a necessary reaction to circumstances. Like everyone else, artists had endured a thin time during the ’30s Depression. Even well-known, accomplished painters frequently complained of selling no work, the generosity of private patronage alone in many cases preventing genuine hardship. Successes achieved by charitable bodies circulating shows to remote outposts, especially during the war years, encouraged positive ideas for the creation of a permanent post-war, state-run body. This developing plan wasn’t universally supported. Among other intellectuals, both Eliot and Orwell forecast that before long such an organisation would begin telling artists what to do. Their predictions gradually came to pass and have led to the current dictatorship of a narrow taste supported only by a few powerful individuals. Years ago this paper warned that the outcome of letting the Arts Council administer not just Treasury cash but also to distribute Lottery profits would give the Council a stranglehold it would use to make increasingly invasive demands with menaces attached. It’s been applying these contingencies now for thirty years, making grants conditional on meeting diversity, carbon recapture and gender/sexual/racial quotas.

Encouraged by the apparent unanimity of view among gallery and museum staff (these workers are hand-picked for willing compliance), the Council is now so cockily confident of its invulnerability they openly admit the terms of their blackmail. The special advantage the Council has now is to have a notable figurehead with form in precisely these areas. We wondered how long it would be before Comrade Serota showed his colours by forming the unelected Arts Secretariat of his dreams with himself as Big Brother. He took over the Council in 2016 after leaving the Tate in the hands of dreary dependables apparently delighted with the monoculture he’d established. He is now dictating policies at the Council intended to advance further the damaging progress already made towards a programme of social and political engineering which has nothing whatsoever to do with art.

It is long overdue that the actual Department of Culture informed itself properly about these developments. Both it and the Charities Commission should be investigating the Arts Council’s and its clients’ incursions into political matters which are nothing to do with either their charters or the legal requirements and responsibilities of a charity. 

Remain alert to the possibilities, eyes up instead of down, looking about instead of transfixed by a small screen, and daily life will furnish marvels, often in unexpected places. Exploring the streets and free institutions of a city like London is a journey through natural and man-made masterpieces, ingenuity everywhere apparent. To stand any chance of impressing in such a sweetshop official Contemporary Art needs to try a lot harder than it has so far.

Here are some sights that have captured my attention in only the last few days: the perfect functional simplicity of a clinker built signal box standing high over a complex railway junction; Lindsay Clark’s war memorial on Borough High Street – a crouching Tommy advancing through slutch and rotting flesh, death imminent; sublime choreography courtesy of Kevin de Bruyne; the chin-dropping magnificence that is Gene Kelly’s An American in Paris experienced on the big silver screen; Burnet and Tait’s ‘Egyptian’ Art Deco masterpiece, Adelaide House, on London Bridge, the tallest building in London in its day; an American F15 Eagle dogfighting an RAF Typhoon over the Wolds; pianist crooners Hoagy and Dooley in back-to-back Bogarts; Gwen John’s The Student in Manchester City Art Gallery, a delicate portrait of young Dorelia clutching dog-eared set texts; a double-act of canny jays in the ash outside my window, flashing sky blue and checkerboard; John Byrne’s brilliant display of characters at the Fine Art Society; The Black Friar; the chrome dream of a Harley shovelhead grunting at the New Oxford Street lights; ornate reliefs on a column drum in the BM from a temple perhaps touched by Alexander himself; a plain ash Gretsch in Denmark Street; Robert Krasker’s graphics in Odd Man Out; the suicide of a fraudulent City banker in Trollope’s The Way We Live Now, still relevant 150 years later; the gleaming, rail-blue Deltic Alcydon switched off in a siding; Peggy Sue Got Married … in the Co-op; the arch-forming planes along Rosebery Avenue; Chimes of Freedom live at the Newport Festival; a sleek bicycle stronger than steel and weighing less than a bag of sprouts; prankster Bruce McLean’s brilliant four-minute video I Want My Crown in Leeds Art Gallery; the De Chirico block that is Mount Pleasant Post Office; that special old girl, Betty Higden, taking to the roads in Our Mutual Friend; a goldcrest in a suburban garden; the physics-defying flying monster, all Mekon forehead, that is the aircraft specially designed to carry Airbus wings from Hawarden to Toulouse; Gilbert Bayes’s sculpted frieze on the Odeon cinema, formerly the Art Deco Saville Theatre, on Shaftesbury Avenue, recording the history of drama and dance through the ages; Rex Whistler’s masterpiece of panoramic trompe l’oeil muralism at Plas Newydd; darting swallows in Holman Hunt’s The Hireling Shepherd…

