Arts and Minds -Journals of an Arts Addict 2007-13 episode 13

Episode 13 August to October 2009

ARTS AND MINDS  -  JOURNALS OF AN ARTS ADDICT 2007-13

JOHN TUSA

EPISODE 13

 AUGUST TO OCTOBER 2009

HIGHLIGHTS;

 The North London coup to seize the Cultural Olympics.  What happens when a singer falls  into  the orchestra pit? If the British Museum  is “protestant”  in its persona is  the V&A “catholic”? Edward Said’s views on freedom get in the way of Beethoven’s in ”Fidelio”. Lee Kwan Yew regrets destroying Chinese culture in  Singapore. I dismiss James Murdoch’s attack on the BBC.  Why artists should be encouraged to make political art. Nick Serota tries to be honest about himself. How Greg Dyke patronised Tony Hall, and Hall is still furious with him. My warning to  a Chinese arts bureaucrat: “Concrete doesn’t make creativity”. Who rules the arts in China? “it’s the Party, stupid!”

Friday, August 14.  On ”Newsnight” to discuss potential arts Olympic projects by individual artistes , a rich, dotty but engaging list for the  “Cultural Olympics”.  Charlotte Higgins of the Guardian argued that they were “nothing to do with the Olympics”. I pointed out that Olympic Sport invites the young of the world to join in competition.  The “Cultural Olympiad” was doing the equivalent, inviting general participation in excellence. Beyond that there is no connection, there cannot be. Moira Sinclair of Arts Council England hints that ACE have been pushing the Olympic Organising Committee - LOCOG - to get a move on. Off camera, we rejoice that Tony Hall and the arts establishment – Nick Serota, Nick Kenyon - have now replaced the South Bank Centre’s Jude Kelly and her bien pensant minions from control of the cultural programme. I think it was a north London dinner party plot that did it! While the arts world stayed publicly loyal to Kelly’s version of the “Cultural Olympiad”, it was actively lobbying against its sterile bureaucracy and modish formulae. Suddenly, the “Tony Hall Committee” appeared by magic but “this could have been no accident, comrades.” Four years have been wasted, and no heads have rolled. To quote the always wise Basil Brush: “I name no names but follow my eyes!”   Now perhaps the Olympic money can be spread far and wide.

You want to be surprised, moved, engaged, stretched by opera.  But not when it is an actual accident in the performance. 

Friday, August 21.  Niaill Fitzgerald, the British Museum chairman, and his wife, Ingrid,  entertain us at Glyndebourne for Dvorak’s “Rusalka”  starting with a light lunch at their Sussex home/farm. Other BM trustees such as Bonnie Greer are in the party. Bonnie has rediscovered her Catholicism and is now big into the church and community at Farm Street in Mayfair.  Bonnie is American. She is reinterpreting English culture through religious prisms. For example, the BM is Protestant, rational, austere, democratic; but the V&A is clearly a Catholic institution, more sensuous, sensual. So far so good.  But then, the RSC is Catholic, the RNT Protestant.  That is less obvious but could be true.  Tate Modern is Protestant, Tate Britain Catholic?  I should ask her how the Barbican /SBC line up?  I guess the Barbican is Protestant – angular, intellectual - the SBC is inclusive, goo-ily Catholic.  Oddly Bonnie sees me as Catholic, in spirit though not in Church allegiance!  Why?  Because I always dress well and with imagination. If that is the impression I give off, that is not a problem, but it is quite surprising for a Central European Hussite.

