http://belcheresque.wordpress.com

Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to loose

Nothing, I mean nothing honey if it ain’t free, 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 ‘communla’ 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 thenpersonal appearances..or substitute appearances in shows etc. 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 philosphy 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.

Saturday 28 June

1.00pm-1.45pm

Launch of the East Midlands edition of Staple

Roberta Dewa, Derrick Buttress, Antony Cropper, Shaun Belcher, Richard Pilgrim, Clare Brown and Michael Pinchbeck – all Nottinghamshire writers – launch a Staple special edition, with short fiction, poetry and a memoir of living in Wilford!

www.staplemagazine.wordpress.com

Non-fiction Marquee, behind the Village Hall

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, claims artist…
Vanessa Thorpe, arts and media correspondent Sunday February 10, 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 student have fallen so has the inevitable standard of tutoring. 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…????

from Art Newspaper:

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

Artists are apolitical, 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… >> MORE

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 wether artists greedy corporate whores or radical silenced clowns.

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

Three poems published in latest Staple Magazine

Rivers I have Visited
The Drifting Village
The Weaver’s Lament

read all three in ‘Odessa’ section HERE

NEW ISSUE OUT SOON! EAST MIDLANDS SPECIAL!

Featuring stories by Clare Brown, Michael Pinchbeck, Roberta Dewa, Marilyn Ricci, Karen Jardine, Peter de Ville, James K Walker, Georgina Lock, Pascale Quiviger, Anthony Cropper, Richard Pilgrim and Jonathan Taylor, poems by Martin Stannard, Rosie Garner, Derek Buttress, D.A. Prince, Alan Baker, Sheila Smith, Deborah Tyler Bennett, Shaun Belcher, Sue Dymoke, Robert Hamberger,  Robin Maunsell and Pat Marum, texts and photographs by Graham Lester George, documentary film-maker Jeanie Finlay’s ’Goth Till I Die’, John Lucas translating Baudelaire, a history of Nottingham Writers’ Studio, reviews, comments and much more. Catching the spirit of the East Midlands in a handy anthology with a picture of a man sitting on a duck on the front…

Staple Magazine website

http://staplemagazine.wordpress.com/

From yesterday’s Guardian

http://arts.guardian.co.uk/art/visualart/story/0,,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…

I came to Nottingham in summer 2002. Even then the cultural map was fairly exact. All ‘creative finances’ trickle down from EMDA / ESF funding through the gatekeepers of Broadway, City Council, University, Regeneration Quangos etc etc. There are cultural geographical reasons for this. Broadway is a child of the original artistic groups in Nottingham and beneficiary of the goodwill and undoubted good work those original agencies established including Co-Operative Education, Nottingham Film Society, City Lights Cinema and, in 1982, the Broadway Cinema. The new 5 Million pound rebuild is a long way from the original Weslyan Chapel that housed it. Alongside the ‘mythical’ playhouse and Midland Group agencies Broadway is the third pillar of the ‘creative Nottingham’ so beloved of administrators and funders.Now though the goalposts have shifted and the funders badges have quadrupled as EEC funding though ESF and regional regeneration partnerships have entered the scenario. What we are left with is not one but two contrasting and competing edifices of ‘cutting-edge’ culture from 2008 onwards. Broadway draws on a great deal of Trent University art and design experience…e.g. Nottingham Creative Networks and new Digital Arts development whilst the new CCAN gallery is allied with the Nottingham University Art History Department ( who already influence the Djanogly Arts Centre…basically a University showcase with a public remit).

With all this activity how does the ‘non-aligned’ artist hope to prosper? Well basically one does not. In the gap between these two ‘alumni’ driven institutions is a large grey area from left lion to artists lead initiatives, to community arts organisations who try to pick up the scraps of funding left and compete with each other in equal measure. Most fail or scrape along.

For many artists the ring-fenced ‘digital cliques’ are not available and consequently the access to equipment. It will be interesting to see how the projected New Art Exchange fares financially or whether it becomes stuck between a rock (CCAN) and a hard place (Broadway) in the tightening funding scenario on offer. Most Local Authority funding will deplete in next few years as council tax increases and funding cuts bite. The Arts Council package recently revealed will simply keep things as they are now(post the April 2007) cuts for which most commentators are extremely thankful.

