The Jackdaw

Tag: Rachel Whiteread

  • Charles Thomson: Lies, Damned Lies and Serota at the BBC

    Sir Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate Gallery, has used the platform of the BBC in a blatant attempt to deceive the nation. Either that or he is genuinely deluded himself. Both options render him unfit for major public office.

    He was confronted on Radio 4 programme The Reunion: Tate Modern on September 23rd by Sue MacGregor, regarding the Tate’s purchase in 2005 of its trustee Chris Ofili’s work The Upper Room. She observed with wry understatement, “The Charity Commission said you didn’t quite follow the rules here.”

    In 2006, as the BBC then reported, Charity Commission chief executive Andrew Hind said there were “serious shortcomings … In any charity we would be concerned that such basic matters were neglected, but in a charity of the size and stature of the Tate we are very disappointed.”

    The Guardian expounded, “The Tate has broken the law … By law, trustees cannot receive monetary benefit from their charity without express permission, usually from the commission. The Tate failed to seek permission … The Charity Commission’s full recommendations and criticisms, laid out in a lengthy document, also said the Tate failed to manage conflicts of interest … Failed to seek independent valuation of works by artist-trustees … Had no defined policy relating to purchases from artist-trustees … Had insufficiently clear acquisition policies … Kept insufficient records of trustee meetings.”

    The Daily Telegraph called this verdict “one of the most serious indictments of the running of one of the nation’s major cultural institutions in living memory”.

    “After an in-depth review lasting ten months by the Commission”, stated The Times, Serota “accepted the criticisms” and “was genuinely contrite”. The Evening Standard confirmed, “Sir Nicholas said today he accepted all the Charity Commission’s findings”.

    In stark contrast, his response to Sue Macgregor ten years later was an astonishing and shameless attempt to hoodwink the nation and evade blame with a trivialising revisionism that implied gross misconduct by the Charity Commission. To the supportive laughter of his entourage on the programme, Serota declared smoothly – as if it were established fact – the evasive nonsense, “The rules of course were invented after we had flouted them.”

    Serota has a history of obfuscation, whether lies, half-truths, delusions, evasions or omissions. In 2004, he applied for a grant from the Art Fund towards the purchase of The Upper Room. He signed a form saying that there had been no prior commitment to the purchase of the work (a condition of funding). Thanks to journalist Chris Hastings and the Freedom of Information Act, it was revealed that, eight months prior to the application, the Tate had paid a £250,000 deposit. Serota blamed it on “a failing in my head”.

    In 2005, I was quoted in The Observer: “Serota, as the director, chooses the trustees, and the trustees are then responsible for reappointing the director. The director then buys the trustees’ work.” In 2008, this was brought up in Varsity (the Cambridge Student Newspaper), where Serota defended himself with another flagrant falsehood: “I don’t have any part to play in their appointment.”

    The September 2005 Tate board minutes state: “The Director [Serota] reported that two strong candidates were to be interviewed for the position of Artist Trustee by a panel comprising himself, Paul Myners and the Independent Assessor.” In the May 2007 minutes, another trustee interview is on record with a panel of three trustees, the independent assessor and Serota.

    The Board of Trustees of the Tate Gallery Annual Accounts 2005-2006, 2006-2007, 2007-2008, and 2008-2009 all say in the section on trustees: “The key stages of the appointment are overseen by a panel, which will normally include the Director.”

    Also in Varsity, Serota said about the trustees, “Why would I want to win their support?” The simple answer to that is that he is their employee, as he explained in 1993 in the Independent on Sunday, when he hoped to be appointed for a second seven-year term as Tate Director: “Tate trustees fall in and out of love with their director and I’ll only discover whether they have fallen out of love with me in 1995 when they discuss my contract … The jury’s out.”

    On the Radio 4 programme, MacGregor confronted Serota about an event in October 2003 that became public the following year, namely “that Charles Saatchi offered you his entire collection … it was worth 200 million – for nothing.” Serota denied this: “I wish he had … he did have a great collection. Sadly he never did offer it to us.”

    This response is consistent with Serota’s version to the press in 2004, when he said that Saatchi’s offer was not for a gift but for a loan of work, which he (Serota) immediately rejected (none of which was mentioned to MacGregor).

    Surprisingly, Serota’s reply was immediately contradicted on the programme by former Tate trustee, Michael Craig-Martin, who admitted there had in fact been an offer of work: “Unfortunately what was offered to the Tate was not the great collection with the great things in it, most of which were already gone by that time. They had been sold by that time.”