The “Rusalka” is a delight, fabulously set, lots of long tailed mermaids swinging from the flies, brilliantly sung. Some ten minutes from the end of Act One, the superb Rusalka – Anna Maria de Martinez - lost her footing and fell straight off the stage into the pit with a horrid crunch!   Sickening and everyone was shocked, really so.  Lights up, music stops, stage manager: “Is there a doctor in the house? Please stay in your seats!”. Then we are asked to leave the auditorium and start to regroup.  The First Wood Nymph is the Rusalka “cover”; the cover for First Nymph was thought to be in Cardiff but in fact is merely in London and the train will get her here in time for Act Three. After an hour’s delay, we resume with Act Two, have a slightly shorter dinner break, the “covers” are both wonderful and it is standers and cheers all round at the end!  Martinez is only bruised, the broken cello will be mended and all’s well!  But it is curiously emotional.   George Christie says that when Michel Roux, the great French baritone, fell off the old stage into the pit, far less of a drop, he picked himself up, walked through the pit door, back onto the stage and continued the performance.

There was magic and watery delight in the Glyndebourne “Russalka”. Sometimes a mere concert performance of a opera reveals something quite different.

Saturday, August 22.  Beethoven’s “Fidelio” at the BBC Proms.  A superb cast, Waltraute Meier as Leonora,  John Tomlinson as Rocco,  acting everyone else off the stage and Simon O’Neill as perhaps the best Florestan ever. So why was the evening not more of a revelation?  Partly because the West-East Diwan Orchestra, even under Daniel Barenboim, is good but not great, neat but not revelatory. And I am not sure that Barenboim has anything remarkable to say about the piece itself.  And an irritating text by Edward Said drawing unnecessary parallels with injustice to this day throughout the world is not persuasive. It wasn’t bad but not the definitive ”Fidelio”. No use pretending.  Vivid memories of Richard Cassilly, John Vickers, to name but a few, quite a competition.

Shu sun-yu is a professional tv documentary film maker married to the development economist, Robert Cassen. Chinese by birth, absolutely bilingual in English, Shu has insights into China that most documentary directors do not have.

Thursday, 27 August. To the Robert Cassens for the last “stay-behind/farewell”  dinner for Shu who is off to Beijing because the Chinese are transmitting her documentary about every day life in Tibet on state television. Some criticised her programmes originally for not being about Tibetan rebellion against China. But they were never going to be that.

On a recent Beijing trip, Shu was at dinner with the former Singapore leader, Lee Kwan Yew.  He inveighed at the fact that to get “his“ ( ie Chinese)culture he had to travel to Shanghai, because he could not get it in (his) Singapore. Lee Kwan Yew: “We made a mistake. We thought that if we gave people all the material advantages and goods, that was enough, that was what they wanted.  But it was not enough. We should have given them much more culture as we developed the economy!” 

Invited by an Edinburgh church community to take part in a  discussion about “creativity”.  “Absolutists”, such as myself, believe creativity  is a precious gift given to few that deserves nourishing. “Relativists” see everyone as “creative” and limiting the word to a very few is discriminatory. I see it as only realistic and common sense. The visit involved an unexpected diversion.

Friday, 28 August. In the evening, I was waylaid on my mobile in the middle of Prince’s Street  by “Newsnight”. Would I do a pre-record about James Murdoch’s attack on the BBC at the current Edinburgh TV Festival.  I said I hadn’t seen the text but when they gave me the headlines, I said I would get down to the BBC at Holyrood and give some pithy quotes. First question: “Murdoch says the BBC  is state-sponsored news!” My answer: “A very unguarded remark. It is nonsense. Murdoch may want Fox-style opinionated news but the British public don’t and to suggest that it comes from the government is just plain silly!”  Next: “Murdoch says the BBC  is too powerful and is taking over chunks of the media  by its power and presence!”  Answer:  ”This is funny. The BBC is told to be commercial and it is. It is told to exploit new media and it does. It is told to be entrepreneurial and it is. Then when it does these things, people complain!”  Next: “Twenty years ago, Rupert  Murdoch made a visionary speech here. Is this one too?” Answer: “No, it looks too much like a scrap over existing territory not a broad vision of the future.  It is a dog fight, not prophetic.”

Art and politics, it is usually said, do not mix. It is good to be proved wrong at an exhibition organised by the  British Museum’s “Coins and Medals” department.

