Page 44 - Studio International - February 1971

they were there, were inconspicuous by their announced, the Chancellor of the Exchequer property, of a monied elite. Private collecting,
presence. Self-congratulatory, patronizing and removed with one stroke what (if we ever a most unhealthy occupation, proves this. Read
elitist, deliberately throttling the radicals, thought about it) we may have too lightly all about it, read about the marble hearts and
deliberately avoiding any questions of real assumed to be a fundamental right. The feeling bejewelled fingers in Lord Eccles's book On
political effectiveness, this meeting applauded was that he had betrayed something. This is not Collecting, and reflect whether this love of
itself most vociferously when Basil Taylor so. The Chancellor is a member of a luxury and acquisition has not always been the
doinged the heart-strings of the middle class Conservative government and he has acted in ally of those in whom sympathy and imagination
by the simple method of mentioning that which accordance with what has always been a basic are wanting.
most engages their emotions, income tax. Conservative principle; that art is in no sense Barber's and Eccles's new impositions reveal
Compered rather than chaired by Richard free, and that its public consumption, like the attitudes as people reveal themselves in relation
Wollheim (whose Socialism and Culture cannot consumption of anything else that is the product to them. Since it is a perfectly natural Tory
be read without emotion), these proceedings of human skill and labour, should be dependent measure, Tory reactions have been as one would
only served to increase a feeling of non tali on the possession of money. Ruling class expect, apart from the odd bit of bleating. The
auxilio among the thousand people present, attitudes to the peoples' leisures and pleasures response from liberal or uncommitted quarters
must have made the government feel all the have always been hierarchical in their rationale droops between acquiescence and despair. Those
safer in doing what it likes, but certainly have and repressive in their execution. Despite who immediately wrote to The Times pleading
helped to make all people concerned with art Ruskin's nineteenth-century efforts to make art for exemption or cheap season tickets betrayed
define their positions on the subject of the and its freedom the central component of our both their own toadying towards the hand that
relationship of art to ruling-class organization— national culture—he couldn't win—exalted views holds the whip and a no less despicable feeling
precisely what the Campaign, if I understand of art have been deeply embodied into a of possessiveness towards art. Arguing that they
its purposes correctly, wished to avoid. ruling-class view of high culture : that it is love art more than most, they believe it should
When the Government's decision was first essentially the province, as it is usually the be theirs more than anyone else's. We should
be fierce in condemnation of such an attitude,
5
and should refuse those deals which might be
offered which would separate those people who
go to galleries regularly, for whatever reason,
from those who go occasionally, or not at all.
But the chips are down, and the turnstiles
will go up. Really on the spot are the directors
of the public galleries, who have to make a
choice between the purpose of their
employment, which is to make art freely
available to as many people as possible, and
the conditions of their employment, the fact that
they are civil servants under a Tory government.
I have no particular faith in civil servants. Civil
to all and servants to the devil, in my experience.
The Directors must have had to consider
whether to break the bogus tradition of civil-
service silence. What Reid and Strong have
done (and they must be given a certain amount
of credit for this) is to break it with a whisper.
They've had little help from their trustees, of
course, and the situation now is that they will
have to fight, to connive, or to resign. I feel for
them. But I think that the circumstances which
inveigled the radicals at that meeting to seek
allies among those they normally have most
5 Ed Ruscha reason to distrust will finally be seen by all to
Book of Stains 197o be unreal, dreamed up by vague hopes of
Courtesy: Nigel Greenwood, London
pragmatic expediency and quickly dispelled by
6 Ed Ruscha with his various publications
Courtesy: Nigel Greenwood, London the ( ?) unalterable way that the art-system
works. And it may be that all radicals will now
join in something that has always been lacking
in this country, an art-politics of truly
revolutionary import. Will the turnstiles be the
first of the new cultural barricades ?

Sudding and rubbing at the sink not long ago,
my eye caught out what (see for yourself, on the
Arid packet) must surely have been a tiny poem,
a secret message from an ad-man who once had
been an artist. Blood, egg, blackberry, grass, it
says. Concerning difficult stains, of course.
Those with such problems, poachers and
children, must lead vivid and bumpy lives
quite unlike the frayed-cuff dinginess most of us
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