BELCHERESQUE : ART CRITICISM

10 years pricking the art voodoo doll 2005-2015

Page 5 of 9

Ozymandias

September 22, 2008 / / 4 Comments

a comment posted on Jonathan Jones blog

‘Could the economic crisis affect art?’

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog

As I live on another planet to the London-based coterie the notion that the art world around here will change at all is an amusing one. You won’t miss what you never had comes to mind. The only money spent on art in the East Midlands is Arts Council money and most of that now curtailed. In my opinion a good thing because most of that money wasted on vain glorious local artists who seriously deluded about their own importance. After the ‘golden decade’ of lottery money there not one East Midlands artist who could be truly be shown as part of the ‘elite’ earners pace Hirst and Co’s banker friendly cohort.

We do have some ominously empty ‘centres of excellence’ though to keep these vanity artists alive though so the cracks will not show for a few years yet…not until the squeezed taxpayers call a halt to their running costs….maybe sooner rather than later round here..

So far from worrying about the ‘crunch’ ( we been in crunch for years) the main problem is that the illusion of some fairy godmother capitalism that there to aim for awaiting our cutting edge heroes with open arms ..well it shattered…..thankfully…..

So now the question is what do we replace those bubble fuelled illusions with?

Teaching skills again in art-schools or at least transferable skills instead of left-wing delusions and right-wing dreams? We have to tell our young students something truthful instead of leading them down the garden-path….admittedly a well-paid path for some but a heap of nettles for others.

Capitalism will not collapse, ailment a squeeze only a pinch at the top and a crushing weight at the bottom.

I hope the ‘crunch’ (sounds like Kellogs advert already) will at the very least awaken a sense of realism in those provincial capitals hell-bent on being the next Miami or Venice Biennale…..

It’s over…if it ever started…..time to clear the decks, cheap use your heads and start ignoring the cloud of deceit called the International Art World and concentrate on basics. I wouldn’t call that new labourism, conservatism or marxism..I’d call that common sense. There are some very hard times ahead and no ‘bounce’ is ever going to smokescreen that…art is not going to be top of anybody’s agenda….

Least of all the taxpayer worried about bills, council tax rising and losing a job…..are they to be comforted by the latest cutting edge show of relational puff in the multi-million pound arts centre…..

No of course not……and rightly so.

The banking bubble has burst..next the panacea of regeneration through art will explode too….and we will be working in the ruins for years to come.

“Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away

In that desert many strange blooms will thrive both right and left-wing let us hope some do not thrive…

The Future of Art Education: Ikon Birmingham

July 29, 2008 / / 2 Comments

Is there one?

Public Debate: The Future of Art Education

Ikon Gallery, generic Birmingham

Monday 6 October 2008, sales 6.30pm

 

A debate about the future of art education is raging on the pages of Art Monthly. In October readers will have the opportunity to come along and put their questions to our panel of educational professionals and policy makers. The panel will debate the future of art education – is further privatisation, unhealthy corporatisation and instrumentalism inevitable or are there alternatives?

 

Read all the articles from this debate at

http://www.artmonthly.co.uk

 

1968 and all that

Will the 40th anniversary of the 1968 protests inspire today’s students to demand radical improvements in art education?

Students at the London College of Communication have had enough and have officially registered their dissatisfaction by demanding the return of their fees in protest at staff shortages and the lack of organisation. Staff, for their part, are over-burdened by bureaucracy, rising student numbers, low pay and low self-esteem. Vice chancellors, meanwhile, are focused on corporate-style branding and the commissioning of gleaming new buildings. The legacies of St Martins School of Art in the 60s, or Goldsmiths in the 80s, should serve as reminders that it is not buildings that make for a dynamic teaching environment but people.