Monday, August 31.  “Medals of Dishonour” show what happens when artists are allowed to get angry over politics, mainly the Iraq War.  Cornelia Parker has a medal with the heads of Bush and Blair seen from behind.  The captions are: “We Know Who You Are”, and “We Know what you Did”.  Richard Hamilton has faces of Blair and Campbell, labelled “Whitewash” and “Waiting for Exoneration” or such like.  There’s a savage Steve Bell cartoon too.  It goes to show how effective artists are when they are encouraged/allowed to “get political”. 

Chairing the Clore Leadership programme of emerging arts leaders was a great learning experience for me. The Clore ”fellows” were very fertile in feeding back insights about leadership.  

Tuesday, September 8 . The “graduating“ Clore cohort of  year four all give a personal statement about their experience on the fellowship: “Risk, Faith, Trust – these are the essential elements.”  I quote a few sayings from the exit interviews with Clore Fours.  Thus: “Knowing the   difference between the romance of yourself and what you are actually doing”.  Probably my favourite: “ Leadership is both a privilege and an affliction – it burdens you with solitude!” 

Two very good sessions at the first residential course for the incoming fifth cohort.  Nick Serota on the penultimate evening (September 24^th), and Tony Hall  on the final morning.  Nick was very simple, not his stern, Puritanical self, as he can be.  He was not operating at such Olympian heights that they could not aspire to or understand. He said the time might come when the masterly Tate “empire” – Tate Modern, Tate Britain, Tate St Ives, Tate Liverpool – might, should be unbundled. I asked him what sort of leader he was?  Nick pauses, then:“ At the start, I always wanted to know where everything was, what was happening where. Now, I hope I am more relaxed about that kind of thing!”   After his talk, he grins and says to me:  “I tried to be as honest about that question as I could!”  With a disarming smile.  I bet he still really wants to know exactly what is going on everywhere.

When Nick was in Hong Kong last year to advise on the dreaded proposed West Kowloon Arts complex, the assembled museum honchos of the world were asked if they “would like to run it?”   Guggenheim (Thomas Krens): “Yes, we sure would!  Count us in!”  Metropolitan Museum (Philippe de Montebello): “Yes, we sure, sure would!  Count us totally in!!”   Tate (Nicholas Serota): “ No thanks, that’s not what we do!”  That is similar to Neil Macgregor’s reaction to the Abu Dhabi museums project:“Yes,  we will help you to create a  museum of Arab/Islamic culture.  But we do not want to run, have, staff a ‘BM Abu Dhabi!’”   Americans museums are imperialists following the imperatives and opportunities of globalisation.

Parenthesis from Tony Hall next day, September 25,  about the BBC.  One of the reasons he left the BBC was the way the then Director General, Greg Dyke, talked disparagingly about those who had been in the BBC for a long time. They did not represent achievement, experience, knowledge that a great institution needs. No, in Dyke’s terms, they were just “lifers”!  Tony said it twice, recollecting the contempt with which it was uttered by Dyke and the disgust with which he, Tony, still recollected it.  Second only to John Birt’s notorious dismissal of people such as the Proms Director, John Drummond, as being  “tainted by experience”. And was it Birt or Christopher Bland who dismissed any criticisms made of the BBC by the likes of me or Charles Wheeler as ”old soldiers polishing their medals?”  At  least, as I said at the time, we had medals  to polish.

After a week’s break in Essaouira on the Moroccan coast, it was back to life as usual though there was never anything “usual” about the Romanian pianist, Radu Lupu. 

Sunday, October 4.   To LSO, Colin Davis and Radu Lupu.   Lupu comes on slowly like an Orthodox monk.  He sits on his usual orchestra chair – no piano stool – his arms folded on his tummy, while the LSO play the orchestral intro to the Mozart D minor concerto. Lupu is rapt. Then at the last moment, it seems, he reaches forward and strokes the keys, using a lot of soft pedal, I swear, to produce a sound of such devastating sweetness and lyricism that the heart rose. Sometime he had to keep his hands in check from conducting; always, he listened to the orchestra and produced this miraculous tone without ever losing momentum.

