Out Shone
Sir: It is heartening to see how jumpy and ratty members of our illiberal, modernist visual arts establishment (for example, Richard Shone, Arts, 21 May, Anthony Everitt, Guardian 16 May, Richard Dor- ment, Daily Telegraph 14 May) are becom- ing. Having seized all outlets from the Tate Gallery to the Royal Academy, the Arts Council to the art schools, the Late Show to Time Out and the Burlington Magazine, today's mandarins seem to be recognising that their grip is precarious. The outside world will not be bullied into believing that commonplace materials (like brick, choco- late and dead animals) can, by fiat or alche- my, be converted into bona fide works of art. Rare, professionally dissenting voices (such as your art critic Giles Auty and the Evening Standard's Brian Sewell) are increasingly seen, therefore, as menaces who must be removed. Fortunately, the present establish- ment campaign to this end is proving spec- tacularly counter-productive. The Gang of Thirty-five's notorious call for Sewell's sack- ing led to an embarassing avalanche of sup- port for his writing. Mr Shone's linked attacks on your art critic and on 'visually illit- erate' art editors is similarly inept: Auty's authority and influence as a critic is under- written precisely by his long and first-hand familiarity as a painter with the mechanics and the grammar of the art. There are visual illiterates at large but, mercifully, they rarely find space in The Spectator.
What really sinks Shone's case, of course, is its self-contradictoriness and hypocrisy. After pious calls for disinterested criticism in general and for a plurality of voices, he ends with the prescriptive demand that critics pre- sent exclusively 'enthusiastic account[s] writ- ten with warmth for the subject' — no cut, no thrust, no scepticism, just remorseless, syco- phantic, promotional gush.
That such should come from a deputy editor of the Burlington Magazine says much of the health of our arts establish- ment and of the arrogance of its members. But it also betrays a fatal weakness: if, near- ly a century on, modernism truly remained a vigorous, healthy and life-enhancing force, it would hardly require the present ugly, repressive machinations being made on its behalf, would it?
Michael Daley
15 Capel Road, East Barnet, Herts
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