What bothers myself and many another ‘mid career’ artist of whatever persuasion is that outside the high profile ‘digital initiatives’ there is virtually no exhibition space available and little audience prepared to purchase artifacts. A recent open studios showed the lack of interest in the large and talented range of artists that through cheaper rents can afford to produce work in this city. We face an over-supply of artwork and an under-supply of audiences.

One of the first initiatives to break this digital / analogue divide and by ‘analogue’ I refer to messy real artifacts in whatever medium..paint, silver, plastic………is the following…

Broadway have instituted a digital ‘advert’ scheme to enable local producers of all persuasions to get their messy real objects and practice in front of the great and the good at Broadway. All well and good but once again there a few stones blocking this new ‘channel’. Most non-digital artists do not have the resources or the the ability to create their own advertising slots. Far better would have been an attempt to utilise the skills of the ‘digerati’ to make adverts for fellow non-digital artisans. If half the money spent on recent ‘creative elite’ shindigs such as ‘unleashed’ ( the creative elite are a self -defining group) was instead spread more evenly across the makers instead of the supposed shakers there would be more sense of a genuine ‘creative network’ instead of the marketing slogans and opportunities thus far foisted on the people of Nottingham.

Making adverts may start to address the ‘digital divides’ but it only addresses a small part of the problem. With an increasingly ‘digital-born and bred’ clientelle there needs to be education too to enable the computer obsessed, facebook generation to actually see anything produced by other means. Broadway is a valuable showcase but where is the showcase for the non-digital? Suggestions on a postcard please……and anybody suggesting local artists will be filling the new CCAN can be classed with those who believe the earth still flat and tinfoil stops alien abduction……or are we all to be pleasantly surprised? Time will tell……

Mother Hubbard’s Cupboard…

“If, as has been predicted, ACE loses £289m from the Treasury and £113m of Lottery monies from April 2008, many funded arts organisations may close..”

Andy O’Hanlon - South Cambridgshire Arts Development Officer from ‘Arts Professional’ 16 July 2007
Well it new school year so Moogee has no young hoodies to go a chewing upon. The streets are bare …..not unlike the coffers of our noble funding organisations. The Brownite revolution continues apace and our beautiful athletes proved beyond doubt, that like our artists, when it comes to the major events…Venice, Osaka etc. we are truly in the second division.

My, my I can hear the protestations loud and clear already…fi fi ….Moogee you are too harsh and given a few solid cash injections and some shiny stadia we will soon be heading the medal tables once again…. O.K. maybe the arts will be a tad impoverished but we’ll all sail through and only a few Volvos full of childrens finger paintings and paper birds will be lost….

Well back in the real world the truth here ‘OOP North’ where we lucky to get daylight in winter and every artist has to pack a snow shovel a dawning realisation has seeped into the collective consciousness….yes we are all broke. Not temporarily, disfunctionally,waiting on a cheque broke but truly bankrupt. The outlook is bleak with some arts officers predicting a futher cut of Arts Council funds in the region of the figures quoted above..
So what is a poor unemployed arts administrator or ceramics workshopper to do with all those half finished application forms and half-baked pots of gold? Well Moogee’s advice is to recycle the application forms to help the environment and register at a temp employment agency asap.

The game’s up my dears and unless you happen to be one of the lucky ‘core’ projects left to do battle for the social impact of art you might as well be running your own marathon for all the good it will do you. How those ‘core’ projects are determined goes back to the heart of Arts Council policy and yes the traditional dance, theatre and opera babes have least to fear. Last in first out is the order of the day so digital fine artists and painters alike look out your cards are marked. If this news is too depressing remember the Italian Renaissance didn’t have an arts council and did alright all we need is a few mad patrons ( as well as Mr S.) who willing to burn heretics at stake and fund some nice murals and before you know it we will all be New Elizabethans all over again. There also a boom market in bronzed athletic figures coming up so drop those conceptual pieces kids and start knocking out some Davids and Venuses for the games…Chinese soldiers at British Museum..tie-in…

On a lighter note and continuing Moogee’s Art Dog promotion of any and all artworks involving dogs a special mention for the latest Germanic Intellectual displaying his wares in Art Capital landing Strip 1 these days. Moogee likes Jochem Hendriks and his posty-Beuysy stuff but draws line at his stuffed fighting dogs that occupying the top floor of noted avant-guarde and trendy gallery Haunch of Venison. As a fellow art-dog Moogee would prefer said dogs had lived their natural life and bitten a few more artists in the arse but there they all are stiffer than a Gormley sculpture and a lesson for all art dogs everywhere…beware of artists….

