As part of our series on the fallout from from the Arts Council's funding decisions, Stuckist Co-Founder Charles Thomson presents a searing indictment of a self-serving system.
Robert Hiscox, chairman of Hiscox insurance, observed, “The art market is the last great unregulated financial market.” He was referring to the private sector, but might as well as have been referring to the public expenditure of money on the visual arts. There is a system of trustee boards and committees in place which is meant to ensure that money disbursed by the government achieves its maximum value for the public. That system has become corrupted, so that very often the last benefit is to the public and the main beneficiaries are either some of those who serve on such bodies or else those with a narrow agenda which is in direct conflict with what the public would choose to spend its money on.
The Arts Council committee awarding grants includes artists, who may well at some stage also be recipients of grants from the same committee. Anish Kapoor and Antony Gormley have both been members and have both received extensive patronage from public funds. Arts Council money is used to sponsor exhibitions in state galleries such as the Serpentine Gallery by high-selling contemporary artists represented by affluent private dealers. After the value of their work has been thus notched up even more by a prestigious show, the resultant profit goes to the artist and his dealer, thanks to a free publicity campaign courtesy of the tax payer.
The Tate is another glaring example, notoriously exposed in 2005, when it purchased its then-trustee Chris Ofili’s work for £705,000. It turned out that the purchase of trustees’ work was a regular practice. The Tate board of trustees nominally represents the public interest. There is considerable public dissent over Tate policies, but the board minutes do not reflect any of this.
The Tate board employs the director, Sir Nicholas Serota, who is an advisor on the appointment of those same trustees. Three of the trustees are artists, and Serota has stated his preference for those who are “erring on the younger side." These, though, are likely to be the most insecure about their careers and are the ones who stand to gain most from being in the director’s favour and have no incentive to question his policies. Two artist trustees appointed in 2009, Bob and Roberta Smith (aka Patrick Brill) and Wolfgang Tillmans have both received considerable Tate patronage prior to their appointments with purchases, shows and, in Tillmans’ case, a Turner Prize award.
Melanie Clore, Board Director and Deputy Chairman, Sotheby's Europe, and its Co-Chairman, Impressionist & Modern Art, Worldwide, was a trustee at the Tate board meeting in 2006, when the gallery announced a major retrospective by Peter Doig, seven of whose paintings Sotheby’s had just purchased from Charles Saatchi. The day before the trustee meeting Sotheby’s had sold a Doig for £445,000. Later, at the time of the Tate show they realised £5,732,000 for one. Clore has said the Sotheby’s and Tate activities were not related and she did not act on privileged information. The fact is that no one in such a possible position of conflict of interest should ever have been made a trustee.
There is no trustee representative of the ordinary man or woman in the street, or even an established voice from an arts professional, such as David Lee, editor of The Jackdaw magazine, who questions the status quo. That would create an entirely different, challenging and doubtless extremely inconvenient viewpoint. Amongst his evidence given recently to the Culture, Media and Sport Committee on the funding of the arts and heritage, Lee pointed out that the public now owns four copies of Jeremy Deller’s work History of the World, which is in the Government Art Collection and the collections of the Arts Council, the British Council, and the Tate. Turner Prize-winner Deller retired as a Tate trustee in January this year.
There are many deserving cases for public funding, but there is no excuse for it going to those who already have more than enough money to fund their own enterprises. In fact, there is every case for such people giving to a public cause, rather than taking from it. There is an “arm’s length” procedure of committees and trustee boards supposedly to remove political interference from artistic concerns. This has had the unintended effect of creating a power bloc of vested commercial interests and narrow artistic agendas. Politicians are reluctant to act, because the loud voices of such interests can easily create unwelcome adverse publicity, branding politicians as fascists or Nazis – surely the implication of Sir Nicholas Serota’s accusation of a “blitzkrieg” of arts cuts.
But politicians should not be deterred. They have a responsibility to the public. The situation is scandalous and change is long overdue for an overhaul (blitzkrieg, if you prefer) of a failed system. The first step would be regulations to ensure that committees and trustee boards were composed of people who do not have to regularly “leave the room”.
Charles Thomson, Co-founder, The Stuckists
www.stuckism.com
The next Stuckist exhibition in London, The Enemies of Art, is at Lauderdale House from 19th April to 2nd May 2011.
Image credit: "The Betrayal of Art by Man" by Darren Udaiyan.
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