NOVEMBER\/DECEMDER 2023<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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 \u00e2\u20ac\u0153cloying self-satisfaction\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t please everyone all the time the Arts Council was in general \u00e2\u20ac\u0153a good and worthy institution in a wicked world\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. 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 \u00e2\u20ac\u201c the Serpentine in 1970 (its first had been the Hayward in 1968) \u00e2\u20ac\u201c 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 \u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 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 \u00e2\u20ac\u0153cloying self-satisfaction\u00e2\u20ac\u009d 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 \u00e2\u20ac\u02dccritical\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 establishment which ought to know better and a political class which couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t care less.
This caused me to realise, yet again, that the Arts Council\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s initial versatility has metamorphosed into an invulnerable monolith dedicated only to its own survival. Naturally, this contradicts the Arts Council\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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 \u00e2\u20ac\u0153monopolise taste\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s birth, the Council\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t seem to produce today. Compare these with the 14 trustees of today\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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 \u00c2\u00a395 billion. Small wonder that there is daily a plethora of internet articles dedicated to \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the most bankable artists\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. The subversion of purpose and the conversion of the Arts Council into State Art is complete: you can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t see the join between the market and what is promoted courtesy of supposedly \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcindependent\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 public finance. When the Arts Council was founded it received \u00c2\u00a3235,000 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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 \u00e2\u20ac\u201c 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Mayfair gallery, a 5-minute bike ride from the Serpentine. So why wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t 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 \u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s dealer. And it seems a rather one-sided transaction, the benefits all favouring Baselitz and Thaddeus Ropac. All of this can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have anything to do with the fact that a year ago an equally coarse Baselitz carving, appropriately called Mrs Paganism, sold at Christie\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s for \u00c2\u00a34.6 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 \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcHow can I make this even uglier?\u00e2\u20ac\u2122. Promoters of work like this can only convey its alleged \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcqualities\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 through writing, always hoping the intended recipient is either blind or gullible enough to disbelieve their eyes. So what do our \u00e2\u20ac\u02dccloying\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 gallery scribblers have to say about this \u00e2\u20ac\u0153ground-breaking artist\u00e2\u20ac\u009d? These works \u00e2\u20ac\u0153provide new insights into the artist\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s process, and how his works inform one another across different mediums\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. Eh? New insights? No they don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t. He takes whole limewood tree trunks and attacks them with a chain saw or (when requiring more sensitive detail) an axe. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s work, by the President-for-Life, who in a previous incarnation had organised Baselitz\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s show at the Whitechapel. Once he was represented in the Tate there was no going back.
The Serpentine, let\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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 \u00e2\u20ac\u0153more than half of them living and working outside London\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. More than ever we need the Serpentine for this same purpose today. We need it to show works by accomplished artists who don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t. 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 \u00e2\u20ac\u0153cloying self-satisfaction\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. Few in the arts sector since have followed […]<\/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-2765","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\/2765","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=2765"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2765\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2766,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2765\/revisions\/2766"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2765"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2765"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2765"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}