Moogee is a commentator and artist located somewhere in the provinces from whence he occasionally barks at the insanity of our IAW ( International Art World). He also writes proper joined up reviews and may do more often as there seem to be a lot of puppies out there needing a helping hand and an old dog can teach new tricks…sometimes…http://www.shaunbelcher.com/writing

Barking….

Dear Gentle Reader

It may have come to your attention that I have been less than impressed with what the Arts Council, Academia and artists in general have come up with in the years that I took a Rumpelstiltskin-like snooze from the ‘Contemporary Art’ scene. I’d say my detour down the highways and byways of literature and music coincided with my moving to Edinburgh in 1993 coincidentally just as the ‘BRIT ART’ boom kicked in on the ‘paved with gold’ streets of London (how many ‘Brit Artists’ are actually from outside London is a sore point the further North one travels).

Now there are many in Nottingham and further abroad who will not like the tone nor the content of the following piece but that hardly my concern. I have watched the efforts of the good and great of this city to ‘rebrand’ ‘hype’ and generally convince themselves and others that there some kind of ‘art boom’ happening here. This has been co-ordinated and reached its culmination in the frankly damp squib Brit Art Show of 2006. My contentions then were expressed in a piece written for The Nottingham Evening Post but declined by that august journal as being a little too ‘off message’ for a city still hurting from the ‘binge-drink’ and ’suicide art’ fest the local and national press had visited upon us.

For people’s information I and many others feel far safer in Nottingham than we ever did in parts of London like Harlesden where I once resided. Nottingham was unfairly slated and I do not want to add to the harbingers of gloom there. However hand in hand with this there seemed to be a blind devotion, especially amongst those parties with most to gain, to talk up our wonderful art scene.

That the majority of people with most to lose were middle-class arts administrators and community arts people was not lost on myself or a good many others. The actual artists remain the most unrewarded and badly treated group in amongst all these ‘parades’ or as I believe better titled ‘bread and circuses’ of recent times. A year on and because of the double blow of central government arts funding cuts to pay for the Olympics and more local ‘housekeeping’ - i.e. if you want a shiny new arts venue (CCAN) you have to lose your only two significant contemporary arts venues in the meantime.

(Costing approx 13 million quids it seems pretty good value compared to my little old hometown of Didcot in Oxfordshire which is spending 7 million on a simple arts centre. Suddenly cutting edge and feted architect for £15 million plus (it always goes up) seems a bargain..shame most of it will be hidden under a hill then…for full itemised council tax bill see arts council document)

A year on and those who gained most from the Brit Art show have either moved on or are busy re-casting their Arts Council evaluation forms to convince their patrons of the whole shebang’s worth. Major art events have always been a stepping-stone for the sharp-eyed arts administrator to ‘progress’ which usually means taking what they can and getting the hell out later. Nothing is ever likely to change in that department especially with less pots of gold to administrate. My point is not that this practice harms the local ‘art economy’ but that generally it hardly ever touches the life and soul of our poor local artist. For him or her life remained pretty similar i.e. plenty of cheap factory space to ‘practice’ in but nowhere to actually sell or exhibit.

Nottingham is blessed with a thriving ‘creative industy’ apparently and indeed there is a plethora of studios and artists all beavering away courtesy of a depressed property market and a manufacturing industry which collapsing and providing new spaces every week. With all this cheap space one of the overwhelming achievements of the East Midlands Arts Council has been to never furnish artists with a decent exhibiting space (Angel Row’s Parade was too little too late) which would have come at little cost if commenced years ago. Instead noble projects like the Oldknows Gallery (closed 1995) were ‘let go’ and funding when it did return in the ‘golden shower’ of the lottery was diverted to those most savvy at form-filling and buttering up or bamboozling their ACE officer with artspeak ( for general public this is known as bullshit).

