JL's thoughts on the disappearing newspaper critic hoo-ha run counter to mine and are worth your read. JL says it's so much navel gazing, where I see meatier media concerns. (He also takes me to task over some sloppy verbiage, but you should skip over those points.)
I do care about the question—I think you can make out the barest glimmer of the spectre of the DJ hanging over the professional art critic. Music has gotten by without the patronage of the DJ and art criticism will survive, too, but the whys and wherefores are still interesting nonetheless. I think Jan Herman's collection of quotes about Columbia's cancellation of the National Arts Journalism Program, whose report in part sparked the death-of-the-art-critic meme to begin with, is fascinating stuff, and I'd love to wade into it . . .
. . . but I'm heading to the beach. That's right, it's Beach Weekend 2005, and my urban tribe is making its second annual migration toward the warmer water and cheaper booze of the Outer Banks of North Carolina. My meatosphere friends definitely don't want to hear me rattling on about the evolution of print art criticism, so I'll have to content myself with drinking hundreds of Coronas on the beach. The hope is that art criticism will still be here when I get back.
Congratulations to my roommate, who is closing shop at his own blog and opening a new editorial space at Josh Marshall's TPMCafe. Think that involves repainting? Lifting heavy boxes of code? Regardless, may his professional success continue unabated (particularly if it is paired with a financial success that will furnish our home in new and potentially high-definition ways).
(Related—for a while there, it looked as if MY was going to have to come up with a bloggy sort of blog name (like Grammar.police or what have you). Rebranding is tough, especially when the best suggestions your friends will offer is "MY Side of the Story!!" and "Whyglesias.")
An inspired homage to Thomas Friedman, courtesy of one of Teresa Nielsen Hayden's readers:
FriedmandiasThat's terribly funny—thanks to Brad DeLong for pointing it out. I'm going to have to think about elevating my Roger Kimball Watch to more poetic heights.I met a traveller from the New York Times
Who said: ‘Two vast and Lexus legs of stone
Stand in Bangalore. Near their paradigms
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And open Windows, and sneer of the Berlin Wall,
Tell that its sculptor often ate at Pizza Hut
Which yet survive, stamped on this Lilliput,
T.I. that mocked them as ephemeral.
And on the plinth by this Michelangelo—
“My name is Friedmandias, king of the IPO:
Look on my prose, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing coherent stays. Round the decay
Of that steroidal wreck, boundless and bare
The level playing fields stretch far away.’
Old hat for regular G.p readers, but the Sepia Mutiny recounts and redresses Roger Kimball's recent reformulation of the white man's burden vis-à-vis Indian history preceding Partition. Ghandi's "rabble" and all that. Says Kimball, if you'll recall:
. . . this third-world feminist of color should get down on her knees and thank Siva that her country was the beneficiary of British colonialism. Without it, she would never have heard of feminism or even of the third world, since the very concept depends upon the freedom, education, and language that the West brought to savages [sic] countries in the 18th and 19th centuries. India is such an economic powerhouse today because of the legacy bequeathed by her former colonial rulers . . . everywhere that Britain went—I cannot think of a single exception—it left better off.A correlation/causation fallcy falling somewhere between a counterfactual and sampling on the dependent variable (e.g., Kieran Healey's "Why are so many of the closets I open full of my clothes?"), Kimball's proposition is that progress necessarily follows from British subjugation. Taking his hypothesis to one natural conclusion, one might suggest that the British immediately be persuaded to conquer the entire world, given all the benefits that subjugation to the queen confers; applying his thesis along another axis, one might suggest world domination by both the Nazis and Soviets as well, since many if not all the countries formerly conquered by these Empires are doing very well today (I cannot think of a single exception, or bother to define my metric), a trend only explained by the wise guidance of Fascism and Communism. Following the time variable backward, in fact, it's hard to come up with a single historical instance of brute imperialism that hasn't made the world a better place!
Two summery posts on Robert Smithson that shouldn't be missed:
Should anyone ever again come by this blog by way of the question, "what+kind+of+grammar+is+ouch," let it be known that "ouch" is an interjection. Strictly speaking, an interjection is a word that not grammatically moored to the rest of the sentence, so I suppose the answer here is "no kind of grammar." But interjection, nevertheless.
My friend LL Cool J stopped by the Czech Embassy last night to take in a documentary about and performance by the Plastic People of the Universe, a Czech band formed by members of pyschadelic acts such as the Primitives in response to the Soviet invasion and rollback of the Prague Spring in 1968. Cool movie and cool band, he reports, though they're getting a little long in the tooth. So all you bastards who think you're so great because you looove Gogol Bordello—well, the two bands aren't actually explicitly related. But! if they were, GB would find themselves deep in debt to PPotU's legacy, so you may want to check out PPotU at the Black Cat tonight to dispel any notions that you're a poseur Slavophile. If not for them, then to maybe get a sight of Václav Havel, who's supposed to be in house at the Red Room proper tonight.
Chock this one up as yet another telling last nail in the Soviet coffin: tonight one may see Václav Havel, a former dissident who was imprisoned for fomenting against the state before eventually becoming the first president of the independent Czech Republic, nodding his head to the Plastic Peoples of the Universe, a bunch of also-jailed dissident Captain Beefheart acolytes, at a rock hub in Washington, D.C., the capital of the United States—where, by the power of the free market, all parties involved may enjoy as many Pilsner Urquells as their hearts may desire and wallots may afford. Let that effin' eagle soar.
