TAITMAIL Drawing a post-Covid future
There’s something eerily Gothick about the New River Head engine house, a delight for illustrators and an image that would send Mervyn Peake on a maelstrom of weird invention. No wonder Quentin Blake fell for it.
TAITMAIL Estuary speak
“Unlovely” is how one of the PRs associated with the Thames Estuary development describes the region. “It’s hard to see Joseph Conrad”.
TAITMAIL Arts centres: investing in the bottom line
There was a poignant throwaway line on Front Row’s edition devoted to Rethink last week when the panel was lamenting any meaningful suggestions from the government about how to avoid the black hole our cultural infrastructure is heading headlong for. “In the absence of large art” said the equality campaigner Amanda Parker “people found local”.
TAITMAIL No normal, no more
At the start of Radio 4’s Front Row on Tuesday presenter John Wilson seemed bucked to be able to say that the government had announced a couple of hours earlier that museums, galleries and cinemas could reopen from July 4.
TAITMAIL Slaving for a living
Artists and writers such as Yinka Shonibare, Ben Okri and Anish Kapoor, and museum curators like Hartwig Fischer at the British Museum, have called for a national museum devoted to, they say, the “transatlantic slave trade and its racist legacy”. But is that what they really want, and is racism slavery's legacy?
TAITMAIL Inequality we all connive at
Black Lives Matter has hit the arts, and so it should. Our culture is who we are, and BLM is telling us that some of us haven’t noticed who we have become.
TAITMAIL Trusting in a new foundation
Negotiations on saving our culture from apocalypse, behind closed doors rather than in the correspondence pages of the national press, have begun and are expected to take until the end of the month, at least in their initial stage. Not long to build a new horizon.
TAITMAIL Staging the apocalypse
Most theatres can’t open before the autumn and those that do will have to operate at 30% box office to meet social distancing requirements, producing an income that would be well below costs. Apocalypse.
TAITMAIL A humble muse for our time
This little fellow, all of four inches tall, is a muse. Not one of the official ones, but one that some enterprising local museums in Kent hope will generate sweet music. Actually he’s a Lar, but I’ll come back to him.
TaitMail Do our museums ever have to open again?
The irony of the National Gallery’s situation last Friday, the 75th anniversary of VE Day, was not lost on its director Gabriele Finaldi.
TAITMAIL The best way to predict the future is to create it
By Patrick Kelly
It’s hard to lift the gloom these days, as the cultural industries survey the wreckage of the Covid-19 crisis and the hapless efforts of the UK government to address it.
TAITMAIL The gifted keep giving
“If you can’t come to art then art will come to you” says the artist Sam Harris, and never has that been truer than in this eerie Covid envelope in history.
TAITMAIL ‘But no decision has yet been made’
That seems to be the sentence that every government announcement ends with. But as Keir Starmer told the government on Tuesday, you can’t just park this. The pandemic will end, nothing will go back to normal, the economy will be unrecognisable, and the plan to deal with it is…
TAITMAIL Minding the gap
By Patrick Kelly
This week we hear that The Film and TV Charity has set up an emergency relief fund for freelancers who have been hit hardest by the closure of productions across the country. Netflix, BBC Studios and the BFI are all stumping up so that grants of up to £2,500 will be available for applicants in hardship.
TAITMAIL The moment of shock
Before I launch into this week’s diatribe, take four minutes for this, from the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra. It will put you in the mood.
TAITMAIL What is to be done?
The news that Halifax’s Square Chapel has gone into administration demonstrates the fragility of arts organisations in the face of the coronavirus pandemic.
TAITMAIL The show doesn’t go on
This is the week the coronavirus crisis really hit the industry, with a tsunami of closures affecting every single sector of the cultural world, from theatre to television, museums to music venues.
TAITMAIL Budget busting for coronavirus and Culture Britain
For Wednesday’s Budget, Covid-19 has been a veil behind which civic Britain is dying. Our high streets are commercial cemeteries, our pubs - as the Chancellor noted - closing at the rate of 18 a week, local theatres and concert halls struggling to survive and shopping malls almost deserted.
TAITMAIL Face, nose Brexiting from
We’ve learned this week that Dominic Cummings detests humanities and the arts, underlining the theory that the Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport has only survived his scythe because he needs it to hit the BBC with, and duly the new culture secretary’s first speech has been about the BBC.
TAITMAIL Rubbish Rembrandt
How did Rembrandt become the world’s finest painter from being barely competent in what could be as little as two years?
TAITMAIL Knowing our place
We learned this week that the Creative Industries are now worth £111.7bn a year to the economy in gross value added, up from £104.8bn in the previous reckoning according to new economic growth figures, and that the next two London “boroughs of culture” are going to be Lewisham and Croydon. There’s a connection, and the link is a fairly new word in artspeak: place.
