The kindest cut

There has been much wailing and gnashing about public spending cuts recently. In all the Government's pronouncements, the most obvious savings to be made by getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan, plus the scrapping of our absurd, dangerous and otiose nuclear "deterrent", have been skilfully skipped round. Other state sacred cows remain safe from the chancellor's dogs; like the Arts Council - of which the most infamous arm is ACE, the English Arts Council. This body exists to support activities that would never survive in the real world, as they have audiences that vary from minimal to non-existent outside the clique of London critics, the tiny band of accountants and lawyers who fancy themselves as curators and the speculative collectors.

But who better than David Lee, founder and editor of The Jackdaw, for a good long time a great thorn in the side of the State Art establishment, to sum up the current state of affairs? The September/October issue is worth grabbing for its comprehensive expose of the whole business. I should say, the whole damn business:

The procrustean approach of the Government to reducing the deficit in our annual accounts will result in many hardworking people who perform worthwhile tasks being thrown out of work: some will lose their wits to anxiety. Necessary as some of these redundancies may be, it is still a sickening spectacle to watch ministers including the Prime Minister, all born into substantial inherited wealth and privilege, removing with a stroke of their pens the livelihoods of those who have nothing to fall back on. In the visual arts most of us will only suffer second hand. The overwhelming majority of artists will be unaffected by Government cuts to art budgets because they were never beneficiaries of its largesse in the first place, so selectively and prejudicially was it distributed. They are used to surviving without complaint. It is my view that visual arts budgets might be cut savagely as the effect for most will be invisible and the sufferers will be, in the main, those who can most afford it. Painters and sculptors will suffer not because the Arts Council's budget is cut but because those who buy their work have less or nothing left to spend.

...ACE has developed neurotic obsessions with things that have nothing to do with making great art. For example, we are informed, though God only knows for what reason, that "the number of organisations whose diversity action plans or equality plans are rated as a 'strength' have increased from 53.3% to 61.6%".

...The Serpentine, which employs two directors for four exhibitions a year, is surely now ripened for privatisation. It is the convenient outpost for the half-dozen most fashionable art dealers in the West End, whose artists are predominantly shown there. It costs the taxpayer a million pounds a year to further rubber-stamp the reputations of mainly foreign artists who are already well-known.

Read about more, including a list of Danien Hirst's ripoff sources and the ever popular Artbollocks page at www.thejackdaw.co.uk

Illustration by Andrew Gray

Hirst's Indulgencies

Originally posted: September 22nd 2008.

It hardly needs to be pointed out that although the fearless hacks of the Press may lay into the pretentions of 'national security' and the War on Fright, they will roll over on their backs every time when it comes to dealing with the ubiquitous onslaught of State Art. The puffs which pass as reviews are not enough, and often the recipients of State Indulgence may also benefit from free plugs in the news pages. Here's a response (in the Observer letters page, 21.09.08) to one of those pieces of so-called news, from Gil Elliot of London:
Contrary to Peter Conrad's inflation of the concept, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living is manifestly false ('I have to admit it - the man really is a genius', News, 17th September 08). Imagining death is at the foundation of all religions and all great artistic traditions. The earliest surviving written text, The Epic of Gilgamesh, is about the discovery of death. In our own age, which trumpets the Holocaust, the Bomb and a world full of dying children, someone who conceives death as physically impossible can hardly be called 'living'.
Damien Hirst's trade is akin to the medieval sale of indulgencies as practised by Chaucer's 'Pardoner', who tells the tale of three men who go in search of gold and find instead death. But it is Chaucer who invents the tale, not the 'Pardoner', a fellow who lives off the sale of fake relics, with an aura of the magical. He trades with the sanction of Rome, just as Hirst rakes it in with the backing of curators, guardians and critics.