Real quick—I don't post a lot of agenda items, but if you live in the District and you haven't seen Dan Steinhilber's solo show at Numark Gallery, you only have a few days to correct that oversight. It runs through 28 May. Fantastic show (and a bright exception to what's been a relatively disappointing month at the District galleries).
Dan Steinhilber, Untitled, 2005.
Another round of heavy, chin-in-hand ruminations about the decline of the art critic, this time by the LAT. One thing I've noticed about this recent line of conversation is how regularly Arthur Danto is cited to explain the art critic's looming extinction. This article expands from Danto's belief that we've reached the end of art, that we live in a posthistorical age in which critical mediation is futile, a state Danto terms "objective pluralism" and describes as a state in which there are "no historically mandated directions for art to go in" (citation: Timothy Quigley). Familiar territory for the postmodernist, sure, though Danto unmasks the culprit who killed art (Andy Warhol, in the Gallery, with the Brillo Boxes).
Though I don't think I've seen Donald Kuspit cited in the same articles in which Danto's name is dropped, it's clear that, among his other works, Kuspit's recent article "The Contemporary and the Historical"—a cousin to Danto's thesis—would be fertile ground in this discussion, too.
Except, not really. Posthistoricity offers a plausible explanation as to why the critic no longer plays kingmaker—if, as Danto claims, "there are no historical possibilities truer than any other," the critic is denied large realms to bequeath to kings or schools through which succession can be traced. Fair enough—but the question isn't about how the critic came to lose his elegance (from Addison DeWitt to Jay Sherman, as the LAT puts it), it's how the critic came to lose his job.
Here's the skinny: Fewer newspapers and broad-circulation outlets are hiring art critics. Few newspapers have art critics on staff to begin with. The why of that is a market question that begs for a structural answer. Danto and Kuspit are invoked in this conversation to lay the blame with art, but that's still insular. I'm inclined to believe that film has lapped visual art in public life. I'm thinking especially of the smart, broad middle class of films that attract large audiences but also do, or purport to do, aesthetic work (e.g., Palindromes). Even relatively dumb movies have gotten smarter (e.g., Sideways). Film—not movies, but film—is the high culture common denominator, the cocktail party benchmark; newspapers and other outlets have followed suit.
Perhaps art critics were boxed out of the public sphere; they're also seeing competition in the art world in the form of art consultants, independent curators, and other new strategies. While I don't think much authority has been diverted to the blogs, for better or worse a good chunk of the art writing has moved in that direction. I'm a little less sanguine than Todd and Tyler about this—I think the deprofessionalization of the critic affects the continuity and archivability of art criticism—but it's definitely the case that there is a lot of strong writing about art out there to be found.
ALSO: On a side note, forgive the LAT for one oversight: Only in the last week or so did the newspaper make its art section freely available online to nonsubscribers. The fishwrap may not realize that the clever, new media-ish thing to do when citing heavily from András Szántó's instructive visual art critic survey for the Columbia University National Arts Journalism Program is to link the damned thing. Click (zipped PDF file). Some interesting (and dispiriting) data from the report: more women are visual art critics than men, but men hold positions of higher prestige and make more money; 3 percent of art critics identify Republican; 90 percent of art critics are white; the majority of art critics make the majority of their income by means other than art criticism (sigh). So not only is art criticism potentially becoming extinct, art critics turn out, in fact, to be dinosaurs.
David Levy resigned yesterday as director of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the Frank Gehry wing has apparently been pocket-vetoed, according to today's WaPo. You can't build a castle on quicksand. This has been on the agenda for some time, but there may be a few surprises in store. Olga Hirshhorn has withdrawn her support for the Corc. More later.
For every reason outlined in today's WaPo piece by Bob Thompson and Jackie Trescott:
The Corcoran Gallery of Art's chairman said yesterday that the 136-year-old institution is in such serious financial straits that it should suspend efforts to build its much-heralded new wing, for which architect Frank Gehry has already completed a design, and replace its longtime director.Yeah, ouch. Note that projected costs for the Gehry addition have been readjusted from $60 million to $200 million, meaning that the Corc would have to double its current renovation piggy—$95 million, with half that amount "contingent on the construction of the wing being either launched or completed." The cheddar hasn't exactly piled up since the District pledged $40 million* last year, and what with Hazel and others now openly calling for Levy's resignation, I don't imagine more huge donations will be forthcoming until the board irons out its branding issues. A step in that direction should be agenda item 1 for the May 23 board meeting.The suspension of the Gehry effort could come as early as Monday, when the board is scheduled to discuss a new strategic plan for the Corcoran. "In the foreseeable future, there's no choice," board of trustees Chairman John T. "Til" Hazel said, citing broad financial difficulties facing the Washington landmark, which includes both the museum and the Corcoran College of Art and Design.
[. . .]
After having 20 years of financial records assembled and analyzed, Hazel was startled to find that in 17 of those years, the Corcoran had operated in the red. (In two of the three years it did not, losses were avoided only because of one-time events: a sudden, unanticipated gift and an accounting adjustment). The board had approved a fiscal 2005 deficit of $800,000, but Hazel learned that it had risen to $1,450,000. Hearing that the projected deficit for fiscal 2006 was $2.1 million, he said, "was a shocker."