TAITMAIL Terry, Greg, Will and William
In 2017 Greg Doran had to start his annual RSC press conference by announcing the death of Peter Hall, the RSC’s first artistic director, who had died that morning. On Tuesday he couldn’t do it for Hall’s successor but one because Terry Hands died that day but a couple of hours later. Trevor Nunn, Adrian Noble and Michael Boyd will be planning a very quiet day when Doran’s next press conference is scheduled.
TAITMAIL Seeing straight in ACE’s 2020 vision
Next week Arts Council England is expected to announce its cultural strategy for the next ten years, and already it’s being forestalled by another report, called ACE in a hole.
TAITMAIL Collision economy
Is there life for the creative industries after Brexit? Well, yes, but it’s the quality of that life (and its consequent earning power) that’s the point.
TAITMAIL Here's to a long life and an arty one
Happy new year.
OK, we need creativity in our schools. Keep on saying it and maybe, just maybe, it’ll be made to happen just to shut us up. But hang on, what’s this? Arts involvement later in life helps you live longer?
TAITMAIL Philanthropy – it's about passion, not money
Troy: myth and reality is a truly fabulous exhibition. It opens at the British Museum today with objects loaned from all over the world and tells probably the greatest story ever told, in that it has inspired, horrified and delighted all those who have encountered it for at least 3,000 years, and probably more.
TAITMAIL On antisemitism being, literally, senseless
I’d known Marcel Berlins for maybe 25 years: lawyer, journalist, critic, broadcaster, poetaster, omnivorous music lover, gourmet, most marvellous raconteur. He never referred to his Jewishness, it was of no relevance, and it was not until his memorial service this week that I knew he had spent the first four years of his life hiding in a French attic from Nazis.
TAITMAIL The 1170 election rerun
So, the swords are out, rhetoric is already echoing and the familiar chorus seems to be in every corner of our lives, the cries echoing across Europe. And it all kicks off on Monday, I can’t wait.
TAITMAIL Come to Dada
What do you think this is, a swastika or two noodle strands arranged in a visual pun? And how seriously should you take it?
TAITMAIL Arnolfini: a marriage of convenience
There’s nothing new in universities getting together with community arts organisations. The Ashmolean, the first public museum, has always been part of Oxford University after all.
TAITMAIL How Le Brun made the RA relevant again
For years, decades, the Royal Academy was an anachronism that many thought should never have been allowed to reach its 250thbirthday, as it did last year. In the 60s, 70s, 80s and even 90s artists would turn down election, not wanting to be associated with such a fossil, its standing as a slavish part of the establishment or the out-moded professional practices of its Victorian membership.
TAITMAIL Africa Centre: ‘the embassy of optimism’
As part of the London Design Festival, the Africa Centre laid open the dilemmas it faces as it tackles its future at a public discussion this week. Its director, Kenneth Olumuyiwa Tharp, and Jonathan Hagos of the architectural practice commissioned to design its new face spread it all out.
TAITMAIL Saving the De Morgans
Evelyn Pickering could have been the leading Pre-Raphaelite painter, at least up there with her uncle R S Stanhope. In 1887 she married the then uber-fashionable ceramicist William De Morgan, and in the Arts and Crafts milieu they were Posh ‘n’ Becks, Harry and Megan, George and Amal rolled together.
TAITMAIL Border blues
By Patrick Kelly
Last week the newspapers in Cork were delighted to report that local heroes Pat Kinevane and Gina Moxley had just carried off a trio of awards at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe for their separate theatre shows. But what was also significant was that there at the podium, beaming and congratulatory, was Ireland’s Minister for the Arts, Josepha Madigan.
TAITMAIL Putting slavery in its place
Almost exactly five years ago there was a mighty street party around Windrush Square in Brixton for the opening, at long last, of the Black Cultural Archives in a former Liberal club close by. It was the culmination of 33 years of research, conservation, administration, fundraising and campaigning not to mention a visceral determination to get black culture taught in schools.
TAITMAIL Fringe benefits
In his Edinburgh Fringe mime show, The Letter, Paolo Nani was trying to open a bottle and pour a glass of wine from it without using his arms.
TAITMAIL Art and Johnson’s kitchen cabinet
The art world is tying itself in knots over Johnson’s elevation, viz Anish Kapoor’s rather nasty visual response I show here - just to get your attention even if it’s not what this piece if mostly about - which, he says, was inspired by a Peter Sellers song: “Oh to be in England now my Johnson’s in a Twist”. “Johnson” being ribald slang.
TAITMAIL Drawing out the real we
At this existential moment for us as a nation, there’s an interesting exhibition opening in Hull soon that tries to pin down who we are.
TAITMAIL ‘If you don’t want a robot to steal your job, study art and design’
We’re going back to Victorian times, and it might be the saving of us – from ourselves.