Instead of a vital and artist-led space we got a hundred projects ranging from the blindingly dull and stupid to the quite good. The artist’s talents were immaterial as tickboxing ensured target audiences and other such claptrap obscured whether any of this was actually any good at all. The same can be said of the arts demon twin ‘community arts’. The number of ‘hoodies’ and ‘alcoholics’ saved by t-shirt printing and rapping would, if you believed art council evaluation forms, mean that there were no social problems left in this and other cities at all such has been their success. As Jonathan Meades pointed out recently in his T.V. series no amount of ‘juggling and street theatre’ ever stopped people drinking themselves to death or pissing in their estate stairwells. Sad but true..the figures support this.

One of the great lies of the whole ‘community arts’ industry is just this. I salute Gordon Brown for axing the golden eggs for some of these organisations which were no more than money-laundering that bled European funding directly into the pockets of well off middle class administrators and managers without ever touching the lives of the people it supposedly was meant to change.

It smacks of the Victorian ‘do-gooding’ and temperance societies with no amount of evangelical artists armed with knitting machines, paper mache masks and digital cameras saving people’s souls. The importance of this industry was not its outcomes at all but was how extremely good it was at papering over the social ills that still affect us and keeping a good part of the ‘chattering classes’ quiet or at least funding their sons and daughters whilst Blairism privatised national assets and participated in doubtful wars. It is not coincidental that the more frugal Brown hit the ACE bill first…..even before stepping into power literally as Blair stood in a gallery and boasted of his funding for the arts!

So what are we left with post-Blair, post-funding ( these measures may get worse if spiralling costs for the 2012 Olympics take hold as they surely will?) Do we knuckle down and celebrate our ‘thriving international’ art scene and join in with the ironic ‘national debate’ on funding and the Arts Council just as they debilitate most of its funding? Of course we do - those artists still operating in a financially restricted climate are more circumspect than ever at speaking out in case they lose what little nectar left in the ACE flower for the little hummingbird’s beaks.

What artists are loathe to do (having forgotten how to) is join together and use that reduced budget wisely and for the common good. After twenty years of competitive arts council funding applications where one group was set against the other collective action in art circles has become a dirty word. This has lead to some of the less scrupulous artists grabbing as much funding as they could by constant ‘reinvention’ and form-watching and some of these even attained a certain ‘glamour’ for their ability to do so.

When art students leaving college are impressed by such activities and are not even considering the trivial and amateurish nature of what that money used to fund we are in a bad place. Thankfully as real-world economics and the pot of gold at the end of the overseas student rainbow diminish even the Academic world is coming to its senses.

In this environment where ACE funding reduced and its laughable ‘hands-off’ ‘democratic’ policy re. artistic merit is exposed for what it truly is i.e. a means to reward those most able ( pace the middle class on hospital services, property and just about everything else) to access that funding then maybe ‘artistic meritocracy’ might actually be reborn.

Casual feminists and those with hands on tiller of power will argue that any notion of ‘elitism’ (their words not mine) or artistic standards smacks of a paternalistic and Oxbridge dominated art world of yore. Well yes it was just such types that invented the Arts Council. I think more sense could be got out of that old group…Raymond Williams, F.R. Leavis and Philip Larkin for instance ( yes all men but I’m sure there a A.S.Byatt for every John Carey there too) instead of the pc focus groups and research students who will lead the forthcoming ‘debate’ in London. Debate?..Or smokescreen..?

To me the whole debate is irrelevant for the real power is in the former chancellor’s hands and when he notices that nothing appreciable happens to the great and good of this island without funding he may never return that largesse to its former proportions. A damn good thing too in my opinion. A conservative estimate of 6 billion pounds was distributed by the Arts Council in the last ten years (if somebody has actual figure I’d be pleased to alter it). If only that money had ben invested in the NATIONAL health service not PFI’s coffers with their lovely batik and textile strewn corridors. If that money had been directed to skilling large swathes of under-employed working class male youths instead of frittered away on self-aggrandising art schemes then maybe the country would be in even better shape than it was twenty years ago. Sorry am i being too socialist there for New Labour?

My father was a thames valley builder but a keen observer and he noted how many people on his daily travels were sat in warm offices administrating things whilst there fewer and fewer skilled labourers to do the basic jobs like sewer maintenance and cable-laying….those jobs now done by ‘imported’ (legal or illegal) labour. As the middle-classes bathed in the Blairite benefits be it PFI management blowouts or arts council jollies abroad the working class slipped lower down the economic food table to the point where some actually fell below the table-top. We are trying to deal with the consequences…asbos as band-aids?