If the Corc spent around $25 million for Gehry's sketches and what-not and choose to bury the Gehry and return pending pledge grants, the Corc would be left with somewhere in the neighborhood of $25 million to finish the necessary renovation (according to the article and my napkin arithmetic). That leaves a tough little leap to the absolute bottom line cost of the renovation—$40 million—but it's a more comforting gap than the gargantuan maw between pledge grants and the order-of-magnitude-larger Gehry pricetag. If the Corc drops Gehry, it will have to hope that its pledge investors are in-for-a-pound, in-for-a-penny? One bridge at a time: what's evident now is that neither the economy nor the Corcoran's direction inspires the confidence to make the Gehry wing fly.
And moreover, the plan to Gehrify the Corcoran was backward-looking, uninspired, and pandering from the get-go. Isn't this town sufficiently backward-looking, uninspired, and pandering without the expensive help?
* Which is also contingent on the Gehry wing, I'm happy to report. As a taxpaying District citizen, I'm comfortable contributing tax dollars to a renovation that stands to draw tourism (even if also threatens to bake the sidewalks). Minus the renovation caveat, it's bail-out for a sinking ship—but a much smaller one.
From a compatriot in the battle against bad usage comes a link to Ban Comic Sans. Too long have readers suffered at the hands of mothers, HR supervisors, and the authors of yardsale and lost kitten flyers everywhere, all of whom are intent on propagating Microsoft's great crime against typography. The site even offers dozens of comicky fonts for those who need a graduated phase-out program to beat a Comic Sans addition.
If you know someone who abuses Comic Sans, tell them there is a place where he can get help.
I was saying to someone just earlier today that I thought that Ed Ruscha was not the best choice for the American pavillion at the 2005 Venice Biennale. Not because he's not fantastic—he is—but he's had such an extraordinary amount of exposure over the last two years. (Well, maybe not in Venice.) Moreover, several not-insignificant problems emerged for the American pavillion last year, when its traditional sponsors vacated and withdrew their funding, leading the National Endowment of the Arts to delay and then cancel the convening of the selection committee. (The Department of State and the Guggenheim, which owns the pavillion property, eventually sorted it all out.) I idly speculated that circumstances made for a safe choice, and I'll sort of still stand by that.
But it hardly matters. His interview with the LAT inspires my confidence in the decision. And intrigue about what he'll do. Definitely Ruscha will be an artist with whom everyone at the event will be familiar and who probably won't be championing the newest modes on the American contemporary front. But if you've ever been to the Biennale, you know that most of the art is wretched, so it's not so terrible to get a guy in there who will undoubtedly raise the bar. (And it couldn't be said that Robert Gober did the same for the AmPav at the Biennale I attended—it's already so embarassing to be abroad as an American without feeling a vague sense of shame about the work of your nation's art Olympian.)
The crucial story this week concerns the New York Public Library's sale of Asher Durand's Kindred Spirits, a Hudson River School masterpiece, to Alice Walton, heiress to the Wal-Mart hyperfortune who competes only with another Wal-Mart heiress for the title of the richest woman in the world. As if the story were scripted, Walton is using her megamillions to squirrel American masterpieces away from the beaten path to a private museum in Bentonville, Arkansas, birthplace of Wal-Mart, population 20,000. That museum will be named "Crystal Bridges," titled after some local pastoral arcana or another.
Crystal. Bridges.
One macro concern here is the manner in which the market is selecting for or against the best interests of the work. I don't hold a prejudice against locating art institutions in flyover country as opposed to the coasts—though erecting a museum for master works in the absolute armpit of the nation sounds like the scheme of a populist tyrant. Nor is art necessarily ill-served by tycoons who want to buy some respectability, as JL observes, citing the case of Ford and Rivera. (Similar cases, but not equivalent. Come on. A tough, greasy Detroit mural, and a museum whose name and mission suggest a collection of Precious Moments™ dolls.)
The transparent mission of the museum is the problem: Walton is conscripting the greatest painters in American history to the service of her personal narrative. Todd Gibson opines:
I can picture the results already: Ross Perot's collection of Americana meets the long-defunct Huntington Hartford Museum of Art. I'm afraid that the Durand is heading off to a collection of American art that will be consistently curated to make didactic, patriotic arguments. The NYPL attempts to put a positive spin on the sale by claiming that they are happy the painting will be staying in America and will be displayed in a museum. Unfortunately, Durand's painting deserved better than this.Quite so. It's hard to say how responsible museum institutions can compete with Walton for works that hit the auction block by Hartley, Homer, Hopper, and the rest—take comfort that this doesn't happen often, I suppose—but I think collectors will surely take note of the story, and the correction may come in the form of more explicit terms for donations. (Though we know how sticky that gets.)
I'm not familiar with the donor's terms that initially brought the Durand to NYPL, but the fact that the organization did initially offer affirmative preference to a joint bid offered by the National Gallery of Art and the Metropolitan Museum would seem to acknowledge some ethical consideration over the sale. One assumes the donor's wishes did not include a caveat for gadzooks of cash, so I would bet NYPL failed that ethical test—the question remains to what extent. (But let me reiterate here: "Crystal Bridges.")