Extract from editorial April 2008

 

Mayday Mayday

The sad truth about art education today is that New Labour has finished what Thatcher started

Ironically, Thatcher’s plans for factory-style education were only to be truly achieved under New Labour. It was the setting up of the dreaded inquisition, the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA), by the first New Labour government in 1998, barely one year after the election, which made the institutionalisation of what Stephen Lee in his letter aptly describes as ‘educational Taylorism’ possible. The QAA, and its spawn, the Teaching Quality Assurance (TQA), became the means by which the product, broken down into bite-sized pieces as a result of the imposition of American-style modularisation, could be tested. Since the government had already begun to refer to the arts as the ‘creative industries’, a term first coined when Labour was still in opposition, this must have seemed like a perfect fit between the so-called ‘aims’ and ‘outcomes’ of an art education.

Extract from editorial May 2008

 

Can’t Get No Satisfaction

Anyone considering studying fine art (at undergraduate level) in England and Wales should google the National Student Satisfaction Survey, particularly the Results By Institution. Six of the bottom ten are or were art schools. Bottom of the survey, that is to say the ‘least satisfactory’, is the University of the Arts London. This will come as no surprise to anyone who has studied or taught there recently.

Link:

http://education.guardian.co.uk/students/tables/0,,1574395,00.html

Extract from letter by Graham Crowley published in April 2008

 

Educational Taylorism

I can appreciate the current state of educational Taylorism and the overbearing, corporate-style management that Graham Crowley describes. The corporate model is a powerful one. It tends to be one-dimensional and seamless, where accountability and success can be clearly measured. To understand the impact of the corporatisation of art schools it’s important, I think, to examine the language or jargon used to organise and disseminate learning, then look at the extent to which fine art students adopt this language. Fine art graduates talk of promotion and marketing, or finding a niche market for their work. If a critic writes about a graduate student’s work, the artist may not necessarily see this as participation in an independent critical arena. On the contrary it’s likely they may see it as an opportunity to gain an additional promotional tool with which to market their work. My point is that the corporate model is pervasive in our wider culture industry

Extract from letter by Stephen Lee published in May 2008

 

Creative Industries

Estelle Morris posed three questions for debate. ‘Will the structure in the paper – with all its committees – actually damage creativity? Will the accountability mechanisms jeopardise risk-taking? And, will mainstreaming discourage some people from wanting to work in the creative sector in the first place?’

Extract from report on the government’s new strategy document Creative Britain: New Talents for a New Economy published July-August 2008

 Excellent sarcastic ‘Reader’s Digest’ version here and if you have atime to waste the full report linked off image

http://strategydigested.blogspot.com/2008/02/creative-britain-new-talents-for-new.html

Debate panel will include representatives from Colleges, Unions and Government Departments.

 

This event is free but booking recommended

To book call 0121 248 0708

Interview with The Pakspectator

June 18, 2008 / / 0 Comments

I was asked to pen some thoughts on this blog for the Pakspectator

Would you please tell us something about you and your site?

I am an artist and my blog is an art criticism blog with my own cartoons illustrating my criticism. It is basically about the English art scene but sometimes touches on International themes.

Do you feel that you continue to grow in your writing the longer you write? Why is that important to you?

In some ways but also as I do not have much time I do think my writing style sometimes suffers because of the speed of ‘blogging’. I need to think before I type more often!

I’m wondering what some of your memorable experiences are with blogging?

Well being contacted by the Pakspectator is pretty unusual. I mostly get visited by, view and comments from, viagra people interested in the art scene rather than politics although I do cross over when it comes to government funding of the arts which we lucky enough in this country to have received ..well until recently that is. When the economy does badly so do artists. People have other priorities and we lucky to have such a thing in first place compared to other countries. Art is not about just money though it about spirit too.


What do you do in order to keep up your communication with other bloggers?

I simply try and keep the blog updated as much as possible which not easy.

What do you think is the most exciting or most innovative use of technology in politics right now?

Probably the use of ‘interactive’ technology via the internet. We have a lot of U.K. politicians using youtube which is amusing…they try to look ‘up to date’ for the voters.

Do you think that these new technologies are effective in making people more responsive?

