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

Episode 15 January/February 2010

“ARTS AND MINDS – JOURNALS OF AN ARTS ADDICT 2007-13”

The arts scene from Labour “instrumentalism” to Conservative ”austerity”

JOHN TUSA

EPISODE 15 JAN/FEB 2010

url: https://johntusa.substack.com/p/arts-and-minds

HIGHLIGHTS

Jeremy Hunt, shadow culture secretary, makes promises to the arts world we know he will not keep. Ann Tusa lambasts novelist PD James for being “Dukey” Hussey’s lackey on the BBC Board of Governors. How to be an arts leader; understand the story behind the numbers and have a sense of danger. My advice to my old friend, Rory Stewart: “the media love you now. They will drop you when they get bored”. Noone understands Henze’s new concert opera ”Phaedra”. Ann Tusa says it makes her realise how much she has underestimated Michael Tippett as a librettist.Thirty years from the founding of “Newsnight” I find myself airbrushed out of its history.David Attenborough and I compare calf muscles. But go no further.

Scanning the New Year’s Honours List is always a pleasure .Will the arts world be acknowledged as it should be. My special pleasure comes from seeing that my former arts director at the Barbican, Graham Sheffield, gets a CBE.

Saturday, January 2 . The NFT was showing both “Jacques Mesrine” films one after the other from 3.30 to 8 pm. Incredibly violent but brilliant film making and no overt moralising. As Annie says: “One scene shows Jacques M rather charming and loving, and you thaw. Then you see him losing his temper or becoming sadistically violent. There is the dilemma - first, one thing then the other – put them together! There’s the moral!”

The crime novelist and former BBC Governor, PD James, guest edits the “Today” programme on BBC Radio 4. I always had an uneasy relationship with her at the BBC when I was on the BBC Board of Management. She always seemed in thrall to the Chairman,”Dukey” Hussey. Here, Phyllis goes for the editorial jugular.

She interviews Mark Thompson, the BBC Director General, and skewers him over BBC pay, BBC bureaucracy and the absence on screen of women over 60. Mark is often reduced to mere spluttering. How can he say BBC pay must be what it is or the best people will go elsewhere? “Just where?” as Phyllis asks? Annie remarks tartly: “Phyllis was one of ‘Dukey’ Hussey and John Birt’s greatest supporters. All these bureaucratic nonsenses grew up and were started by them . How dare Phyllis come righteous indignant like this? She was complicit in creating the system she now attacks.” It was still a destructive interview.

We are often ‘last minuters’ in catching up with exhibitions. Occasionally we get there just in time.

Sunday, January 3. The closing day of the Roger Hiorns’ installation in Lambeth. As we blundered our way through South London’s housing estates, we saw the queue; a hundred people waiting in the bright cold. “Is it worth queueing for” we asked some of those leaving? “Oh, yes, you’ll love it”. Roger Hiorns was commissioned by Artangel, Jerwood and the National Lottery. He found a small one bed ground floor flat in south London about to be demolished. He is interested in the random behaviour of materials beyond the artist’s control. The flat was tanked around with metal, lined internally with metal grid, then 70,000 litres of hot copper sulphate solution was fed in through a hole and left to cool. As it cooled, the copper sulphite crystals consolidated on all the flat’s surfaces. At a certain temperature, the flat was drained, revealing an Aladdin’s cave of intense blue, wedge shaped copper sulphite crystals. The crystals vary in density of colour, responding to the way they are lit. You are enveloped by intense blue. Beautiful, yes, curious, yes, are we glad we caught it, yes. For we will never see it again. We must get used to art that is deliberately ephemeral, specific in place and moment. One part of me wished that a gallery would buy the Roger Hiorns as an installation. But why? I will never forget it.

To the British Museum to dine out Barry Cunliffe, fellow trustee, fine academic and good chap.

Monday January 11. Barry describes the Oxford convention of how to behave when you meet a fellow don on Oxford station going to London – as they all do. You board together and ”make general conversation until Didcot, at which point you turn to your article, proofs or other papers for the rest of the journey!”

I told the Director, Neil MacGregor, how much I admired the way he firmly deflected the ‘personal’ questions – mainly about his religion – put to him by the recent ‘Observer’ interviewer. ”Oh yes, and she got rather angry! As if an interview isn’t proper unless it gets personal,” he says. I added her assumption that because we had been part of the British Empire we could not look objectively at other world civilisations! Neil: “Or was I comfortable discussing Islam since I was a Christian! They’re so naive!”