There's more to be sussed out about the sale, but we should also turn our attention to John Wilmerding. Carol Vogel reveals a conflict of interest in her NYT piece:
So far [Walton] has hired several experts to work on [Crystal Bridges], including . . . John Wilmerding, a professor of art history at Princeton University and a National Gallery of Art trustee who advised the library on the sale of the Durand. Mr. Wilmerding is to work with Ms. Walton on the collection and on the programming for the museum. He also introduced her to Earl A. Powell III, director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, where she has joined its trustee council.What museums do need are entrepreneurially minded advisers who can devise innovative solutions to compete with the private sector in order to promote the best interests of American art. What museums really do not need are advisers working from both sides of the coin. Walton is trying to assemble her own museum, and she's aggressively vying for pieces that are the purview of the NGA—what could Rusty Powell think she brings to the board? Kwame Brown looks like a hell of a contributor in comparison.Although Bentonville is a small city (population 20,000) Ms. Walton is said to hope that it will become a destination for those interested in American art. She is certainly determined: her bid for the Durand from the library's collection outstripped one made jointly by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art.
Jackie Trescott wrote on Thursday about Rusty and the NGA for the WaPo; is it too early for a followup?
And now, it's Friday, and I am just waking up. It's time for lunch. So, I'm going to go have some coffee and a bagel. I'll be back around 3. Then, I'm going to write about this Bolton fucker. After that, I might pop a Xanax and have more sex.Again, SOP around G.p downtown headquarters. I'm a few Metro stops removed from the junior charity circuit but I enjoy Collins's observations on it. And she regularly offers ludicrous amounts of cash for gossip. I do wish I could type the blog address in my browser without writing "washington socialists," which sounds more like my kind of circuit but doesn't exist.
Caryn Coleman reports on an Art Mobs project to archive and provide podcastable museum audiotours—smArt tours, tailored to your rhetorical or topical tastes. The thrust of the museum "hacking" rhetoric indicates a goal of piping squeaky art bloggers and fans into the ears of a population straining under the gross hierarchical abuse of pedestrian art tours. I don't personally feel the compelling urge to rage against that machine. But I could imagine academic applications to the technology; course lectures conducted quasi-live in the museum would be immensely more instructive and less nap-inducing than by slideshow, and podcasting might facilitate audiolectures featuring specialized content, which might in turn promote interdisciplinary studies across genres. Better technology; more homework!
Podcast or not, an English audiotour would have been a boon for me when I visited the Novaya Tretyakovskaya Galereya in Moscow. If only for a hint at the contextual signals that were difficult to decipher for a handful of artists with whose work I was unfamiliar and whose cultural citations are obscure. I studied hard to familiarize myself with the Moscow contemporary before I traveled there, but the occasional frustrating encounters were unbridgable. Sounds like a perfect task for a Russophile with an iPod. Of course wall tags (artist name, title, year) in the contemporary gallery would be appreciated as well and would require somewhat less sophisticated technology to implement.
OK, I'm embarrassed to have missed this glaring item in the same Armavirumque post I mentioned below:
Had Britain had the courage to face down Gandhi and his rabble a few years longer, the tragedy that was the partititon of India might have been avoided. [emphasis added]Gandhi! One presumes here that our neocolonialist correspondent would avoid that tragedy by having India remain subordinate to the U.K.
Gandhi—rabble!
(Has nothing to do with the post; I'm just running low on puns.)
Using the privilege of his soapbox to respond to and demoralize an anonymous respondent to the New Criterion, Critter-in-Chief Roger Kimball spells out the poor man's case against Andrea Dworkin in an aside:
Here she is on the subject of sexual intercourse; and here she is in propria persona, as it were.To be clear, that one-two link combo, legitimizing all too many points made by Dworkin's defenders (among whom I don't include myself), belongs to Kimball.
Next up: Yo' mama (was a Communist) jokes!
As you've no doubt heard by now, it was announced yesterday that one Herbert Matter discovered 32 previously unknown, uncatalogued paintings by Jackson Pollock in a storage locker in East Hampton. The paintings were discovered in 2002 and have undergone cleaning, restoration, and authentication over the last 3 years. (As JL observes: The documentary of that process had better be forthcoming, damnit.)
The NPR report is here. If Untitled, 1948–49 (displayed on the NPR link page) is representative of the rest, this cache is a body of work from the significant period on the cusp of the breakout works for which he is known. Good stuff.
Blake Gopnik had a modest proposal for the Corcoran:
With that modest change of name [to the Corcoran Museum of Photography]—and ambitious change of mandate—the Corcoran would go from being a very poor relation of the city's great museums, with their world-class collections and shows, to being the only full-scale museum of photography in the United States—and possibly the biggest in the world. New York would have nothing to compete with it.Corcoran director David Levy demurs:
Taken in its entirety, Gopnik's proposal might be hard to reconcile with our continuing mission to present the Corcoran's choice collection of American art (of particular resonance in this capital city) or with its very strong educational and community orientation. Still, he suggests a promising direction, not just for this museum but for our city and our national patrimony.Art Institute of Chicago director James Cuno speaks at the Corcoran and, at Tyler Green's prompting, tackles the subject of the Boston MFA's lending a dozen priceless Monets to a commercial gallery in a Las Vegas casino (Cumo says this is extremely unwise). At this point, according to MAN, Levy defends Malcolm Rogers's direction of the MFA and its practice. Defending a fellow moneylender in the temple up the coast?