And then every night on the television or on YouTube or catch-up, and almost free, we can watch the greatest works by the greatest artists in the greatest art form of the 20th century that is popular cinema. In the last fortnight alone Michael Curtiz, Welles, Coppola, Fellini, the Boulting brothers, Kubrick, Michael Powell, Tarantino, Tarkovski, Marcel Carné, Scorsese, Vittorio De Sica, Eastwood, René Clair, Visconti, Mike Nicholls, MGM, Renoir, Sergio Leone … Stories and spectacles galore, collaborations of vast teams of those uniquely skilled with paint, music, sounds, costume, movement and make-believe, all with a powerful urge to entertain.

 Everywhere, in our free galleries, at home, on line, in the sky and in the street, and from the top deck of the 73 bus, we are gifted the miracles of geniuses making our lives better. And yet the shower placed in charge of visual art supposedly for our benefit gush critical superlatives – in deluded expectation of eliciting the same response from us – about a plaster cast of the inside of a hot water bottle or the space underneath a chair. Really, who do these gullible twerps think they are kidding? State Art and its creepy synod of apostles needs to get out more: the world’s amazing but what they show us is not. Public indifference to what they insist on forcing upon us is hardly a surprise. And this is the reason they had to make Rachel Whiteread’s Tate exhibition free when all their other shows cost a small fortune, otherwise the place would have been a ghost town. Any death mask is more stimulating than Whiteread’s entire oeuvre. 

In the beginning the powerful provided the unlettered with uplifting Biblical pictures in churches. We were impressed ­even though some scenes threatened us with eternal agony if we broke their rules. The scarcity of pictures outside of church meant we were naturally curious about anything drawn or coloured. Wandering pedlars would show up to impress us with secular material, crude woodcuts, illuminated song sheets, lampoons and the like. And, of course, when they needed us to fight, pictures of kings and generals were carted about the land – they looked well fed and warm.

In bigger towns there soon opened shops with pictures in the windows done by local painters and engravers who sold work to landowners and, later, to tradesmen and factory owners. The gentry had their portraits painted mainly so they could admire themselves. We could see pictures through the windows of their houses. Some had mountains and blue skies, dead animals and naked bodies. Pictures in civic buildings told stories we could recognise. There were even public shows of famous pictures society folk queued to see. Small prints of these grandstand works were for sale in shop windows.

Eventually, after we had migrated to work in dirty towns, there were opened imposing stone buildings, like temples, full of paintings and statues which working people could see for nothing. They said these rooms were for us, but they weren’t really. Some of our kinder employers even paid for us to travel on chartered trains to look at famous works of art in glass palaces. They said they were ‘improving’ us in the appreciation of higher things. And they were very impressive, but had nothing to do with working lives like ours. About this time photographers opened shops and in their windows showed portrait displays of everyone famous. We learned from these public galleries that looks had nothing to do with position. Princes were just as likely to be bald, squinting, inelegant and bandy-legged as we were. Some photographs were so cheap that for the first time we could have pictures taken of ourselves. Then newspapers and weeklies started using drawings and, later, reproduced photos. Suddenly pictures were everywhere, and clever coloured posters appeared in the streets trying to sell us stuff we didn’t need.

Art never registered for us. Moving pictures were more to our taste, especially when they talked and were in colour and told stories about people like ourselves. We couldn’t get enough of those, still can’t, and we were even prepared to pay for them, sometimes more than once a week. 