I do. I know a lot of English people are sceptical but I work with young people and they have long since abandoned their pens for the computer screen.

Politicians should speak in a language people understand even if on internet.

What do you think sets Your site apart from others?

My cartoons and my art dog character ‘Moogee’


If you could choose one characteristic you have that brought you success in life, and what would it be?

Being inventive and seeking new solutions to problems.


What was the happiest and gloomiest moment of your life?

Meeting my partner and losing my father in the same year.


Do you think [the use of Twitter and other social networking tools by politicians] is bandwagon jumping or what?

As I said before politicians need to communicate in whatever way is suitable.

If you could pick a travel destination, anywhere in the world, with no worries about how it’s paid for – what would your top 3 choices be?

Iceland
Nashville U.S.A.
New Zealand

What is your favorite book and why?

Raymond Carver – Fires – short stories and poems
because it made me a poet.

What’s the first thing you notice about a person (whether you know them or not)?

Attitude.

Is there anyone from your past that once told you you couldn’t write?

A lot of arts adminstrators, politicians and lecturers are uncomfortable when one says the truth.

How bloggers can benefit from blogs financially?

I wish I knew..I do not..and never set out to make money from my blog..

 

Is it true that who has a successful blog has an awful lot of time on their hands?

They need to be sat down in front of a screen and type a lot that is for sure. They also need to avoid R.S.I. and related diseases from too much typing…

What are your thoughts on corporate blogs and what do you think the biggest advantages and disadvantages are?

I not that familiar with ‘bigger’ blogs although something like Huffington Post does seem to have changed the rules about how news is provided.
I think the world has changed and blogging is helping to change it even more…for the better.


What role can bloggers of the world play to make this world more friendlier and less hostile?

Just help with communication..we all need to communicate and avoid misunderstanding each other.

Who are your top five favourite bloggers?

I do not have a top five..I like the Guardian Newspaper Uk Bloggers – five of those do?

Is there one observation or column or post that has gotten the most powerful reaction from people?

Yes but not written by me ironically! A noted New York artist chose to comment on my blog and he gets lots of ‘hits’. He also going to write some ‘artist in New York’ travelogues for my blog so looking forward to those.


What is your perception about Pakistan and its people?

I have a very nice Pakistani family living next door who offered us some party food last weekend because welcoming someone from Pakistan.

So my impression was very good as was the food!


Have you ever become stunned by the uniqueness of any blogger?

My cartoon dog is pretty unique I haven’t seen another.

What is the most striking difference between a developed country and a developing country?

 

I have never visited Pakistan but I would guess people the same the world over and health and happiness not related to wealth at all. We are wealthy in some ways but poor in others.

What is the future of blogging?

 

I think it will become more like television because of technology but I hope there will still be a place for good writing.

You have also got a blogging life, how has it directly affected both your personal and professional life?

It has affected my profile as an artist. I believe more people may have heard of me because of the cartoons.

What are your future plans?

Keep blogging and asking questions even when I get no answers!

Any Message you want to give to the readers of The Pakistani Spectator?

Many thanks for spending some time reading my little thoughts from a damp and raining England. May you enjoy health and happiness and good weather!

regards,
Shaun Belcher

Artist and Poet and Songwriter

Nottingham, England

 

The death of the artist?

June 16, 2008 / / 0 Comments

Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to loose

Nothing, viagra I mean nothing honey if it ain’t free, sildenafil no no

Yeah feeling good was easy Lord when he sang the blues

You know feeling good was good enough for me

Good enough for me and my Bobby McGee.

Kris Kristofferson ‘Me and Bobby McGhee’ Lyrics

A money culture wants the figures, the bottom line, the sales, the response, it wants a return on its investment, it wants more money.

Art can offer no obvious return. Its rate of exchange is energy, for energy, intensity for intensity. The time you spend on art is the time it spends with you; there are no short cuts, no crash courses, no fast tracks. There is only the experience.

