MARCH\/APRIL, 2023<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The New Year\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s that easy. Ingrid Pollard accepted an MBE, the honours equivalent of a wooden spoon \u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 Curious, isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t it, that these supposedly anti-establishment types will accept anything even, amazingly, stuff with \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcBritish Empire\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 tagged on the end.
John Akomfrah is knighted for being \u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 everywhere, the human passe partout of State Art. This follows an OBE in 2008 and a CBE in 2017 \u00e2\u20ac\u201c imagine that, he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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 \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcarty\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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 \u00e2\u20ac\u201c not even the world\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s most lissom limbo dancer could wriggle under the State Art film bar.
It wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t qualify even for a rosette. And then there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s John Schlesinger, Lindsay Anderson and Karel Reisz who weren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t 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 \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcnoir\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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 \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcfor services to the arts\u00e2\u20ac\u2122. That is a bad joke. \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcServices to the arts\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 is his job. He works for a charity which gives away billions of taxpayer\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s cash and is paid the eyewatering wedge of \u00c2\u00a3156,000 p.a. to do it. His boss, meanwhile, the Arts Council\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Chief Executive, Darren Henley, has previously notched up an OBE and, last year, a CBE, also for \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcservices to the arts\u00e2\u20ac\u2122. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a weird system this, because once you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve got one medal if you stick at it long enough you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll get another for doing the same thing. In Henley\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s case he pockets \u00c2\u00a3180,000 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t 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 \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcState Art\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 read \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcDIRTY\u00e2\u20ac\u02c6GREAT RACKET\u00e2\u20ac\u2122.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
MARCH\/APRIL, 2023 The New Year\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2757","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-leader"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2757","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2757"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2757\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2758,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2757\/revisions\/2758"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2757"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2757"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2757"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}