     

    As it happens, that is incorrect. At the time of the offer in 2003, Saatchi still had in his collection iconic Brit art works, including Damien Hirst’s shark, Tracey Emin’s bed, Rachel Whiteread’s plaster cast of a room, Mark Quinn’s head made from frozen blood, Sarah Lucas’s table with two fried eggs and a kebab, Marcus Harvey’s Myra Hindley painting with children’s hand prints, Ron Mueck’s sculpture of his dead father, the Chapman’s penis-nosed mannequins and Chris Ofili’s Virgin Mary painting with elephant dung.

    Serota continued about Saatchi: “Michael [Craig-Martin] and I with Janet De Botton spent a great deal of time in the late nineties trying to persuade him to give, not his collection, but maybe ten works from his collection as a founding collection for Tate Modern. But I’m afraid he didn’t feel for one reason or another able to do that.”

    This is obviously another failing in Serota’s head. In 2004, the Evening Standard reported that in 1998, “Saatchi offered 86 works by 57 British artists – including Langlands & Bell, Turner Prize winner Martin Creed and Glenn Brown” (as well as Richard Billingham, Richard Wilson and Chantal Joffé). A Tate spokeswoman confirmed the offer of 86 works, which were rejected as “The trustees felt on this occasion the works would be better suited in a collection elsewhere.”

    Regarding The Upper Room scandal, Christopher McCall QC wrote to the press in 2005 condemning “expediency … which has an appeal to an overbearing executive”. The Times said of the Tate: “If it had been a company, the verdict would have sent shareholders into a panic.” No doubt if it had been a government, resignations or sackings would have followed the public outcry. Surely we have the right to expect the same standards across the board in public life, including the arts.

    Serota has not displayed a level of behaviour and integrity to remain a figurehead and step into another prime position as Chairman of the Arts Council. His record is tarnished and far from admitting to his mistakes, he has the blinkered arrogance to pretend they never happened.

    We need leaders who do not have recurrent failings in their head.

    Charles Thomson
    The Jackdaw

  • Editorial – November 2017

    AND I SAY TO MYSELF

    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.

    David Lee
    The Jackdaw Nov/Dec 2017

  • The Art Fund subverted: they were only playing leapfrog

    The separate bodies contributing to State Art are now so interrelated, so cosily acquainted, their personnel so readily interchangeable and of identical mindset, that they might as well join forces. (… Liz Forgan is sacked from the Arts Council but remains a Trustee of the Art Fund; James Lingwood swallows his annual  million from the Arts Council and also sits as a Trustee of the Art Fund which has bought a work he commissioned, and so on – I could fill this column ten times over with similar complacent overlaps.) Imagine the savings on personnel and rent alone if the Contemporary Art Society (now funded and run by a former employee of the Arts Council), The Art Fund (headed by an ex-director of the Tate), the Arts and British Councils and the Tates (also directed by a former Arts Council employee) stopped pretending they pursued distinct objectives and pooled resources.

    The Art Fund is the latest to dump any semblance of independence. It is nominally a charity, if, that is, you count bankrolling the already well supplied as ‘charitable’. If the Salvation Army doled out caviare to nobs in Mayfair there would be a fuss. But the Art Fund regularly does the equivalent.

    It was founded by altruists in 1903 solely to help museums buy works of art. It gives £6.3 million a year in grants, spreading it thinly across scores of acquisitions, including some important ones. Its core activities are still nobly worthwhile and more than ever necessary.

    Recently, it announced it would fund two British tours: Jeremy Deller’s ‘immersive works’ (don’t ask) created for the British pavilion at this summer’s Venice Biennale, and Grayson Perry’s six large caricature tapestries on the subject of British life and taste. Why is a charity sponsoring the promotion of Perry and of a Tate trustee, Deller, who are among the most visible, wealthy and successful of recent British artists? And why aren’t their dealers paying for these tours from which they will all benefit? Deller’s exhibition in Venice, funded by the British Council (the tour of his inflatable Stonehenge is already, by the way, covered by the Arts Council), cost over half a million of public money to stage. Why is Deller worth even more from the limited resources of yet another much tinier charity? None of this makes sense. Unless of course there is a privately agreed national consensus between a raft of organisations, public and private, whose objectives – for whatever reason – are to promote the same few reputations.

    In their recent accounts the Fund crows its contribution of £200,000 towards Rachel Whiteread’s infantile defacement of a listed masterpiece, Charles Townsend’s Whitechapel Art Gallery. Again, here is lavish support of a successful, regularly exhibited artist represented by a leading world dealer. Charity? Really? Additionally, they funded the Tate’s purchase for £125,000 of five Whiteread ‘drawings’, or diagrams as they used to be known – they now have 30 of her works.

    The Fund also oversees the annual £100,000 Gulbenkian Museum of the Year whose judges are perennially lazy, predictable and uninspired. It is responsible too for administering ‘Artists’ Rooms’, an overpriced and dubious blunt instrument of State Art which ensures the circulation of work by top brands around regional museums, apparently ­– God help us – in perpetuity.