Jeanette Winterson – ‘What is art for?’ – Guardian 2002

Where are we now? – the bigger picture

Arts planning and funding in the U.K. has been thrown into turmoil by two or three concurrent factors. One a slowdown (pace – ‘recession’) globally which may well remove the Labour Party from power in the next two years.

Two a diversion of a significant amount of lottery funding to the Olympics (even if there were no Olympics to pay for the income from lottery is in a downward spiral).

Thirdly a cut-throat bottom-line cash-driven business model in arts education that is pumping out a hundred fine art graduates per institution into the muddy waters of U.K. Creative Industries PLC. Even the most hard-nosed ACE administrator realises that the gravy will be spread thinner and thinner soon on some very poor fare…

Where are all these new ‘geniuses’ going to go?

‘Free Enterprise’?

So here I am 50 years old and advocating ‘Freemium’ policies, freecycle marketing and not-for-profit artists organisation and pressure-groups. I must, therefore, be mad?

I honestly believe this is the only sensible way forward…the arts council’s golden goose has probably laid its last golden eggs for a while in terms of low-end funding..

For new models perhaps we should look to American free enterprise models that are not based on ‘state funding’. We need enterprise, imagination and communal enterprise to survive this recession.

Nottingham was the base for the East Midlands Group in the 1970’s that survived and prospered because all of those things..not just because it was state-funded. It high time that artists stopped ‘competing’ like so many little businesses for government ‘largesse’ and actually started producing high quality work people actually might want to take an interest in.

This starts with reskilling our fine arts graduates instead of spilling them out with pretentious notions and badly conceived ideas of being the next Damien Hirst or Tracey Emin. Removing the skills base was one of the tragedies of the past two decades of art education.

GLOBAL/LOCAL?? Digital freedom?

The free market is dominant to a degree we have never seen before and it destroying not only local communities but the old ‘communal’ bonds between creative individuals. Grants and lip-service cannot change the digital wrecking ball creating havoc with creative copyright. Protecting one’s work digitally is impossible. All creative output can be copied and distributed freely…those who do not accept this are swimming against a very strong tide.

The only ‘saleable’ commodity left to the artist is his/her own ideas and experience and the ‘authenticity’ of their ‘personal appearances’..or substitute appearances in shows etc.
Bit like Barbara Windsor opening supermarkets…

Crafts practitioners are strong on the ‘authentic and personal’ properties that sell items but fine artists no longer are because of recent changes in fashion. To have abandoned traditional skills just at the point where they are most needed is madness. I call this kind of art and skills based production ‘slow art’ to differentiate from the internet’s dissemination of ‘fast food art’. This ‘fast art’ is eroding the market for all the arts…

A ‘near-perfect’ copy of a Francis Bacon can be painted in China in the time I have taken to write this evaluation ….so why bother being Francis Bacon any more the students argue..we have ideas…such wonderful ideas….Indeed all 100 have wonderful ideas..it is putting them into ‘practice’ literally that requires skills and understanding as well as ideas.

Some digital artists are already ‘outsourcing’ their creative output to others on a massive scale..just like companies.

It began with YBA’s (Hirst and co. had most ‘artifacts’ ‘made-up’ for them) now everyone’s doing it…especially those students coached early in their career in networking and the ‘wow factor’.

Students are no longer taught to make paints or stretch a canvas or cast bronze ..we have entered a period of ‘Warholian’ education.

True ‘authenticity’ is in short supply now and Fordism is a more relevant philosophy to artists now than the ‘Van Gogh’ suffer and paint model..ironically both he and Picasso engaged in bartering – swapping paintings for food and drink when poor….plus ca change….

Everything else in the arts has been up for grabs since the internet was invented.

To paraphrase Kris Kristofferson in ‘Me and Bobby McGhee’…..

Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to sell.

Nothing ain’t worth nothing less it’s free

We are all living in the freemium economy.

There's no diversity problem….