So there's your good advice, and there's your bad advice. Levy's seeking out the worst of the latter in following Gladwell's lead. Tyler noted that "at a recent Corcoran opening shindig, the gallery allowed someone to stand next to their admissions desk, hawking rugs 'inspired by' The Quilts of Gee's Bend exhibit;" Wednesday one can see food gossip writer Liz Smith speak for an exorbitant fee (she's serving "the dish," but she's some sort of cookbook author, so I guess vegetables are sluts or something?). Small potatoes. I had assumed that more J. Seward Johnson–sytle atrocities were in the works to secure the funding for the Gehry façade, but perhaps Levy has his eye on the permanent collection.
A harbinger of dubious things to come. Wonder whether any of this will be hashed out at the May 23 board meeting?
UPDATE: In the Corcoran's defense, the gallery is hosting the last 36 hours of Melissa Ichiuji's Stripped performance right now, which sounds like the sort of thing you expect a contemporary museum to endorse.
UPDATE II: DCist elaborates.
The show's long been closed, but if anyone caught the Charles Long show at the Bell Gallery at Brown, I'd love to hear his or her thoughts. Judging from the reviews I've read, the artist has made a dramatic about-face since his collaborations with Stereolab back in the 90s.
Charles Long, 3 to 1 in Groovy Green, 1995.
Those I'm agnostic about. I'm no friend of synthesia; collaborations like these never fail to leave me cold.* But the new forms from the "More Like a Dream Than a Scheme" exhibit, comprising steel, plaster, papier-mâché, and lights, coupled with found components in various states of disrepair, are earnest and attractive.
Charles Long, Long Time To See You, To Beat You, 2005.
I wonder specifically how mature they are; surely it would take some time for a talent even such as Long's to acclimate to new strategies, and time may reveal more focus than appears in the installation view. Clearly I'm in no position to judge, but I'm intrigued.
* I know, collaborations between visual artists and musicians are surely fun to make. I am a grinch; I deplore fun, especially fun had in the making of art.
The Dean, one of the gents from the Cleveland Park Men's Club, posted his routine for today, the eve of the Virginia Cup Gold:
Gallerist Matthew Marks has been having a tough week. Caryn Coleman called him out on his dismissive remarks about Leonard Nimoy, the L.A.-based photographer and art collector and promoter. (And Vulcan). Quite clueless. It's frankly very mid-90s for a NYC gallerist to act as if the L.A. art scene isn't for real.
Worse still, in my opinion—though it's in no way Marks's fault—a young artist named Blake Boyd bought a two-page advertisement spread in Art in America that he used to publish a letter to Marks. Were it a blog post, Boyd's letter would be a bleg—he all but begs Marks to feature his work. The left page is a letter (in highly readable Old English font); the page facing opposite features the artist's logo (the Mickey Mouse logo, actually, with his name printed in another bad font); a timeline comparing his arrival (should his bleg be answered) to "Sgt. Pepper's," Star Wars, and Andy Warhol; and an assurance that the letter is no joke.
Boyd's antics and art (lots of Pop superheroes, Darth Vader references, boobs) peg him at just shy of 16 years old. And the letter—from its content to its high school literary magazine–grade design and layout—is mortifying. They say any publicity is good publicity, but this can't feel like good publicity for Marks. Definitely doesn't look good.
Check out J.T. Kirkland's new artist site.
Ice cold. After being accepted at a number of graduate programs and finally choosing SAIS, Susan hears word that she's been granted a Fulbright to study ethnic separatist groups (or something) in Georgia. (No, not Atliens. I'm talking about the nation of.)
Congratulations are certainly in order, but it's all rather obvious to me, and I couldn't be prouder anyway—so stop by and giver her her due, will you?
I'm hoping that you read the letter on the U.K. elections that guest blogger JL commissioned from Bunny Smedley the first time it appeared, but if you missed it, take a look. This sentiment in particular struck a chord:
I don’t believe that there is any mileage in the Conservatives trying to pretend they are just like Labour when it comes to such issues. If nothing else, surely Labour are better at being Labour than the Tories ever could be, whereas the Tories might possibly have some success at being Tory, if they could ever just remember what that was like?Sound familiar? How about this:
So it is that the present-day Conservative line on the war is . . . akin to conciliar debate amongst the 5th century fathers of the Church in the richness of its apparent paradoxes: for although, according to Mr Howard, it is terrible that the Prime Minister lied about the reasons for going to war, Mr Howard himself voted for the war, and indeed still thinks the decision to go to war was correct. And somehow, as a rallying-cry, I don’t think that’s going to send the nation galloping off towards the polling-stations, desperate to spill their ink and cast their votes in the Conservative, rather than fringe party, interest.OK, well, that part about debate in the Church notwithstanding—"Adam & Eve, Not Adam & Steve" is about as advanced as topical, public ecclesiastical debate seems to get this side of the pond—I know how that tune goes. The Democrats send the Tories their condolences; that feeling actually gets worse after the election.
UPDATE: MT seems to have chewed up the paragraph related to the post's title, but it had to do with Tory castigation of Prime Minister Blair for hewing to closely to President Bush's agenda. Key point: This line of criticism always makes me laugh—there are so many leaders in the world vying to be President Bush's lapdog.
I'd accept Tom Davis's (R-VA) D.C. Fairness in Representation Act of 2005 if it granted the District one voting House Representative and reduced Utah's entire congressional delegation to a single House Representative. Otherwise I see no principled justification for giving Utah citizens greater representation than they are entitled to in order for District citizens to receive less representation than they deserve. Parity isn't at principle here, fairness is.