I have no time for the apologists of the Blairite regime they have done very well from those years and with escalating property prices have never been better off. The net effect of this has been a ghettoisation of our cities where these people have walled themselves into whites-only comfortable estates whilst the rest…black, asian, bottom rung whites are left to flounder. Significantly it just these groups that no longer represented at the educational establishments. Grant cuts (thanks Tony) and failed schooling have meant that many of the groups I and a lot of my fellow students in early 1980’s came from - white working class and ethnic minorities - simply have no chance of getting to university. This has reinforced the class divide and barring the occasional very gifted student (Hirst and Emin take a bow) this cultural apartheid has got worse.

The majority of arts graduates ( have a look at facebook for a snapshot) are now white middle-class and/or new rich and female. This has had a major impact on arts administration posts (Arts Council but one amongst many) and the kind of people who can become artists. Social groups bind like to like so the more middle class women become curators and even those not enthused by self-fighteous feminist idealism will be default tend to employ, show…and yes debate with like minds and social group members. Perhaps the Arts Council should do a survey of class background instead of tickboxing ethnicity and sexual orientation. Because this process is well advanced and even the most ill-equiped have used it to progress up the academic ladder it will be a major problem to try and put right this nepotistic and classist impulse in the arts.

Artists and ‘cultural producers’ are notoriously opinionated that their ‘ways’ right and can manufacture quite successful ‘in-groups’ that exclude others. Sometimes language and background are signifiers that lead to this exclusion before a picture painted or a book written. Good people have worked hard to stop this but it still exists as long as we live in a class-based culture which we do. Sorry Tony your only revolution was to replace one elite with another looking and speaking the same. In other words there was no New Labour revolution at all. In fact this chimes perfectly with the Saatchi driven Brit Art revolution which also was not New or British or particularly revolutionary unless being beholden to a full-on capitalist advertising executive who good friends with that old Queen of Art funding Margaret Thatcher was what left-leaning artists had dreamt of all along. Funny how a wad of cash can silence the most ‘political’ of artists when they see the palm crossed with silver. Bell and Langland….socialism is only skin-deep then..

Brit-Art, Lottery funding, Hubs of excellence…the hype merchants can spin most of the last ten years into a veritable art banquet. Nothing could ever dent this facade of artistic wellbeing could it? That is one version.

My version is slightly more jaundiced and maybe the truth somewhere in between. What is true is the arts schools facing a funding crisis, artists ..community or otherwise (those who lucky to have cadged any that is) are facing a funding crisis. Here in Nottingham we have a rather spledid council who funding not one but two major art galleries with the noble intention (as revealed by new manager Alex Farquharson) of ‘creating a regeneration alley through a moribund city and promoting shopping’…I kid you not we were all sold a pup it isn’t about art at all…so blockbusters it will be and lots of London advertising to draw social groups A & B here to shed lots of cash on our poor huddled masses. One could truly not make it up……when did digital installations and site-specific projections become the generators of high class shopping experiences I wonder….or maybe they were all along and those of us who thought art meant something and had intrinisic value were just deluded. On a side-note the advertising for CCAN awarded to Fresh Communications ( see the news document credit) who proudly re-launched Paddy Power recently….seriously…..it all fits.

Last year’s mighty ‘Underscan’ flop was just paving the way…. no pun intended our lucky Mexican-Canadian artist pocketed over £100,000 for showing pictures on the pavement which but a small part of the consultants fees for setting it up…).Little did those leery chavs pissed up on white stripe on their way home realise that the projections they vomited and pissed in on the way home were not art but forerunners of this years talking surveilance cameras and £500 fines for dropping a cigarette. Art as social control and intrusion and cutting edge technology ..the boundaries of where artwork stop and social engineering start have been blurred…those lacklustre community artists trying to stop some poor begger pissing his life way were just the forerunners after all of something far more sinister. It is not such a giant leap from potato prints and grafitti murals to directed ‘employment’ and state surveilance after all….is it.

Meanwhile those artists stupid enough to plow on with redundant technology like pencil, paint and brush can have no part in the brave new world of ’spectacle’ and circus. As long as it cleans up our city centre and pushes the human trash out of sight it worth backing….it must be the consultants told us it was for the best and no-one argues with a consultant.