April 1, 2008 / / 0 Comments

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‘There’s no diversity problem in the arts, check ‘ my friend said. ‘As long as you’re middle class.’

full article

shop ,2269478,00.html”>http://arts.guardian.co.uk/art/visualart/story/0,,2269478,00.html
Mark Ravenhill
Monday March 31, 2008
The Guardian

For the past 20 years, we’ve censored ourselves from thinking about class. In part, this is understandable: class became more complex in the 1980s, as the manufacturing base of our economy was ripped apart. This left a great gulf in incomes and social expectations, and a society even more divided than before. The Thatcher government told us class envy was pointless – that we should all celebrate the wealth of the few. Blair absorbed the rhetoric, and the nation, weary of the class battles of the past, seemed to welcome this. By the 1990s, to talk of class, to point out the massive divisions in our society, became an embarrassing, almost forbidden, topic of conversation.

I can’t help feeling, as we board members prattle away trying to ensure that we address issues of race, gender, disability and sexuality – all important issues – that there’s a great big elephant threatening to sit on the table and squash our sandwiches. I’m sure we can gradually achieve greater diversity among the board, staff, artists and audiences. But I suspect that, though diverse, we’ll all be as plummy as each other. Recent evidence suggests – and is corroborated by friends of mine who teach – that it is white, working-class boys who are falling behind in school. What future for them as audience or artists? To involve the least wealthy in our society in the arts: there lies the biggest diversity challenge of them all.

Sharkforum Chicago relaunched…

March 17, 2008 / / 0 Comments

The very good Sharkforum from Chicago has been relaunched and a Moogee cartoon now on there….

Alex Meszmer: So That is Art? Und das ist Kunst?

Belcher_cartoon_nutshell.jpg
Cartoon by Moogee the Art Dog, here Nottingham UKArt is booming and the auction houses are rubbing their hands with glee. After the short dry spell, unhealthy one is allowed to hype again. And the transition within the art academies from the European system to a modified Anglo Bachelor and Masters system will certainly contribute to the cause of manifesting and solidifying the new Academicism.
Read More…
http://www.sharkforum.org/

The return of 'High Culture' and the Death of Art Schools

February 13, 2008 / / 0 Comments

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Two recent articles which fit seemlessly together to show the parlous state of arts education GB.

Low morale devastates art colleges:

Britain’s creative future is under threat from the admin culture that is wrecking our best schools, buy cialis claims artist…
Vanessa Thorpe, viagra arts and media correspondent Sunday February 10, search 2008 The Observer ….

http://arts.guardian.co.uk/art/news/story/0,,2255311,00.html

From today’s BBC…

Children promised ‘high culture’ 
 
Culture – widely defined – “enriches lives” the government says. Schoolchildren in England are being promised access to high-quality cultural activities and the chance to pursue creative careers
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7241460.stm

This is a fascinatiing insight into how disjointed and frankly bankrupt present government thinking is on the subject. Right hand knowing what left hand doing situation….

Anybody unfortunate enough to have been through the coffee-grinder of present day ‘arts education’ in practice…..i.e. pour students in one end set the grinder to maximum profit and pour out other end will recognise everything Crowley says as being true. In fact it such a truism there little point in stating the bleeding obvious. Our art-schools are now run by administrators and to misquote our very recent Arts Council boss ( who spent less days in post than Dwain Chambers has in American Football) what do you get when you have a policy of ‘garbage in-garbage out’ as long as profit margin high…exactly….

As the educational standards of the student body have fallen so has the inevitable standard of tutoring due to cost-effective slashing of contact time. To get more than an hour of effective contact time is the exception not the rule of our beautifully housed institutions…if only as much money spent on education as on flash buildings, consultants and PR we would not be in this mess…

Then the clincher…as these institutions start to sink like a batch of Titanics sent into an ice floe we hear good news….

The Government is going to instigate ‘high culture’ on a scale unseen since the Blitz. Avid children are going to be lead like donkeys to sites of cultural significance determined by the revisionist Culture Vultures at the Department of Let’s turn the clock back to the 1950’s. The latest statement smacks of the kind of elitist twaddle that cultural snobs from both sides of the house but especially the right wing have been moaning about for years.

