Notebook
A Very strange thing happened in Edinburgh at the end of last week. Mr Ian Hamilton Finlay, the Scottish concrete poet and 'artist, suddenly called off an exhibition of nix work sponsored by the Arts Council. SUrne 250 people invited to a preview were either ejected from the gallery or refused Permission to enter. The Arts Council's orangements were wrecked, and no doubt some of its money wasted. Mr Finlay took tills drastic step because, he said, of the SPectator's response last week to a Press Founcil ruling upholding a complaint he 'lad made against this journal. Why the P,unr Arts Council, and indeed the Finlay 'ans of Edinburgh, should be punished for the alleged misdemeanours of the Spectator I,s a puzzling thing, but Mr Finlay told the 'eels/flan: 'It became clear to me that if the SPectator was to behave in this way, to have an exhibition put on by the Arts Council n'as to spit in the face of art . . . The SpecticIllor has not only sneered at me but at the ress Council, and at the whole idea of accurate and honest reviewing. It has done that because these standards are allowed to ekist in the art world.' I know little of the standards which exist in the art world, but 4111 familiar with the standards which are generally regarded as acceptable in journalism. It is acceptable for an art critic to express strong views, however unattractive Or unfair they may seem to the artist. (`Crities are entitled to be as critical as they wish
be', as the Press Council sagely put it.) So ?bn McEwen, our art critic, was, for exam
quite entitled, in his review of Mr play's London exhibition last autumn, to 'e,scribe the artist as 'at best a purveyor of ;Inddlebrow tourist knick-knacks'. Mr Fin complained of factual errors, and it is rue that there were one or two; but what he PleinllY minded about —what anybody would 11,ve minded about — was the low regard in
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,71ch Mr McEwen held his work. The fack'mal errors, he revealingly complained, had used to support 'an inexact opinion'. 17' hat of these 'errors'? We corrected two, ittlt were asked to correct another eight. Of sq,ese, only one could be categorised as a 4`raightforward error and I will correct it a certain Dr Stephen Bann, who wrote Izit'e catalogue for Mr Finlay's exhibition, kc'es not teach French at the lit.iversity of e.nt; he lectures in history. Another con.telvable 'error' was the statement that the pnte Gallery had 'just' bought a piece by Mr 4ItdaV when the gallery had exhibited it as a w purchase twelve months earlier, but 1,4 depends on one's attitude to time. As h-r the rest, they weren't errors, and I do not elleve the Press Council can have thought
they were. No representative of the 'public sector of the art world' has complained of Mr McEwen's well-substantiated statement that it fawns upon Mr Finlay; nor has the Royal Academy complained about the view that it 'bent the rules' to include a piece of his embroidery in an exhibition of 'British painting'. If any reader feels, like Mr Finlay, that our account last week of the Press Council judgment was 'sneering', I would maintain that it was accurate and compensated for certain gaps in the Press Council's own version. The Press Council said nothing of the 'inexact opinions' of Mr Finlay and his highly-strung friends who bombarded us with abusive letters — the 'inexact opinion', for example, that Mr McEwen is a lout and a liar and, as Mr Finlay describes him in a letter on page 15, a 'tedious bully'. He is none of those things. He is a serious and fair-minded art critic, who fortunately can take criticism with greater equanimity than Mr Finlay. As for the Press Council, it reproached the Spectator for failing to correct 'inaccuracies which were considered significant by the artist'. Perhaps they could now let us know whether they considered them significant.
Perhaps one of the reasons why Italian journalists have been so unkind to President Leone (who finally resigned under suspicion of corruption last week) is that he abolished the presidential custom of inviting them once a year to a wild boar shoot. It was an invitation also extended to foreign correspondents in Rome, something which made me contemplate with shame the inhospitability of our own head of state who has not, I believe, often invited Italian journalists to shoot pheasants with her at Sandringham .My host on two or three occasions was President Saragat who, although a Socialist of sorts (the Labour Party should note), made no attempt to conceal his passion for bloodsports. Indeed, he liked to dress up in a rather tweedy English manner. The shoot always took place at Castelporziano, a former royal hunting lodge near the sea outside Rome, where the boar were driven backwards and forwards through thick undergrowth across clearings in which the journalists were perched on wooden towers with their guns (supplied by the President) at the ready. The towers were cunningly positioned so that it was more or less impossible for one hack to kill another. Three hours spent thus in considerable
boredom, as the appearance of a wild boar was something of an event, were followed by lunch at the castle amid hunting trophies and roaring fires. At the end of lunch, the President of the Republic would read out the bag, attributing triumphs to the cor respondents of those newspapers he most wished to please — 'the New York Times 2, The Times 1, Le Monde 1' — even if they had not in fact fired their guns. Leone, who doesn't like shooting anyway, put an end to all this. Other reasons for his downfall will be given, I hope, in an article next week by Luigi Barzini.
The news reported in last Saturday's Daily Telegraph that Prince Michael of Kent and his Austrian baroness were 'spending the weekend with fiends (sic) in the country' does not, I hope, mean that they have turned their backs on religion after the Pope's decision to refuse them a church wedding. Distressing though this must have been for the couple, I can only sympathise with the Pope. The Dean of Christ Church, Oxford, described the old man's decision as 'disturbing' and a public setback to the ecumenical cause. But who is talking? Is it ecumenical that the Church of England should refuse to recognise the Roman Catholic annulment of the baroness's previous marriage and continue to regard her as a divorced person? Is it ecumenical that Prince Michael's future children, if brought up as Catholics, would be obliged to give up all hope of acceding to the throne? I think not. Even if the Baroness Marie-Christine thinks that nowadays 'it doesn't matter which club you belong to', the two 'clubs' in question continue to operate under different rules, and it is appropriate that they should enforce them. Prince Michael's pledge to bring up his children as Anglicans not only appeared to conflict with a previous commitment given by his future wife but was in clear conflict with Roman Catholic regulations on mixed marriages.
We may be about to see a great city shrink and shrivel before our very eyes, and we will
have to pay very heavily for the privilege.
The city is Glasgow, where the rats are leaving a sinking ship at a terrifying rate. Some 24,000 people left the city in 1976-77. By 1983, the population will probably have declined to 712,000. Our expert on such matters, Christopher Booker, has returned from Glasgow with a copy of the Evening Times which describes one plan for dealing with the crisis. It seems that this city, which has built more homes and tower blocks than any other in Britain, and which is the country's biggest municipal landlord, may be obliged to destroy many of the monstrosities it has created. Quite funny, except for the cost and for the human misery which Glasgow's housing policies have caused. A still private report by the local Director of Planning, Mr James Rae, foresees expenditure of £415 million over the next five years. The money would be spent as follows: demolition of 28,500 houses —f215 million, demolition of 33 schools —£6 million, land rehabilitation after demolition — £20 million, thebuilding of 13,000 new homes away from the city —£151 million, the building of 21 new schools—£22 million. One lesson of this tragic business is that the cost of pulling down a tower block is only about one third less than the cost of putting one up. So when the local authorities start building thousands of new homes outside the doomed metropolis, perhaps they might reflect whether they are the sort of things that anybody will want to live in.
Alexander Chancellor
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