    The Fund’s magazine, Art Quarterly, formerly a purveyor of scholarly articles, is now a yappy promotional brochure for State Art. The current issue advertises three artist trustees of the Tate, each of whom receives the Fund’s cash. In the case of Wolfgang Tillmans, they contributed £95,000 towards buying 15 of his pictures for Glasgow Art Gallery having the previous year given £62,000 for the purchase of nine others of his works by the Arts Council, which has £450 million a year of its own to spend. The Tate already owns 62 works by Tillmans. Why this obsession with an indifferent German photographer?

    But all is not bleak. In 2011 when the Fund announced public purchase of Yinka Shonibare’s Fourth Plinth bottle the published cost was £362,500. As we demonstrated at the time this was a lie repeated in all newspapers. In their recent accounts the figure has now shot up to £650,000. They’re getting there, slowly.

    David Lee

    The Jackdaw, September/October 2013

  • Olympic posters: our native genius

    Olympic posters: our native genius

    The Turner Prize nominees and winners came up with a predictable set of embarrassing posters for the Olympics. Apart from the perpetrators themselves, no one could be found to say a good word about their efforts. Someone needs to get a grip. First we were presented with an inept logo which had cost £400,000 for what looked like two minutes work; then there was an artless rollercoaster sculpture selected by the President-For-Life; and now this lot of fashionable scribblers who couldn’t design a wheel from blueprints have done their worst, also, very conveniently, courtesy of the President-For-Life. Inevitably, as with Gibbereesh’s rollercoaster the PFL chose his reliable lackeys from the Turner Prize not to mention a serving Tate Trustee, Bob and Roberta Smith, i.e. one of those currently responsible for employing him.

    Rachel Whiteread and Gary Hume excelled themselves with lovely colouring in – if their efforts had arrived crumpled from the nursery you might have fixed them proudly to the fridge. Bridget Riley knocked off her usual stripes. Each small poster – and these are nothing like the grand sheets of Lautrec – will be available to buy for £7 when an exhibition of the works opens at the Tate next summer.

    Now for the good news, that is if you are one of the participating artists. The posters are being released as signed prints courtesy of Counter Editions, thus enabling the artists to reward themselves in the manner to which they have become accustomed. Bridget Riley’s stripes, for example, is in an edition of 250 and started at £3,000 an impression – yes, that’s a gross of £750,000 for one signed screenprint, and it has already sold out. The Margate Express has hers in an edition of 300 at a throwaway £1,800 apiece – a mere £540,000… It is also sold out. The gross will, of course, have been far greater than the sums cited here as the cost of each print increased as the edition sold out. Still available however are ‘Professor’ Gary Hume’s blots (near right), a snip at £540 in an edition of 250 (£135,000 minimum gross) and Howard Hodgkin’s blue wave (£1,300, ed 300, minimum gross £394,000 – far right). No wonder the artists stood in a line laughing when their works were unveiled.

    Martin Creed, at last now widely regarded as educationally subnormal, said of his inspired marvel (£490, lithograph edition 250, minimum gross £122,500): “The colours are based on the Olympic colours but they are changed to make them nicer.” Here is the Mental Paralympian of State Art talking.

    What we got in this project was the usual bunch of over-rated contemporary artists promoting themselves and their art and not the Olympics. We can’t discover from anywhere what the deal was with the artists; were they actually paid to come up with their contributions or was their remuneration to be the loud ker-ching of limited editions? If you come across any information please let us know.

    … And then there was the dear old Margate Express. No are event is nowadays complete without her embonpoint rippling over the proceedings. On the same page of the papers when these Olympic efforts were announced you could look across from the Express’s maudlin scribble to Leonardo da Vinci’s drawing of hands on show in the National Gallery. An unfair comparison, yes, but it is surely impossible to look from one to the other and not think what a catastrophic deterioration has occurred not only in the technical ability of artists but in the willingness of those responsible for protecting standards in art to promote such conspicuous rubbish.

    By the way, if you wish to purchase all 12 of the posters you can buy the set in a nice box for £11,805. A commemorative heirloom for all the family to enjoy, and what a bargain.

     David Lee

    The Jackdaw, Jan-Feb 2012

    Latest News

    These posters are beginning to reappear on the market.

    Three editions sold out within days: they were Tracey Emin, Rachel Whiteread and Bridget Riley.  Now , one of the Rileys is being sold  at auction with an estimate of  £2,000-£3,000. This poster racket was not only a scam to line the pockets of already well-to-do artists but also to allow a quick turnover to collectors eager to cash in on the fever generated by the actual events.

    The complete set of posters are no on view/on sale at Tate Britain until September  23rd. So buy now. They’re crap, but what an investment.