High Culture…….the BBC article shows a ballerina…typically….the unwashed masses are going to be dragged away from their game-boys and little ponies ( kicking and screaming I expect) to enjoy…..ballet, theatre, opera….and if too unruly they will get the community arts second-best route..rapping, singing…making a film…all the X-Factor generation teasers they need to become the disappointed generation all over again. When Further Education colleges already filled to capacity with failed plumbers and hairdressers who think they now graphic designers or potential pop stars we are once again only storing up more failure for the future.

The economy is crumbling as outsourcing to more talented, better educated Indian and Asian operations continues apace.

The areas of ‘High Culture’ will continue to be dominated by the cultural elite ( i.e. The Middle Class) who been doing this for years…in their own time and money…they very good at it.. ….and the better schools already do it. This is a feeble ‘democratic’ attempt to erase ‘difference’ that doomed to failure. Instead it will create more division, more resentment and more anger as children are shown a glimpse of the ‘promised land’ then have the door shut in their face.

£25 million on pilot schemes alone is promised …the Arts Council spawned quangos are rubbing their hands with glee…what the Arts Council and the Olympics took away the Schools will reimburse and keep the Volvos full of poster paints bringing ‘culture’ to the sink estate reservations moving towards enlightenment……..IF they can find the time in curriculum and the money ( small details I know)…

Laughable…

Meanwhile the hundreds of genuine charities, fine arts organisations and dare I say it theatres everybody been wringing their hands about…will they be saved by this noble scheme?

Will they hell…

More under-educated students driven by false hopes into more failing courses that slide off the production line into jobs that no longer exist because we did not address fundamentals in our education system because we too busy mortgaging our school playing fields and infrastructure to public-private initiatives so that things ‘looked better’ whilst forgetting to get what being taught inside the buildings right first…

Yet more castles built on somebody else’s sand. Until the fundamentals flagged up in Crowley’s complaints addressed we will have nothing to lead our darling youngsters toward….

Meanwhile the mediocre ‘participatory’ clowns and jugglers will lead the funding straight back to the middle class domiciles to fund their childrens far better education with extra trips on top…..lovely jubbly…win win situation…

This initiative will fail because like Child Benefit it will have to be applied universally….

It is bad news for the disadvantaged poor youngsters who will be led into the realms of high culture and told to dream until they get too noisy or have their mobiles taken away….After all we know what ‘High Culture’ is and we are going to use it…

Where have we heard that before…????

Art & Politics: Ed Vaizey

January 21, 2008 / / 1 Comment

Originally the Vaizey article available at the Art Newspaper: NOW offline and only available from archive.

http://www.theartnewspaper.com/article.asp?id=7041….

Artists are apolitical, doctor leaning to the left but embracing right-wing standards

There’s an entertaining “Alex” [The Telegraph’s hard-nosed City banker] cartoon where the eponymous hero is asking why his bank buys contemporary art. After all, he ponders, it’s impossible to…

Ed Vaizey | 20.12.07

Interesting take on artist’s ‘political allegiance’. It true that the whole spirit of Britart crowd were selfish ‘entrepreneurs’ cloaking their greed in sometimes ridiculous statements about their own notions of ‘cutting edge’ and being ‘avant-garde’.

A more compliant bunch than that would be hard to find. Indeed Wallinger stands out as one of few artists who had more in common with the left wing artists of 1970’s e.g. Conrad Atkinson than their cash-laden capitalist benefactors. To see how the colour supplement crowd actually got into bed with mass-marketing (most notably with Charles S.) and how that coincided with a lot of spare ‘profit’ from banking in late 1980’s is a book unwritten…they went hand in hand of course….

So how does an artist confront the lap-dog mentality of a good deal of supposed ‘left-wing’ art which as Vaizey points out is actually compliant and tries to avoid biting the hands that feed i.e. local not-for-profits, community groups, NGO’s and the irreplaceable(?) Arts Council England.