The arts world spends too much time navel gazing. The Royal Society of the Arts (RSA) and Arts Council England (ACE) summon a gathering on ”The State of the Arts”. The Shadow Culture Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, makes promises we all know he won’t keep in office; lottery funding to be restored to the arts; fewer objectives to be met; five year funding, less bureaucracy.

Thursday, 14 January. A really bad afternoon session on “New Business Models for the Arts” where none was suggested. I thought of a few. (1) “Reward better than target performance in box office, commercial, development and efficiency.” Objection: how do you implement this without a big slice of bureaucratic supervision? (2) “Get funding from other government departments, eg health, education.” Objection: while New Labour has prattled endlessly about “cross-cutting government”, in practice it means that one department obstructs another. (3) Acknowledge the practice of real ”risk funding” - financial support only kicks in when box office targets have not been met because risk was consciously sought. Objection: far too clever sounding. At least these are ideas!

The BBC’s new arts editor, Will Gompertz appears. He professed amazement that Jade Goody’s death attracted more column inches than that of the great modern dancer and choreographer, Pina Bausch! Why is he surprised? I point out: “ It’s your job to explain the difference and do so without falling into the ‘apology-because-it-is-elitist!’” trap.

Few evenings with the great Russian maestro, Valery Gergiev, in charge of the London Symphony Orchestra are dull. I hadn’t thought of Richard Strauss’s ‘grand guignol’ opera ‘Elektra’ to be quite his score. To the Barbican to find out.

Thursday 14 January. Gergiev treats the score with meticulous attention to detail, overall balance, and releases its horror and its moments of lyricism. Elektra’s triumphant dance of victory in expectation is savage; the recognition of Elektra and Orestes is one of the greatest moments in all Strauss – forget the ‘Presentation of the Rose’ in “Rosenkavalier”! The ending with the murders is shattering. Afterwards, the music critic, the flamboyant and colourfully dressed John Amis says that an opera administrator once said to him: “ ‘Elektra’ seems rather short commons, don’t you think? Shouldn’t it be a double bill with ‘Salome!’”.

I once met the German composer, Hans-Werner Henze, at lunch at the home of Sally Groves, Henze’s publisher and Dennis Marks, the opera director. Henze, the great modernist, surprised me by tracing his musical roots directly to Beethoven.

Sunday 17, January. To the Barbican for the UK premier of Henze’s latest concert-opera, “Phaedra”. His starting point is Theseus, the Minotaur, Phaedra and Hippolytus. Then it is laced with heavy German mystical abstraction and concepts and turned into a frankly incomprehensible libretto. Annie says: “Only now do I realise how much I have under-estimated Michael Tippett as a librettist.” (The critic, Norman Lebrecht, thinks that ‘the best double put down I have heard in years’.) The music though occasionally lyrical, gives you few clues and no real support. When Greek myth meets German metaphysics what can you hope for? On Monday, I ring Henze’s confidante, Sally Groves. “Please, help us! We could not make head nor tail of last night!” Sally: “Don’t worry. Dennis and I turned to one another at the end and said ‘what was THAT about’?” Phew! We were not mad.

This year sees the sixth cohort of would be future arts leaders during the ten month course of the Clore Fellowship which I chair. They all say they want to be ‘arts leaders’. What do they really think that arts leadership actually involves beyond fancy words.

Wednesday, January 20. We round off the three day Clore session with a round table disco on leadership. The qualities they admired were gentleness, humility and integrity. The more robust qualities actually needed for leadership left them more confused and uncertain. I get a strong response to the thought that ”a good leader must be unselfish!” “Did I ask that in order to provoke,” one asked? No, I wanted to hear their answers. One insists that a leader must be egotistical, charismatic, selfish and self centred – but, of course, only in the interests of the organisation. The session on numbers invites them not to be a slave to them but to user numbers as a tool, an instrument of managing. The best single apercu on this subject: “finance is about understanding the stories behind the numbers!”

A UAL lecture at the National Theatre in honour of the stage designer Jocelyn Herbert because the University’s Wimbledon College has her archive.

Friday, January 22. Richard Eyre, former RNT Director, gives the lecture filling the RNT Olivier Theatre with 800 seat buyers. Called “Less is More” he ranges over the experience of theatre design from Gordon Craig to Brecht, George Devine and of course to Jocelyn Herbert herself. He sets out faithfully the special virtues of “less is more” in the theatre. Towards the end he says: “Jocelyn and I never worked together in the theatre. She thought I was insufficiently austere and rigorous in my approach; I preferred things to be rather more flamboyant!” It was wonderfully open, honest and delicate. Afterwards at the party in the RNT Paint Frame workshop, I get Richard to repeat an obiter dictum from his father: ” Time is Short/ We must seize/ Every chance/Above the Knees! ” He says how his father never forgave him for going into arts; he regarded every artistic event as a personal affront and never saw one of Richard’s productions.

