By Patrick Kelly, Northern Editor
A few months before Covid hit I found myself in Sheffield with some time to kill before I could catch a train home, and wandered down a little city centre lane into a place called Trippet’s Lounge Bar.
Andria Zafirakou is the Brent secondary school art teacher who became famous in 2018 by winning the $1m Global Art Teacher Prize and ploughing her prize money back into her vocation: teaching art
The distinction between a refugee and an asylum seeker is a fine one. It seems to depend on the degree of despair, how the individuals referred to are regarded by those to whom they are appealing, and whether they are seeking merely shelter or more direct succour (a distinction that comes down to how much they are expected to be a burden on the taxpayer).
Sara Shamma is known for her uncompromising paintings of the human condition - her own website has as its main image a brain laid bare in all its glistening viscerally.
The sacking of Jaroslav Suchan as director of Poland’s state modern art museum in Lodz in April for ideological reasons has set off alarms across the globe, condemned by the Tate’s Maria Balshaw among the world’s directors.
By Patrick Kelly
The Covid crisis has revived the idea of creating a basic income for artists. Too often it’s been dismissed, even by artists themselves, as the kind of crazy idea which will never happen.
“Why can’t we sit in a comfy armchair, drink coffee and chat while we look at art?” Kenneth Hudson liked to posit. “Why do we have to treat a visit to the museum as if it were a sepulchre where you have to stand in silence and awe?”
One of the deep grassroots of our cultural heritage is dying. It’s jazz and the cause of its demise seems to be, well, its informality.
In a monstrous conspiracy of fate British musicians, acknowledged globally as the finest in the world, have never had it so bad thanks to Brexit, Covid and the cost of living crisis. Employment among professional musicians fell by 35% in 2020 alone.
By Patrick Kelly, northern editor
York has everything a self-respecting tourist city might want – a smattering of Roman ruins, a magnificent Gothic cathedral, medieval streets with crazily overhanging houses, a clutch of fine suitably colonnaded Georgian buildings, and most of its original walls. But one thing York is missing is a castle.
The Burrell Collection that reopened in Glasgow’s Pollok Park this week is magnificent by any standards, maybe a model for a modern museum.
The Battle of Lincoln in 1217 isn’t up there with Hastings or The Field of the Cloth of Gold or Bannockburn in the pantheon of major conflicts that define our history. It doesn’t feature much in the history books or make it to the silver screen.
By Patrick Kelly, Northern Editor
Nadine Dorries didn’t mince her words in the Yorkshire Post when announcing the government’s approach to levelling up arts funding a few weeks ago. It’s the “biggest ever shake-up in arts funding” she says, designed to redress the “deeply unfair” imbalance in government support for the arts between London and the rest of the country.
Today at a Philips auction in Berkeley Square the last bricks will be taken out of the wall hiding one of London’s best kept secrets, the Warburg Institute.
Twenty years ago Adrian Noble drew almost universal opprobrium when, as the RSC’s artistic director, he engineered the company’s departure from the Barbican in London (where the theatre was tailor-made for the ompany), believing that Shakespeare belongs at least as much to regional audiences who he felt had been neglected in favour of the London bright lights. He wanted to refocus on Stratford.
An interesting week for arts funding. As the Arts Council got down to the nitty gritty of its national portfolio for 2023-27, Nadine Dorries announced a new £50m pot of money intended to level up arts funding outside London and the South East.
The death last week of John Sainsbury will not, we must earnestly hope, mean the end of an era of personal and family philanthropy. But it does feel like it.
We Brits love our children’s illustrators. It’s through the work of Kate Greenaway (The Pied Piper of Hamelin), John Tenniel (Alice in Wonderland) and Ernest Shepard (Wind in the Willows) that we visualise our earliest reading, and versions without their drawings just aren’t quite the same.
So now what? Lockdown by any other name - no indiscriminate mixing indoors the doctors say - appears to be inevitable and with Omicron on the gallop the only question seems to be whether it happens before or after Christmas.
By Patrick Kelly, Northern Editor
Walk on the square - perhaps piazza might be too fancy a term - outside Barnsley’s gleaming town hall, now repurposed as a cultural space, and admire Nigel Hall’s dramatic Crossing sculpture.