While the history that landed District citizens in the state they find themselves in—stateless by constitutional design but disfranchised by congressional machinations—what is relatively clear is that the applicable answers to the question of whether District should be refranchised are "Yes, the District should" or "No, the District should not" and that Utah does not enter into the equation at any point whatsoever.
Probably moderate heads will prevail among franchise supporters on the hypothesis that it would be asinine for Congress to cede the District a House Representative but refuse a Senator—a slippery slope to full citizenship. That underemphasizes the outrageous asininity of giving Utah so much as an extra day of sunshine in exchange for rights that are owed tax-paying, conscription-fulfilling citizens.
I also definitely understand that many District citizens are facing problems that need immediate solutions, but this fact also discourages allowing the debate to settle to a state of comfort in having less than full rights. A token acknowledgment of the disparity between Districters and American citizens will only make it more difficult to realize statehood or some situation in which District citizens determine for themselves, elect a congressional delegation, and are not answerable to other states.
Complacency affects more than our likelihood of arriving at congressional representation. The District needs representatives and public figures who will take the fight against outside interference to the public. Consider the most recent butthead:
That announcement [that gay couples could file District taxes jointly] kicked up warnings from Congress about the financial consequences for the city if it used the tax code to grant rights to same-sex couples.That's a Kansas senator threatening to send the District to bed with no supper if it won't design local tax policy to his fitting. Fuck yourself, Senator Brownback. And what the hell is the matter with Kansas that they don't see through this? I assume the state has real problems that could be dealt with. His behavior should provoke as much outrage in Topeka as it has here.Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.), head of an appropriations subcommittee that has oversight of the city's budget, issued a warning to Mayor Anthony A. Williams and [District chief financial officer Natwar M.] Gandhi at a recent committee hearing.
"I was hopeful we weren't going to be confronting this issue. But it appears there will need to be a review and a discussion," Brownback said, prompting speculation that he intended to scrutinize Washington's budget should the tax office accept the joint filing.
No crumbs, thanks, we'll have the cookie. If only the District had a mayor with a public sensibility like Gavin Newsome, we could capture and reframe the debate in terms of justice. You don't live in the District long before you hear a Marylander or Virginian explain that the District could make its case more palatable if it showed better management skills, a theme manifest with racist undertones that has endured since 1874, when Congress revoked home rule (for fear of the black vote during Reconstruction, though the move was dressed up as a reprimand for the District's financial difficulties). (For an example of the mismanagement line of apology, see comments here.) It seems to me that a District government looking to respond to Brownback et al. should tell the Capitol to collect and dispose of its own trash, police its own grounds, and prevent its own fires. I'd run to the Hill to see Burberry-clad Washingtoniennes staffing a garbage truck, but I think the image would be as short-lived as it would be delightful.
The larger point being: Reject the D.C. Fairness in Representation Act of 2005. Get the cookie. Support instead the untiring efforts of Delegate Eleanor Holmes-Norton in the form of the No Taxation Without Representation Act of 2005, concurrent House and Senate legislation which would restore District citizens' full represenation. The act has garnered 27 co-sponsors in the House and 12 co-sponsors in the Senate but ought to have kitchen-table recognition throughout the nation.
That was one frightening vacation in the meatosphere—I seem to have caught a cold and developed a repetitive stress injury in my left wrist during the move, Wreck keeps trying to run away from the new house, and I realized the extent to which my possessions and lifestyle mark me as yuppie scum (very much so, thanks). LiveJournal fodder notwithstanding, it was a productive break; my sincere thanks to Dan and JL for keeping the pilot's seat warm while I was away. The idea was to get you hooked for free and then make you work that mouse for it. I imagine I'll revisit a few things each of them said.
Anyway, nothing's more tedious than reading about where an author stands vis-à-vis his vanity Web site, so we'll see if we can't get some less meta vanity content up in the very near future.
Guest blogger: Dan of Iconoduel
One more post from me, if I can bother you to click...
Assuming that I can, might I direct your attention to Carolyn Zick's Studio Notebook, where Carolyn happens upon a decade-old copy of Art in America and reflects on the way we was digital (offering, along the way, a dose of perspective to the internets-addicted among us).
1995: the internet's "Pong Days," as Carolyn says.
Something to bear in mind, I suppose, even as we gripe about museums' online galleries or level righteous indignation at art world Luddites.
Related... simpleposie wants to know: What is a jpeg?
Guest blogger: Dan of Iconoduel
Reviews of art fairs tend toward the scattershot. By nature too large and unfocused to be amenable to easy summary, fairs invariably lend themselves to unfocused lists that lose the forest for the trees on the one hand or impossibly general blanket assessments leveled against often incommensurable variety on the other.
Having already attempted the former, at least thus far for the two main Chicago fairs (here and here), allow me to try my hand at the latter, with the added advantage of being pretty well uninformed and lacking anything truly substantial to say. Couple these virtues with some arch metaphors and tedious word play and there's only one name for what I'm shoveling: pure blogging gold!
So without further ado...
Fair is Foul and Foul is Fair...
Just as there are a multitude of critical approaches to assessing a fair, there are a plethora of gauges of a fair's success. At the end of the day, though, only one matters: art fairs are largely economic affairs, with the bottom line of success ultimately being the bottom lines of organizers' and gallerists' ledgers.