TAITMAIL Time for the arts to stop cheating the poor
One shouldn’t be surprised, in this retro world of ours, but young people from poorer families are still being excluded from arts careers by the old boys’ network, the “affinity bias”, and those that do make it are paid an average of £6,800 a year less than their more affluent colleagues.
TAITMAIL Rylance may be right, but how do we square ethics and economics?
Mark Rylance’s announcement that he was parting with the RSC because of the company’s association with BP makes him the latest in a growing list of artists getting involved in the increasingly fraught quest for arts funding.
TAITMAIL No business like being a curator
The new director of the Royal Museums Greenwich is to be Paddy Rodgers, a man with no professional museums experience at all.
TAITMAIL Art schools need subsidy to feed creative boom
Good news in Philip Augar’s review of post-18 education in that it calls for £1bn more to be allocated to fix further education and allow tuition fees to be cut from £9,000 a year to £7,500.
TAITMAIL You couldn’t sing an aria about it
Someone HAS to write an opera about opera. Better, a soap opera. Sex, death, plot lurches, vast personalities and gorgeous costumes, it's all there.
TAITMAIL 2022, a year of two Roses
It was a coincidence of fate. At the moment the survival of the oldest Elizabethan theatre against the odds and its bright future were being celebrated, the probable closure of the modern one modelled on it was announced.
TAITMAIL Forget farming, it’s the arts that counts in a modern economy
By Patrick Kelly
Since the referendum, there’s been a lot of talk about cars. As in “the German car manufacturers will force the EU to come to a deal” or “the UK’s car industry will flee the country if there’s No Deal”.
TAITMAIL Derry, Irish cultural enterprise and Heaney
I was in Derry a few days before Lyra McKee was killed, a place I’ve grown an affection for over the years.
TAITMAIL The pit and the panjandrums
Both our national opera houses are in trouble this week, in quite different ways. One of the issues might have huge repercussions, the other smaller ones.
TAITMAIL 14-18 THEN
Can the arts recover from austerity, and if so what is the medicine? More, can the arts heal our fractured country?
TAITMAIL Can Manchester’s sticky solutions stick?
As Mrs May’s Brexit becomes more and more Mrs May Breaks It, the country is pulling itself together despite national politics, with its cities planning for their own cultural revivals. First London, now Manchester, next – where?
TAITMAIL Twinkling under the Stratford gloss
Post-Olympic Stratford is booming. The V&A, Sadler’s Wells, University College London and even the London College of Fashion are all settling in at the Olympic Park, or what Boris Johnson called Olympicopolis. It’s getting a £2.3bn international quarter for global corporations, the 34-storey Sky View Tower and the 14-storey City West Tower. Even the multi-storey car park by the station is to turn its top level over to a roof garden.
TAITMAIL Leicester supports its culture by sacking its curators
It is not so much ironic as poignant, that the point at which a charity, the John Ellerman Foundation, recognises the growing crisis among museum curators and intervenes is swiftly followed by a local authority getting rid of all its curators.
TAITMAIL Charity at the core
With no fanfare at all and hardly noticed, an important brick might just have been added to the wall of the new structure of funding for our arts and culture.
TAITMAIL Prizes for the pride and the passion
By Patrick Kelly
It’s a guess, but the chances are that most readers of this column will not have heard of Emily Hope. Which is a shame, because Emily is a visitor team leader at the Beamish Museum in Durham. And she is in the running to become a Tourism Superstar.
TAITMAIL Don't forget to count a gift horse's teeth
This week the Royal Academy announced its biggest ever single gift of £10m as a result of which the RA Schools will be named the Julia and Hans Rausing campus. At the announcement in the RA’s life drawing room, where we sat on the same benches that Turner and Constable once rested their young haunches, my colleague whispered, “Is that the good Rausing or the bad Rausing?”.
TAITMAIL Wimbledon’s acting lesson
Wimbledon College of Arts is turfing out its fine arts operation so that it can teach acting. In three years or so, if things go according to plan, half of the thousand students in the leafiest corner of the University of the Arts London (UAL) empire will be performers; the other half will be costume or set designers.
TAITMAIL A shaft of light in the city gloom
Not to get too carried away by convenient cliché, there’s a new dawn breaking over our cities.
TAITMAIL Age should not weary us
Next month the Arts Council publishes its annual diversity report, offering a series of webinars on how to do diversity.
TAITMAIL Cliff edge or launching point?
We’re on the brink. The political arrogance, diplomatic blundering, economic obfuscating and cultural ignorance have led the cultural industries to the top of Beachy Head and about to step off. Or are we?
TAITMAIL OK, give me VR Shakespeare, but leave me the sniff factor
A research programme has just been announced that sends the imagination into paroxysms and at the same time makes you despair for theatre as we love it. It’s called Audience of the Future.