Nottingham Castle Museum was doing well, for a museum without much real history left to talk about, and it was getting a healthy 150,000 visitors a year - about half what Stonehenge gets - before it closed for its £30m refurb which it was hoped would double the numbers.
It is the practice to aim museums’ didactic at a 12-year-old schoolchild, not to dumb down but because that is the demographic that is most intellectually receptive and represents the level of attention visitors will have – carefully constructed so as to give the right information without being exhaustive. Generally a 12-year-old is interested, unbiased, questioning and is able to absorb new concepts easily.
Arts organisations are missing out by not recruiting disabled people to their boards for their intellectual abilities rather than their physical status.
A quarter of a century or so ago there was a fervour for a national dance theatre. We had a national theatre, a national gallery, a nation opera company, even a national youth orchestra, but never a national theatre of dance.
The National Trust’s annual meeting on Saturday was billed as being potentially the most explosive since its foundation 126 years ago. More than 100,000 members zoomed in from 12 countries, joining 400 in a Harrogate hall. What happened?
In the unlikeliest of settings, the courtyard of a St James’s gentleman’s club, the most keenly argued issue of contemporary art of the last 70 years is being tackled full on: is abstract art really abstract?
TOTAL WAR! the didactic shouts at the start of the Imperial War Museum’s new permanent exhibition: the concept realised for the first time with the Second World War that non-combatants as well as combatants were considered legitimate targets.
When it was announced four years ago the London mayor’s plan looked like bandwagonism that would quickly pass in the night, floated along behind Hull’s hugely successful year as the government sponsored UK City of Culture and Yvette Cooper’s call for “Towns of Culture”. Now it seems to be driving its own, apolitical, path.
So how’s the culture war going? Dispatches from the front are confusing.
By Patrick Kelly, Northern Editor
Post-pandemic - that is assuming that we are in a post-pandemic phase, and Covid 19 has no new plans to come back and surprise us - what will happen with audiences for the arts? Can we assume that the same people who would have been trooping in to watch theatre, concerts, dance or cinema will return in their droves again, desperate to get the cultural fix? Is it a given that museum and gallery audiences will just pick up where they left off and return in numbers to those blockbuster exhibitions they have been missing?
The UK’s soft power pre-eminence, the British Council reported in 2019, “is vital for its post-Brexit future”. But the cuts to the BC’s operations announced this week will significantly disempower us, said our former national security advisor Lord Ricketts: “I find this completely perverse”.
With the imminent completion of its £110m Herzog & De Meuron designed building in Battersea, the Royal College of Art is moving ever more closely to being the world’s leading centre for industrial design, which some see as a negation of its name.
Nicholas Kenyon leaves the Barbican today after 14 years as its managing director. Nothing extraordinary in that, he is 70 after all, and he’s going back to his first love, music, as the Daily Telegraph’s opera critic. But there’s a nasty taste about his departure that has nothing to do with him. Kenyon has, in effect, been cancelled, and it hurts.
There’s a major historic landmark in popular sport coming up, the centenary of women’s football being banned by the FA. Soccer is by far the most popular participatory wide-scale sport, and this anniversary is being marked by an increasingly key popular artform.
There are two kinds of local museum. One is set up as a perceived duty and run by the local authority; the other is there because of the devotion of a group of enthusiasts. Both sorts range the spectrum from inspiring to dismal.
By Patrick Kelly, Northern Editor
Britain’s high streets are a sorry sight these days. Boarded-up shops, abandoned arcades, vandalised benches and planters are becoming all too familiar for those shoppers who still like the idea of purchasing stuff from someone behind a counter. In some of the country’s poorer communities, shuttered shopfronts are the norm rather than the exception and once thriving town centres are deserted by teatime.
There was an obvious irony in Shell sponsoring the Science Museum’s year-long exhibition Our Future Planet, a show about how to get carbon dioxide out of our atmosphere supported by a global fossil fuel company that for over a century has spent billions putting carbon dioxide into our environment. It is the first ever exhibition about carbon capture and opened in May.
It’s 69 pages long and stashed with stats and recommendations, but the latest report from Oxford Economics - The UK Creative Industries: unleashing the power and potential of creativity, commissioned by the Creative UK Group (the umbrella of the Creative Industries Federation and Creative England whose first joint publication this is) - makes two things plain.