In the Green Room, enthusiasm and the stories from Lupu’s long time agent, Terry Harrison.  Lupu  is notoriously eccentric and isn’t getting less so.  After Thursday’s concert with the LSO, same programme, as Terry drove him home, Lupu said: ” Maybe I no longer play in England!”  Why?  “Traffic is so bad!” On Saturday, he was being driven  to Brighton to play at the Dome.  At five o’clock he tells Terry: “Tonight, I don’t play!”  No explanation. Terry phones and warns Brighton’s Director, Andrew Comben, that he had better get ready to tell 1,000 eager ticket holders that the concert is off.  In fact, Andrew is just about to tell the audience of the catastrophe, when Lupu changes his mind again; he will play after all.  But Andrew Comben takes the precaution of going back after each sonata to make sure that Lupu is coming onto the platform again, especially after the interval.

Why go to awards dinners? Usually not for the news of who wins what. The invitation is of course flattering. The “literati/glitterati” are out in force.

Tuesday, October 6.  Man Booker Prize Dinner at Guildhall. I have yet to come across anyone who is not appalled and shocked by reports of the size of BBC salaries and pensions. Talking to David Owen, I say that my salary outgoing as MDWS in 1993 was shy of £100k.  What did he get as Foreign Secretary?  About the same?  David laughs: ”No, far, far less!”  The Commons Speaker, John Bercow, is at our dinner table. He is determined to keep Commons procedure reform moving.  Surely, the minimum we voters demand is taking the nomination of Commons Committee Chairmanships from the hands of the whips; ditto with membership of the Committees. John Bercow agrees but warns that the forces of reaction on both political sides are re-grouping ready to “limit the damage” as they see it to their power and influence.

In October, the publisher and cultural entrepreneur, Lord Weidenfeld,  got his  chief aide, Hella Pick, the former “Guardian” diplomatic editor,  to organise a huge East/West conference in Beijing on major issues in contemporary arts.

Saturday October 9.   Beijing Culture Conference.  Martin Kemp, the Leonardo scholar, Robert Cassen, the economist, Helena Kennedy the lawyer and I go to the famous “798 Art District”, old army warehouses and former factories now formalised as ”Beijing’s Art District”.  It is attractive, lively and full of, well, so, so-ish art.  Chinese? Not especially.  International? Undoubtedly. But vigour yes, activity, yes. 

 Antony Gormley there finishing his new installation. Set in a bare concrete building with a pitched roof. In the middle of the space, a Gormley ”flying body” made out of hundreds of metal rods, suspended by several score wire, rubber and silk ropes making an intricate cat’s cradle of connections.  Add to this the effect of the sun raying in from the roof windows and it is a magic work.  Martin Kemp says: “ Just when you thought Antony’s cast iron bodies were running out of steam, (sic!) he moves on in this totally new direction!”

At  the actual conference. I chair two sessions on art markets, art collecting. There are some very strong assertions because of the strikingly contrasting international perspectives and experiences. 

Saturday, October 10. Xu Bing, a Chinese artist and academic: the art market is an “economic activity”. The artist must ”think deeper” about what it means to be an artist. Are you an active artist who “meets market need?”  Concepts will not be collected by posterity – only “the highest level of civilisation” will be collected.

Daniella Luxembourg, an Israeli gallery-ist, really lays it on. Where is the art market?  Collapsed. In 2008, the world auction market totalled $20-30 billion; today it is perhaps $5-8 billion! The ”most manipulated part of the art market will  fall the most; the contemporary art market was the most manipulated.”   Beware of  ”demonstrative art, new art”, art that is only created for effect! But the Russian, Aidan Salakhova, really spits it out about the actual Russian new art scene. The total contemporary art scene there has fewer than 500 people in it! There are only 20 galleries and 20 serious collectors! The total number of buyers is 126, which she gave as an exact figure!!  And 98% of the Russian art market is for really traditional art. 