In Apocalypse Now there a famous scene where the Marines shoot up a civilian boat. then medics go in to repair the damage. Its described as ‘machine-gunning’ a people in half then administering a ‘band aid’. That in my opinion is what new developments in Nottingham will do to its art scene, and I not alone, when CCAN and Art Exchange are finished the same ‘able’ few will coin their shining coins and the rest will be given band aids. It is a salutory lesson in misguided interventionism. Everybody has right intentions. Ask Tony..he had more than most….

I am contributing a column to Arts Hub Uk website here the latest

July 31, 2007

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Empty Skulls and Pearly Kings

Another week of sun and Moogee may start dog-bathing again. Meanwhile the shower of marvellous art continues to drench us with facts and figures. Mr.Hirst (Moogee’s favourite artist) has seen fit to make some headlines (with a little help from his overactive PR dept.) by releasing a diamond-encrusted bonce. Said Pearly Bling has made many column inches and left people in no doubt that we witnessing the greatest living artist since…oh Rolf Harris I’d guess. That the bonce is tarted up with a batch of sparklers of indeterminate lineage ( pace Clive James in BBC article) we are left to wonder at the beauty of the artifact. A noble addition to the fake skulls that the Incas knocked out circa 1952 this latest ‘zeitgeist trembler’ is as good as anything the Hirst as ever done i.e. it’s not very good at all. As if by a miracle (or tie-in) David Beckham dyed his bonce in hommage. Moogee waits with trembling paws for the Becks and Posh his and hers diamond skulls to be ‘released’ soon.

Apologies for older dogs who may think artworks are ’shown’ or only emerge fully formed from artist’s studios. Nowadays artists ‘release’ works in the same way as the latest fashion line hits Top Shop (Kate Moss or Frida Khalo?). Some of this may stand test of time but as that smart old dog ‘Ozzer’ Wilde said ‘Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.’

So it good to know that Hirsty has already knocked out a second Fish in a tank to keep the market bouyant. Expect a Top-Shop Emin Tent soon with back page adverts in Sunday Times and how long before individual Mark Quinn blood heads will be sold as Blood bags for hospitals as part of yet another PFI initiative to ensure that dying pensioners see great art as they waste away in corridors. Yes life is consumption these days and a big Woofy yes to the show and tell generation.

Thank god the art world has cleansed itself of those dour old duffers with their paint smeared hands and anti-social graces. A skull is worth a hundred Howard Hodgkins or Francis Bacons because all that depth and intensity and craft just got in the way of a good headline. You cannot expect your average Oxbridge hack to delve deeply into the artist’s psyche as they wolf their dinner down in Grouchos can you?

Thankfully Warhol and his comedy offspring Gilbert and Sullivan (sic) were here to save the artworld from meaning. Better a hundred photo rehashes by some tired old pearly kings desperate to be asked on to the set of Eastenders than real painting.

Yes the world is a better place and our lovely students of the arts have heeded their words and are busily creating artificial nonsensical installations and photo essays with flags and turds in as we speak. Hip hooray barks Moogee we love the new millenium artworld and all who sail in her…..

Pip pip ..snarl…

and a previous snarl from Moogee’s Kennel

July 2, 2007

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Pearly King

Mr. James who a little more erudite than your average YBA has written a fetching piece on Mr.Hirst’s latest tat at..

Clive James on that skull

Damien Hirst - Diamond Encrusted Skull - First Version

Moogee’s reply..

Cracking riposte Mr. James.

Mr. Hirst is the Barnum of our age and whilst not being a bad lad and kind to his mum he does produce some silly artworks. Even sillier is the stage-managed way he hoovers up press via his agent. Fair play in the kingdom of the skull the one-studded man is a chav. My friendly art dog has seen through the media fog for many a day mainly because being a dog he cannot converse with Mr. Hirst in case he rips him in two and drops him in a tank.

Unfair treatment of a critic but that the way life is these days. Would it be unwise if Moogee suggested that if current proportion of illegal diamonds on market as high as suggested that more than a couple of sparklers on this Pearly King’s bonce are dodgy anyway?

More woofism (turn right at post-modernism, ignore blankism and toss Moogee a bone)

Grrrrr