All of this year’s Museum of the Year shortlist for the £100,000 prize are regional museums. “Our five finalists” said Jenny Waldman, Art Fund director and chair of the judges, “are all deeply embedded in their communities... They have each shown extraordinary innovation and resolve”.
Pub closures were a tragedy already happening when the pandemic started, and subsequently the mortality rate has risen sharply. According to the Morning Advertiser, the publican’s bible, 446 pubs disappeared in England and Wales in 2020, 37 a month, more than one a day.
By Patrick Kelly, Northern Editor
Everyone knows by now the important role that local government plays in the cultural ecology of the country. Attention is often focused on the UK government, or more precisely the UK government in its function as funder of the arts in England. There’s lots of debate about Arts Council England, too, and the part it plays in supporting cultural activity. But local government as a whole gets less airtime. Partly this is a result of the hugely centralised media we have. If it hasn’t happened in London, it’s probably not that important.
The V&A has decided to take the government’s war against wokedom – or “contested heritage” – head on.
Being aware of the unbelievable hardship that has oppressed the theatre sector these long, long 15 months makes stories of triumphing endeavour by practitioners of all sorts all the more astonishing.
By Patrick Kelly, Northern Editor
Part of the problem in advancing the cause of culture in government and other circles is the argument, sometimes unspoken sometimes said out loud, that the arts “business” is somehow not “real”.
Twenty-five years ago Ayub Khan-Din’s East is East was a ground-breaking piece of theatre, bringing to British audiences with dark humour the torments of tradition versus contemporary life for so many British Pakistani families.
Design, I thought, is the most pragmatic of disciplines, but I was wrong. The London Design Biennale’s 33 pavilions, answering to the theme of “resonance”, have turned it into a mystical practice.
By Patrick Kelly
We have heard a lot about culture wars in the UK lately, but the truth is that the “rows” over everything from the displaying of union flags to the dumping of statues is an essentially English argument.
Visual artists have suffered more than many in this pandemic, most of them being freelance and not eligible for the grants other self-employed have been.
I’m not sure if the government is trying to level us up or level us down, or who the levellers and the levellees are. Who are the British and what do they look like? Our museums should be able to tell us.
One of the justifications for the quickly aborted European Super League this week was that young people had lost interest in football and needed to be enticed back or else the game would die.
The search for a silver lining in this coronavirus shitstorm has been depressingly disappointing, but there has been one gleam for our sector, particularly for the visual arts: digital technology.
Well, we made it - didn't we? As of Monday we can start to open with shops and outdoor events, come May 17 museums and theatres can open and on Midsummer’s Day almost everything will be back to normal. We think.
By Patrick Kelly
It’s the hope that keeps you going. Ask any artistic director or CEO of an arts institution how they have survived this calamitous year and most will say that the prospect of re-engaging with live audiences is what has sustained them through the long months of lockdown.
Despite the V&A’s protestations there’s widespread belief that it intends to finally close its theatre and performance department.
“Bread and roses” was a stroke of soundbite genius used over a century ago by the American workers’ rights activist Helen Todd to represent her campaign for “fair wages and dignified conditions”. It was invoked again this week in support of creative industries’ freelance workers by the actor Siobhan McSweeney.
It’s all very well venues and museums being allowed to open again from May 17, but how are they going to lure their audiences back from the newfound comfort and safety of their laptops? And how do presenters know their audiences’ tastes are still the same after all that’s changed in the last year?
The Covid experience has taught us a lot about the value of art and how it is valued, and many see the government’s apparently new attitude as positive.
The government has it in for museums. AI had to change its report on Boris Johnson’s “roadplan” on Monday three times because it wasn’t clear when museums were to be allowed to open. Not till May 17 is the final word.
By Patrick Kelly
The news that the National Theatre is abandoning any plans to tour its productions in Europe is a stark reminder that decisions have consequences. The decision of the culture secretary and his department, and his government colleagues, not to back the creative industries will haunt us for many years to come.
When we finally awake from this nightmare, and by my calculation that should be just in time for the last few shopping days to Christmas, the world will look completely different. And the world at Christmas, before we went into our Covid coma, was the high street.
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