In this sense at least, an art fair's goals can run directly counter to those of its public (its non-art-buying public, that is). Perhaps Chicago Contemporary & Classic's Ilana Vardy is right when she suggests, though not in so many words, that the cutting edge of international contemporary art and the catholic tastes of the cultivated don't ultimately make for the most salable commodities or lucrative enterprises in a more conservative greater-Midwestern market. Maybe competing at the level of Art Basel Miami Beach is a pipe dream and maybe a re-imagining of a Chicago fair requires us to lower our sights and lower our price points. And perhaps art fair success must come with a certain amount of bruising to our collective cosmopolitan ego.
That said, Wednesday's opening night preview—the earliest thing on offer all week and competing, as such, against no one—was incredibly sedate for such an event. And, according to a mid-fair report on Art Letter's message board, the fair had "no attendance and the gallerists [were] openly griping in front of the few people who [did] attend." And this is not to mention how profoundly Navy Pier sucks as an art fair destination.
So, how did CC&C's exhibitors fare sales-wise? I have no idea myself, and am in no position to find out, but it would be interesting to see, as it might help us approach the ultimate question here: namely, will CC&C be returning next year to continue its bid for the mantle of Chicago art fair king? Cited everywhere toward an answer to this is the seven-year contract Pfingsten Publishing signed with McPier when taking the reigns of the pier expo (in what I have to imagine was an attempt to pressure Art Chicago out of the game early in the going) and the certitude this implies. But then Fred Camper wrote in last week's Reader:
Chicago Contemporary & Classic has a seven-year contract at Navy Pier, but when I queried Vardy about next year she replied, "Ask me in two weeks."
So things seem a bit less than certain.
"Rebuilding."
It's a phrase that bears a ringing familiarity to the ears of any Chicago sports fan.
The Cubs, the Bears, the post-nineties Bulls, the White Sox and the Hawks (wait, the who?) have all made such an art of the "rebuilding phase" that they now seem to delight in bringing us rebuilding year after rebuilding year, in perpetuity.
And now we find Thomas Blackman seeming to take a similar tack in his view of his latterly suffering Art Chicago. From the most recent Time Out Chicago:
"I promised that when I left the pier, I was going to try to pull off a show that was so spectacular it would help keep the fair at a very high level, and I would start with the help of the city and Park District. I think we have an interesting group of dealers." Blackman calls Art Chicago in the Park "a prototype" for the future. "This is my year off," he says, gesturing at Butler Field. For him, it's a small show, and all of the work put into it was done early. In previous years, confronted with the challenge of staging another behemoth fair, he would still be busy painting walls.
So even Thomas Blackman Associates is willing to recognize that this year's installment was sub-par. It's certainly understandable given a shortened time-frame (having only announced the rebirth of Art Chicago as late as November) and dramatic change of venue. And what was presented this past weekend may well have exceeded the expectations of those who wrote off Blackman's fair as all but dead, if simply by getting off the ground at all.
Yet, as many have been wont to point out over the past weeks, the fair's roster of exhibitors lacks any number of heavy-hitters (so necessary to reliably draw out the collectors) be they from New York, overseas or even home-grown (oft cited, as here, were the absences of blue-chip locals Rhona Hoffman, Donald Young and Richard Gray). In this fickle and fashionable art world, can Art Chicago really ever recover such lost cache?
From my own perspective, Art Chicago, though it left very much to be desired, had the vastly more successful go of the two competing fairs this year, and a casual survey of press and internet reactions suggests that I'm far from alone in this sentiment. But all this opinion amounts to a whole lot of jack without black ink on that pesky bottom line. And again, I know not a thing of sales returns and other such vulgar figures, and so cannot weigh in on this most important of matters. At any rate, the big question is not so narrowly local as all that anyways, as TBA's biggest competition comes not from the pier, but from places like the Swiss bankers' playground down in Miami.
Art Chicago's fundamentals seem to give them the leg up on CC&C in most respects (e.g.; location, should they again secure their spot in Grant Park; experience in their market; continued gallery support, especially locally; and a brand name, however diluted) but are they strong enough to give the fair national (let alone international) staying power? Ultimately only time will tell whether we're catching a last glimpse of a sinking ship or just waiting for our hardy, tempest-tossed vessel to return safely to port.
Cautious uncertainty.
Guest blogger: JL of Modern Kicks
This will probably be my last post here at Grammar.police. I’ll be checking in on comments, of course, and will continue writing at Modern Kicks. I hope you've enjoyed the past week of guest blogging by Dan and I. It's been fun, if a little exhausting, though probably not as much as moving was for Kriston. Writing at what is, certainly by comparison to MK, a prominent site, linked to and read by all sorts of people, has certainly been a change. If nothing else, the experience has given me reason for one week to feel less guilty about clicking on Grammar.police's Sitemeter button. And since traffic has not shown a complete collapse over the past several days, I'll chose to believe we've done ok, or at least that the worn rut of readers' web habits has not been totally eroded by Kriston’s absence.
It's my duty, however, to announce that guest blogging is now over. And I mean totally over, like Roy Orbison hitting the high note at the end of "It's Over" over.
Sure, I know, people will continue to do it – they’re doing it right now, even. But it was over the moment Kriston announced Dan and I were to be posting here, or, at the latest, when our first pieces ran. Let me explain. Like many of you, I've been reading blogs for several years now. But I only started writing one last year, summer of 2004. That’s right, just as the election campaign was heating up and everyone was going on and on about blogs, what they were, and how they were changing everything, man. That is to say, I started doing this at more or less the exact moment it was over. This was not a new experience for me. For instance, when did I finally decide I thought R.E.M. was a pretty good band and I should buy their next record? Right before Fables of the Reconstruction came out. Yup: over. If you’ll forgive a metaphor bent to the breaking point, you could say that I have the gift of boarding trains that have left the station. So I think we can feel pretty certain now as we wrap up this exercise that the role of guest blogger is done with as well. Any role that was once a novel thing, was later taken up by Harry Shearer, and then I performed? That is the definition of over.