Without warning paintings began to look less realistic than they had before. Many mocked this new ‘modern’ approach, and the point of it certainly escaped us. Then came a war followed by a hard time when even those who were supposed to love art didn’t buy it. There were far more people painting pictures than there were others wanting to buy them or even look at them. There was another war, and after that art became anything anybody said it was. Now that was weird. It was meant to appeal to us because it wasn’t, they said, done in the old aristocratic way. Some painters felt guilty about leaving us behind by producing work hardly anyone understood, but their sympathy was misplaced. Having developed our own pastimes we couldn’t have cared less. Even when we told them it was of no interest the Government still sponsored art, allegedly for our benefit, which we never went to see.

Those few who liked the new way, and who claimed they were making it for everyone, tried desperately to get us to like it by mentioning it every day in the papers and on the telly. Most of it looked as though anyone could have done it. We laughed at how feeble it looked and couldn’t fathom what the fuss was about. In the old days we were stupid enough to believe that if we didn’t behave like Jesus a devil would skewer us with red hot spikes. We don’t believe everything we’re told any more, especially about what they tell us is Good Art. And still they can’t begin to understand our indifference. Truth is we’re not interested and never have been. We prefer the astonishing genius of Hollywood, soaps and box sets because we can choose for ourselves and the quality is obvious even to us. We’re simpletons you see. We will always like transfixing stories beautifully told with breathtaking skill and ingenuity.

But they never listen. They are like the unstoppable monster in B films forever lumbering towards us. Trying so hard to convert us must make them feel saintly even though we all know they do it only for themselves.

Odd that no one has ever asked us what we might want from them. And that’s about where we’re up to. 

In the last issue I noted the gradual but relentless erosion of space allocated to historical pictures in Tate Britain. This contraction will now accelerate because the collection is to be re-hung, yet again, on this occasion thematically – a policy undoubtedly designed to demonstrate the State Art Commandment that all roads shall lead to the Usual Suspects. Long gone are the reassuring days of my youth when a regular visitor to Millbank would know exactly where to find the enduring gems of British art. This trend of squeezing the historical is also inevitable because new art increases as a percentage of the collection. Hedging their bets, and in order not to miss something the future decides is important, the Tate now acquires anything by anyone. To them the idea of exhibiting discernment is as damningly reactionary as the idea of figurative art itself. The result is that Serota’s true legacy is not really all those expensive new buildings and extensions but his total surrender to mediocrity. 

A well-researched article on the Guardian website recently arrived at the startling, though not entirely surprising conclusion that during Serota’s recently concluded 28-year tenure the number of works in the Tate’s holding – excluding the Turner Bequest – doubled. Serota added over 30,000 new items, the majority of them box fresh. We’ve pointed out previously in these pages that the Tate’s stock has grown every two years by more works than the National Gallery has acquired in total in the 193 years of its existence. The irony here is that this massive growth, both of the collection and the galleries in which to house some of it, has taken place during a period when scarcely a month passed without warnings of dire consequences if more public subsidy wasn’t found. On the evidence of the collection alone, and for all Serota’s gloomy predictions to the contrary, the Tate has enjoyed a golden age of expansion during which it swallowed far more than its fair share of the national arts budget.

Most of the work acquired during the Serota years is by a roll call of artists you’ve never heard of, many of whom are not only living but young, and whose efforts wouldn’t have merited preservation in what at least in theory, until Serota took over, had always been a repository for choice works of proven quality. Not any more. Today, the collection is home to the kind of instantly forgettable trivia we see in Tate Modern’s latest extension.