It is striking how much silence and lack of ‘analysis’ greeted every ACE funding announcement from the artists themselves as long as they were recieving their stipend….now we have a cut in funds and suddenly the ‘radical left’ has found its voice…hardly…once a dog lost its bark it takes a good deal of punishment before it returns.

Worst case scenario were the ‘have cake and eat it crowd’ i.e. those artists who ostensibly ‘radical’ but prepared to do just about anything to keep C.V. afloat and attractive to the ‘Corporate’ world of sponsored bashes …pace Bell and Langlands and Chapman Brothers….at least Tracey and Damien had good grace to admit they basically in it for the money….

The true test of an artists radical credentials these days is their obscurity and lack of funding..the further down the pecking order they sit probably the more interesting and truly ‘radical’ their output. From Thatcherism onwards the burial of the true-avant garde in the British Art Scene has been the most shocking example of BritArts legacy. People like Alan Woods in Manchester with his links to Situationism and Surrealism have been buried without trace virtually….also Iain Sinclair’s ‘Shamanistic’ outsiders as exhibited at Goldmark Gallery Uppingham.

Instead we have Observer articles on next years ‘Saatchi’ babe…a young female painter financed (obviously) by her super-rich parents ( brought up in a Johanesberg Modernist classic) who paints super rich houses for super rich people with a ‘hint ‘of Constable and Turner’ thrown in……and not a hint of why their ‘white-flight’ brought them to London….

Excuse me whilst I throw up…

This makes the Fashion world look cutting edge and entitled to the moral high ground ….in fact they one and same thing.

The British Art World is corrupt from head to toe whether artists greedy corporate whores or radical silenced clowns.

That something Vaizey (if he does get in power) will not change…ever…..it too late…

Crocodile tears? The Luvvie that cried wolf..

January 15, 2008 / / 0 Comments

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From yesterday’s Guardian

order ,2240467, health 00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=40″>http://arts.guardian.co.uk/art/visualart/story/0, generic ,2240467,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=40

“The final reckoning
It is the biggest cull in the arts council’s history: some 200 organisations have until tomorrow to tell it why they shouldn’t suffer massive funding cuts – and possible extinction. Laura Barnett meets six companies facing a grim future “

Is this some new epidemic, are we talking mass extinction, the end of the cultural world …no….some theatres and arts organisations are having some (not all if one reads into the article properly) funding cut.

Do I sympathise?..Do I hell. Welcome to the real world luvvies this has been coming for years and hats off to the powers that be for finally taking a fairly blunt blade to one of the most unfair aspects of art funding in the post-war era.

As part of the post-war welfare state settlement the Arts Council was basically set up to protect the ‘finer’ arts of Classical Music, Opera, Ballet and Theatre in that order. The emphasis was on a middle-class definition of what constituted the arts and to hell with the rest. One very significant aspect of the current round of cuts and ‘re-distribution’ is how fine art finally is getting some serious attention. Oh I can hear the actors sobbing through their make-up what about the Damien Hirts and Tracey Emins of this world they are no more deserving of our taxpayers money than little Rupert or Joanna’s stage school future? (Ed.note: stage school’s are presently fit to burst with little middle-class Harry Potter wannabe actors – a weird by-product of celebrity culture).

Well the simple factual history is that compared to the glorious ‘stage’ beneficiaries above the more ‘rootless’ occupations of writer (poet, novelist, screenwriter) and fine artist have never shared anything approaching the same munificence when it came to dolling out the cream. Before any smart-arse commentator says what about Shakespeare before pointing out the link between the stage and TV etc blah blah drone…can I point out that we talking about mediocre middle-class theatre going here not Sam Shephard and cutting edge avant-guardism….which will continue to thrive and prosper in the underfunded hinterland all ‘cutting-edge’ arts have traditionally occupied i.e. the cash-free zone.