It is a pleasure to discover that composers not only write music, they are very fertile at curating it, assembling programmes of wonderful interest and stimulus.

Sunday January 24. A big evening at Wigmore, a stunning programme devised by Ollie Knussen – all music composed by musicians who were aged 28-30 but of different generations. The trouble is that it includes three wonderful pieces from the youth of Harry Birtwistle, Max Davies and Sandy Goehr. Two of them, Birtwistle and Davies, are mini-masterpieces. The Goehr is austere and chiselled. All are intellectual, formidably thought through and tributes to being part of a system though not bound by it. By contrast, the pieces by today’s young composers of the same age group are very pleasant but lacking a sense of tough discipline. Where is the rigour?

I have known Rory Stewart almost all his life – literally. I was his godfather and have been a Trustee of his Afghan Charity “Turquoise Mountain” from its start almost a decade ago. Annie and I have visited the project in Kabul several times.

Monday January 25. Lunch with Rory Stewart, just back from an emergency dash to Kabul after last week’s Taliban assaults. His two recent tv films on TE Lawrence and his place in modern Arabian policy-making were full of clear messages for today – namely you must live, work, fight alongside the Arabs as one of them not as intruding armies. His message today was uncompromising - we shouldn’t be there. Our mutual friend, the former diplomat Rodric Braithwaite has sent Rory an email: in talking to current diplomats and soldiers, they all see the bind we are in and see no way out except to get out. They all say the politicians are the problem: “they can’t get to the place in the book where the soldiers and ‘dips’ are”. My answer: it is far easier to order in troops, to “win the war” than the hard grind of politics and diplomacy. That ”looks weak” while going in to win “looks strong”! It is the softer option. How will this play with Rory’s political colleagues? I offer him advice: “ The media love you now; but they will drop you when they get bored or will turn against you. They love you while you sell a few copies. The time has come for a period of Trappism. You need less exposure, not more .”

We share equal contempt for DfID (the UK’s economic development ministry) and the British Embassy. After the latest Taliban attack, the Canadians offered $1/4 million to Rory’s Afghan charity, ‘Turquoise Mountain’, to buy two armoured vehicles to protect his staff. “Shouldn’t the British Embassy have done that?” I enquire, slightly faux-naively? Rory: “It wouldn’t occur to them!”

One of the more eccentric pleasures of chairing University of the Arts London (UAL) was to be able to attend their brilliantly creative fashion shows, not our normal environment.

Thursday, 28 January. To the V&A for the London College of Fashion catwalk show.ev will gi far. Ah, the colours, the legs, the high heels, the fabulous materials, the exuberant gestures, the dead pan faces, the craziness, then the moment when you say, “Ah that’s good, that’s different!” We guess the two winners correctly because Annie’s eye for the cut is so superb. The verdict of the young: it was all “insane!” Venue, setting, atmosphere, clothes, models, all “insane”. Too right.

How rewarding to be able to observe careers grow and musicians develop. It was clear from the start that both Paul Lewis and Steven Osborne were exceptionally talented. Now we could relish them in their maturity.

Saturday January 30. Evening Paul Lewis and Steven Osborne play the three great Schubert four-hand piano pieces. Packed house, sellable twice over. Lewis’s deep elegance, Osborne’s delicacy and subtlety balance and cohere superbly. The great “Fantaisie” was understood, its teasing, wholly Schubertian, rambling form – not structure – was deeply revealed. A classical but sensuous and never self-indulgent performance. Joy for a winter evening.

It was not only emerging British arts leaders who were obsessed with the notion of leadership in the arts. When I am asked to talk about the subject, I always try to offer something original that they won’t find in a text-book.

Sunday January 31. Talk to a group of overseas arts leaders at Missenden Abbey on the nature of cultural leadership. It is not about skills that either you or a colleague need to have. I offer “Six Senses” that a leader does need: a sense of vision; a sense of direction; a sense of purpose; a sense of cohesion; a sense of identity; a sense of feeling. And what leadership is not; authority without authoritarianism. There is of course a vital seventh: “a sense of danger”.

Thirty years ago, with fellow journalists such as Peter Snow and Charles Wheeler, I was part of the team that founded BBC 2’s”Newsnight”, an innovatory approach to television reporting and analysis. Only those involved from the outset in January 1980 could know how precarious its existence was, its very continuation often in doubt.