Serota’s reign was also responsible for a serious reorientation in the way we must approach art. State-approved styles and mediums now require a different way of looking. Established criteria of judgement were replaced by a new ‘vision’ discouraging of knowledge and preconceptions. Dinosaurs, such as myself, who were trained in stylistic comparisons and the identification and explanation of minute visual subtleties, have been mystified by this, confounded by the obvious feebleness of what is relentlessly marketed as the acme of achievement. It took me longer than it ought to have done to realise that if you start with any assumptions at all about what the Arts Council dubs ‘Challenging Contemporary Art’ you are certain to be disappointed. Even the lowest demands will lead to bewilderment. Another of Serota’s legacies is, therefore, that in looking at contemporary art we must all start with no expectations whatsoever, and, what is more, from the furthest extremity of ignorance and credulity. Only then might we not be disappointed, for in these Year-Zero days even the equivalent of a baby spluttering to communicate can be sold as progress. 

As Alexander Adams points out in his thoughtful review concerning the material poverty of many artists (see page 8), the probability of low incomes has not, as one might have predicted, caused a reduction in numbers. Far from it. Students have been sold the pup that anyone can do it with the result that a massive surplus is being produced, too little is worth the time spent looking at it, and too much that is self-evidently stillborn is speculatively hoarded by national institutions. Generally, Serota’s legacy is a beautifully polished reflection of his age, in so far as it was one of unsustainable, undiscriminating acquisitiveness. Our population was addicted – a serious sickness – to shopping, fashion, momentary gratification and the instantly obsolete, and so was Serota. And just as ‘Austerity Chancellor’ Osborne borrowed more money than all his predecessors since Robert Walpole combined, so Serota acquired more stuff than all the previous seven Tate directors put together. 

In recent issues I’ve described how since 1945 the education, bureaucracy and exponentially increasing cash for the visual arts have been usurped and dominated by an evolving one-track mindset which, in these pages, is called State Art. This sinister subversion of the institutions, predicted before and after the last war by Eliot, Wyndham Lewis and Orwell among others, is complete with the recent appointment of Doctor Balshaw as overall Director of the Tate (see last editorial). She understands nothing but that which is ‘Contemporary’, a qualification (if that is an appropriate description) which makes her uniquely unsuitable for running three galleries with what should be historical and scholarly functions. 

The sad truth now is that the Tate has become a gallery of contemporary art with a marginalised historical concession on the side, whereas its original function was the reverse of this. The revolution that has taken place for this to happen over the last half century is an object lesson in change by incremental stealth. It is the perfect demonstration of what Rudi Dutschke meant when, confronted with the fact that a successful immediate proletarian revolution was impossible in western Europe, he referred to the necessity to operate clandestinely from inside, a process he famously dubbed “the long march through the institutions”. This would, he predicted, lead to the eventual substitution of one establishment by another independent of any popular support. And in the case of the contemporary visual arts this means a far more repressive, hidebound and authoritarian regime than the one it replaced.

Writing in 1971 political scientist Leonard Schapiro observed: “[T]he true object of propaganda is neither to convince nor even to persuade. But to produce a uniform pattern of public utterances in which the first trace of unorthodox thought reveals itself as a jarring dissonance.” He was referring to Stalinism but he might just as easily have said it about an equally dictatorial State Art. Such is the blind faith in the New Scripture for Contemporary Art, and the impossibility of apostasy from it (like membership of the Euro the only exit from State Art is a door marked Disaster), that any attempt to question the evolving orthodoxy and monopoly has condemned any would-be non-conformist to immediate ostracism. The predictable chorus of positive opinion at the appointment of Dr Quack is evidence of this common fear of being targeted as a “jarring dissonant” and the career disaster it portends. Her inadequacies are blindingly obvious but who in the arts commentariat actually mentioned them? There is now a terror in the visual arts of telling even a fraction of the truth. Thus has State Art been allowed to prosper in a parallel universe impenetrable to public interest and criticism which renders its functionaries untouchable and self-perpetuating, and – like Moonies – eternally pleased with themselves.