No what this article in the Guardian very clearly shows is that when their livelihoods at risk the governers, boards, equity members and boosters of middle-england’s stages are second to none in rallying the troops and creating a storm in a teacup to get their beloved money back…after all being high earners they contribute more than most to tax so why shouldn’t they spend it on themselves?

The ‘glorious stage’ is one of the most ridiculous conceits of post-war Britain. I am a fine arts graduate from a working-class background and I can quite honestly say I never been troubled by the notion of visiting a theatre much nor worrying about them let alone sitting through some ghastly revival of J.B.Priestley or the latest supposed cutting-edge play which actually badly written and being watched by two theatre critics and a bored poodle. Oh and the Edinburgh Festival…..I lived there …the displays of some of the appallingly talentless were stupendous to behold…the comedians were good but that sums up theatre today…

This is a class issue and it goes to the heart of what New old labour may finally be trying to do do here before the pressure groups secretly vote for Cameron to right this awful genocide, this stake in the heart…this unforgiveable wrong…this final reckoning….

Maybe it is Brown’s accounting eye that has flagged it up but the simple truth is that a large number of these ‘flagship’ cutting edge theatres actually survive by children’s book tie-ins at Xmas, comedy gigs and well this a rumour but a substantial one..by cooking the books when it comes to actual bums on seats when it comes to providing stats to feed back to ACE to access yet more funding…that would be called fraud in other countries but here it politely ignored..until now..allegedly

Now that a sharp eye and an even sharper knife has been brought out to bring this sad state of affairs to an end anybody would think mass murder was being done…but will there be even an Agatha Christie body in the library to cry about when the curtain falls…

By comparison we have heard virtually nothing from the fine artists and writers  who lost funding en masse from last April onwards simply because they are not as organised or as connected to the ‘literati’ in London Town. Where were the banner headlines when hundreds of smaller bodies and individuals were politely told the cupboard was bare?

Let us also not forget the myriad tiny organisations across all communities not just the suburban white that provided community arts of one sort or another and have now disappeared……….silence.

No it only gets nasty when the knife starts peeling the flab from the middle-englander’s favourite institutions. When there no children’s theatre at Xmas then we really are hitting a crisis….

This is the outcry above over the likes of a theatre in Exeter and a National Student festival….what would happen if the knife was aimed at the jugular of The National Opera or Covent Garden or Royal Ballet….the arts most able to support themselves and the ones most financed by ALL the taxpayers of Britain. Change of government comes to mind….you can go so far in your equality Mr. Brown but don’t fiddle with our cherished notions of what constitutes ‘real culture’…

This is where the class issue really hits home. On any weekend more people attend the local football teams or ice hockey than attend a typical theatre in my city in a year. Sport is working class theatre…..not subsidised…but equally important to the culture of this city. Working class people put their hands in their pocket to view this theatre….should we not then subsidise that too?

The sad fact is that this ‘calamity’ and ‘final reckoning’ (I wonder what this journalist would coin for a phrase if an airliner fell on her house?) is actually about taxpayer’s money that has been wasted keeping mediocre institutions open for years because the ‘client base’ vocal and politically strong. It has in no way reflected the aspirations and desires of the whole populace just this vocal minority.

Well done ACE. I think this a good start but the knife should cut deeper…much deeper and really start to allocate funds according to the new buzz words of ‘excellence’ and ‘accessibility’. Take the savings and use across all communities to provide excellence that both entertains and is really excellent and you will always get my vote. Weed out the dead wood, the lacklustre and ineffective in theatres and community arts and we may start to get value for money…not drivel..

As for the crocodile tears of these melodramatic actors and administrators watching their livelihoods wane all I can say is tough…how about getting a proper job….or get your act together and start providing that excellence that disappeared in the slew of mediocrity….maybe then you won’t need hand-outs..and if you cannot go work on the box-office at the local stadium…

Or why not start supporting the screenwriters in Los Angeles because what they striking over fundamental to all our creative futures not just a few in the Shires…

Come back Shakespeare and kick this lot into touch…

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