Thursday February 4. The great ”Newsnight” 30^th birthday party. for “those who were in at the beginning”. While we ate, the recent BBC 2 “Newsnight at 30” programme appears on the screen. There is no mention of me at all. Wesley Kerr says cheerfully: “I see you have been air brushed out of history!” Bridget Kendall, sitting next to me adds: “There was no mention of you in the 30th birthday programme; I thought that very shocking!” On the day of transmission, which we did not see, my son Sash had used the same phrase –”air brushed out of history!” At the time I was hurt, no doubt. Since then, I reflected that this was only preparation for the future – lack of one! David Wedgwood Benn, an old Bush House colleague and Soviet expert, rang me, incensed: “It’s just like in Stalin’s days!” he fumed. The atmosphere at the party was wonderful – as Ellie Updale said, “no bitching, no vendettas, no old score settling”. I said that there was no grandiosity about “Newsnight’s” importance, its place in media history; we don’t have to go round telling people about it. This is not arrogance, but self-confidence based on what we did. Afterwards Annie observes that those first years at “Newsnight” were like a university, a forcing ground of talent who learned from one another and the insane disciplines, inspiration and opportunism of making the programmes.

Over supper, Bridget Kendall says to me: ”What do you think of BBC salaries?” I tell her what I said in my “Sunday Times” article. Bridget: “I can’t tell you the anger inside the BBC at the size of senior salaries. People say ‘I’d love to see Mark Byford go into the outside world and ask for his present salary!’ And how can Mark Thompson go on about competition in the private sector? What private sector!”

It was time to catch up on theatre, which we were sometimes prone to neglect. At least we would only go to shows already well reviewed such as Lucy Prebble’s “Enron”.

Monday February 1. A bit of a disappointment, amusing enough but a confection, a performance, a divertissement on what is a massive theme, institutional, organisational deceit, greed and corruption. Who said white collar fraud hurt no one? This one cost thousands their jobs and scores of thousands their savings and corrupted a system. It needed an Ibsen, Arthur Miller, Granville Barker, David Hare to invest it with the right degree of moral anger. The writing lacks that quality, that stature, that passion. Comparing reactions with others, we agree on it being diverting but no more.

Down to Richmond for dinner with Camilla Panufnik in her lovely Thames-side villa. A professional, photographer, she was married to the late Polish composer, Andrezj Panufnik. Their daughter, Roxanna, is a fine composer. Genes, anyone?

Friday, February 5. Simon Callow, the actor and author is there, good rattling social company. Why is British theatre so ”Oxbridge dominated” he muses? I say because there is so much theatre going on at Oxbridge, you learn your trade very directly. You make connections of course, but the craft becomes embedded through intense practice. Peter Hall once told me that he was asked at an American university if British theatre was so strong because our universities had great drama departments? Peter replied: “No, it is strong because we do NOT have great drama departments!”

Simon is less worried by the ”Oxbridge clique” than by the intense verbalism of the text-based British school, Simon McBurney excepted. I acknowledged this, pointing out that “Dede” Rylands, the legendary King’s don, half blind, directed the elite university Marlowe Society productions with his back to the stage, listening only the words and their sound. It shaped a generation of performers. Good or bad? The quality of verse speaking and meaning has surely never been higher. Now it is all about “what do you FEEL!” I wondered how Simon himself learns text? Through meaning and connections, he replies; “intelligence, I suppose”. He says Derek Jacobi sees a page and takes it in photographically.

David Attenborough and I compare calf muscles - he is proud of his, I of mine. I challenge him on thighs – he declines. Later, when talk turns to Tony Blair and his submissive, pseudo-alpha male , simian George Bush-imitating walk at Crawford, Texas, someone says TB was “walking like a chimpanzee”. Quick as a flash, David: “You are quite wrong; chimpanzees don’t walk like that; this is how they hold their hands, this is how they walk! It’s quite different!”

A winter weekend. Early February too, all too close to the real dark time of the year. Time to break the mold of our usual routines and behaviours. There is something very self indulgent about a movie matinee.

Saturday, February 6. To see the much lauded French thriller “Le Prophete” at 1 pm. We knew it was violent but the suppressed horror and threat of the first 30 minutes were really appalling. Both of us nearly left. It was a relief when the murder takes place, within the first twenty minutes. Then the film is plain reflection of racial prejudice within the prisons, internal gang warfare, crime being a continuation of the criminal world within prison walls. Compelling, relentless, bleak beyond words, a nihilistic experience of the world. But is this the reality that the likes of us can never conceive of?

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