 With Dr Q’s appointment, and the earlier elevation of a contemporary art specialist to head Tate Britain, the takeover of the institutions is complete. We have arrived at Dutschke’s Year Zero. The art of Now has become its own justification, as if nothing before matters. This is the curious process by which an uncoupled past has become an irrelevance. If it goes in any direction at all the story of art now travels backwards, and not very far back at that. State Art-approved galleries have become locked in the bubble of a continuous present inside which nearly all recent ‘masterpieces’ and ‘challenges’, ‘subversions’ and ‘explorations’ are almost instantly forgotten because really they were meritless to start with and their importance routinely overstated. Yesterday’s work is replaced swiftly by today’s and accompanied by the now familiar hyperbole, for in the visual arts we are trapped on the treadmill of perpetual mediocrity.

Consider this. In 1946 there were two curators and one director at the Tate. There are now 17 directors alone. On the Tate’s website they don’t publish a full staff organisation chart, most probably because that would give away the scale of empire-building that has recently gone on there (despite its predictable annual cries of poverty). Instead 46 staff are listed as examples of what they call “the broad range of academic and professional expertise in the organisation”. In fact, the ‘range’ it describes is the narrowest of bottlenecks. Over two thirds of the staff on this list are modern and contemporary curators, mainly the latter; a fifth relate to art before 1920; and the rest are dedicated to conservation and managerial wonks with mystifying job titles. 

Such a bias in favour of the contemporary is justified at Tate Modern but it isn’t a prejudice appropriate at Tate Britain or the two satellites reliant on its historical collection. These galleries should show and research what is established and not that which is either speculative, market driven or the current whim of a dominant, highly prejudiced clique of curators and their favourite dealers. 

And so it is urgently necessary to split off Tate Modern from the rest of the franchise. A different ethos must apply at Tate Britain, a gallery whose historical works should be its justification not its embarrassment. Not all the Tate’s galleries should have to pay the necessary lip service to Schapiro’s “uniform pattern” demanded by State Art, as is currently the case.

This dismantling of Serota’s unwieldy empire has been mooted before but now he’s gone for good it’s an urgent necessity, especially when we have a scholarly nobody in charge of the world’s most important collection of historical British art. It is a serious crime of negligence to abandon the organisation to the leadership it has. Having someone in charge of Tate Britain who has no credibility in the history of British Art might be fine in a gallery of contemporary art – even then it’s not exactly desirable – but it is perverse in an institution which began life in 1897 as the National Gallery of British Art ­– which was, incidentally, run until 1954 by the National Gallery.

Tate Britain today is heading relentlessly in the direction of becoming a museum of Modern and Contemporary British art with some history attached. If you have a person in charge whose knowledge stretches back only to the week before last this continued drift is inevitable.

The space for work before 1920 is constantly being squeezed. Currently the building is split into three parts. The vast middle strip, the Duveen Galleries, is customarily wasted promoting an over-rated contemporary. At the moment it is White Cuber Cerith Wyn Evans with sprawling, incoherent patterns of white neon tubing signifying only he knows what. A ‘Senior Curator of Contemporary Art’ writes of this piece on an ‘information’ board: “In this commission CWE has responded to the space of the Duveen Galleries by creating a neon installation which focuses on ideas around the folds and flows of energy via material and immaterial conduits.” Only the author knows what that means. So the gallery’s middle third is wasted. 

The eastern third is modern British art since roughly 1920, much of it minor and nearly all of it illustrative of the Modernist Creed. At the far end Hockney currently occupies galleries which usually act as a graveyard for the latest Turner Prize. In the front corner is the Turner annexe, now also used to house Constables which used to live in what is a new ‘installation’ space.

The western third used to be all history and is the most popular section. Visited but not crowded it is a perfect place to study those pictures which are hung well enough for the purpose; that is, low enough and not skied as many paintings are here. A shop has intruded at the south end to make way for an ‘Art Now’ gallery on the ‘modern’ side where the shop used to be. Large installation spaces and a photography gallery have also cut sizeable chunks out of this wing. The impression is of a distant history tolerated by being piled high in a restricted space, but which is far from celebrated.Tate Britain urgently needs it own identity. The current regime will not deliver this because all they are capable of understanding is “material and immaterial conduits”.