I sum up the morning like this: “Some art markets are in disarray; a few are in a state of collapse; most are undermined by a lack of authenticity, a lack of a sense of values.  There is confusion about the interplay between prices and values. Some artists paint for the market, for effect, some artists  paint for value. There are at least three elements at play in the market – dealers, with their long term commitment to artists;  museums and galleries,  concerned with long term assessment and judgement; and in the middle, the swilling, muddy  mass of the market, fuelled by individualists, and uncertain how to strike any sort of balance between conflicting but intense emotions.  The art markets are where you make your reputation and lose your money.  Take your pick!”

Inevitably and rightly politics and their interaction with culture had  to be addressed. But it happened almost accidentally. And it was all my fault.

In the afternoon, I drop a bombshell in a question from the floor in the discussion about museums and galleries: “What impact did the Cultural Revolution have on collections and programming of galleries and museums?!”  There is a strangled silence, then a hand goes up and out comes the official answer: “It had very little impact on collections at all!”  At the tea interval, everyone is buzzing. One Chinese says: “It was a catastrophe; I will find out for you!” Gradually, a picture emerges from various people and sources. Yes, museums were largely undamaged because the Prime Minister, Chou en-Lai protected them. In the provinces, in particular, the Red Army kept the Red Guards out of them. It is true, too, that many museums accessed good quantities of material as families put their precious objects in museums, knowing the Red Guards would destroy them if found in their homes. The real losses rather occurred elsewhere – a decade at least of neglect of fabric and collections; a generation of lost curators and scholarship.   

With the actual conference concluded, a number of  us stayed on. This allowed my old Chinese friend, Shu Shun-yun, the documentary film maker, to match  me with a high Beijing cultural apparatchik.

I try to persuade him not to build more arts centres in Beijing; they are planning eighteen. Give the artists available buildings, old theatres, warehouses, let the art spring from the availability of spaces. Let them be artists, not venue managers!  China is full of new buildings, hoping that arts activity will follow the building, the same mistake the Japanese made in the 1990s – “concrete not creation!”  

While in Beijing, I trade on my former connection as chairman of the Government Art Collection to get in to see the “hang” of GAC  artworks at the Ambassador’s Residence. I feel like Gogol’s Government Inspector.

 Wednesday, October 14 .The Residence staff are very relaxed because the GAC Director, Penny Johnson, did the hang herself not so long ago, the chef d’oeuvre being a Frank Auerbach of the back streets of Camden Town. There is also a gem, a dreamy landscape of the Ming Tombs by, of all people, Stanley Spencer – what a bit of placement. The staircase has Patrick Prockter’s great China series of prints, of which we have the one of “Lake WuXi” at home.

British  Council seminar in the evening. About 50 people turn up, and I give a spirited rendering of the value of the arts politically. Two themes which I like:  “Chinese arts centres need to choose between two opposites; one is ‘top down or bottom up?’  Do you impose arts policies from the top, and expect that the art follows?  Or do you accept that art is created at the bottom and then flows upwards?   The second opposite is : ‘Concrete or Creation’, a practical version of the former. If you think that just building a ‘creative university’ creates the conditions for creativity, you are almost certainly mistaken.  Creativity is a small, uncertain, diffident but ultimately glorious plant that shoots up where you least expect it. Concrete does not deliver it.“

So what are the limits of speech, activity, freedom in China? What is the deal, the “social contract?” It is very clear. The Party rules; the media are controlled and the Party may interfere with external media if it wants. Art exhibitions may be closed and are closely monitored. Books may not be published if the party decides. The codes for all such interventions seem unclear. In return, prosperity in the cities, material goods, at a price, some jobs, and a lot of direction. The Party really does know best.   

3,645 words   15 Nov 2024