So while I’m still here let me use this forum to complain a little (the one thing that's never over on a blog.) What was especially galling about starting a site just as the phenomenon was over was how well situated I had been to ride the wave. You see, I spent part of 2002 and essentially all of 2003 unemployed. There I was, lying in bed until noon, only rising to surf the web and wash handfuls of Cheetos down with gin, warm water, and sugar far into the early morning hours - was I not the very epitome of a blogger? The plan should have been to put the blogging game in a chokehold. Yet all I did was sit there, thinking things like "that Drum guy is so darned reasonable!" or "how can that economics professor get away with half the time just reproducing someone else's entire post with a link attached?"
When I did start a site, I realized a few things, aside from the sheer overness of what I was doing. The first was that I felt like a total fraud writing about politics, even though, or perhaps because, once upon a time that was my chosen field of work. So I mostly stopped. I also realized that part of what it meant for blogging to be over was that no one needed my thoughts on politics anyway (or on anything else, for that matter, but let's stick to business here.) I’m extremely proud of bringing to you all Bunny’s analysis of the British elections – more so of that than anything else I’ve done online. But let’s face it: I’m not capable of something of that quality. And no one needs what I am capable of – another post by some jackass saying "I disagree with Ezra when he writes . . ." or "The Editors are great! (well, except for that period after the election when they totally lost their shit, quite understandable, really, and they're better now, anyway.)" No one needed that at all. Finally, I realized something I had forgotten about why I was unemployed: I absolutely hate writing. Remembering that cut my ambition down to size.
But I kept plodding along, moving steadily in the direction of art/culture writing of a very informal kind. I hope I don't have to point out that this is now oh-so-very over. It's been rewarding, after a fashion (i.e., no actual rewards), doing it interests me, some of the time, and it helps keep the mental self-reproachment ("fraud! loser!") to a relative minimum. Enough people care about art to make the conversations interesting, but not so many that doing this feels like it could spin out of control. If you've enjoyed the posts I've offered here, feel free to stop by Modern Kicks anytime, there'll be more. Probably. In any event, thanks once again to Kriston for letting me help fill in along with Dan, and to all those who keep reading along. I'm also especially grateful for the emailed press releases from DC galleries that I'll now be receiving until the end of time. Every time I see one of those in my mailbox, I'll think of the time I spent here with you. And then I’ll hit delete.
Over at Modern Kicks we've been talking about the Art Institute of Chicago, which Todd popped into recently and Dan knows, and I used to know, quite well. There's no need to rehash the whole thing, but Todd had noticed that the Ab Ex crowd aren't with the new American galleries reinstallation, but are instead still up in the modern galleries. I assumes that this is a conscious curatorial decision and not just what fits where. One travels through the various types of European modernism, down through abstraction and beyond to surrealism (and about a zillion Cornell boxes), and finally enter the long room with one of the AIC's many prizes, de Kooning's Excavation. It's a layout that has always separated these works (among others in the modern galleries) from a national account of American art, but perhaps that's as it should be. In any event, it is hard to enter that final gallery and see the works it holds without a sense of an expected climax, given the wonders one has seen along the way (the Kandinskys, just to give one name.) It's with envy that I think of that collection, as there's nothing remotely approaching it in New England. On the other hand, there's nothing like the antiquities or Asian art collections we have out in Chicago, which I at least take some solace in.
But anyway, Dan raised the real question in comments: "how much does AIC's image search suck?" For suck it does, mightily and hard. It is not flexible, does not provide much information nor cover more than a fraction of the collection, nor is it well-integrated with the rest of the collection information offered or the website's provenance research section. I'll let Dan add his own remarks, as I see he's now posted something comparing the AIC's site to that of the Terra Foundation. The latter has a much smaller collection, of course, so in some respects it's easier for them.
I don't want to poach Dan's comments, in case he wants to add them here. I'll just finish by saying that in some ways the challenge faced by institutions can almost be thought of as creating a new version or copy of the museum online. I don't know how the AIC is operating, but most institutions are working with some sort of software, whether off the shelf or customized, that brings material from their collections database to the web. The Getty's site, for instance, works that way, as does (I believe) the Currier's and the MFA's. Unfortunately for the AIC and other institutions in its position, not only is implementing these systems a costly and time-consuming task, once they're in place, there's a lot of inertia built in. So if it's badly done, it'll probably stay that way. But in the larger scheme of things, Dan's right: getting this sort of thing done (and done well) is a huge and vital task. So much of collections material is inaccessible, and often for the best reasons, that to allow virtual access to it is the best way to meet the goals and requirements of museums and similar institutions.
UPDATE: Good lord, I just sent a trackback to my own website. Thank god Kriston is coming back soon - I'm starting to get dizzy.
Guest blogger: Dan of Iconoduel
Picking up where Kriston left off a week ago: someone's back from her honeymoon.
Guest blogger: JL of Modern Kicks
Political posts don't happen often at Modern Kicks, and so I haven't brought any to Grammar.police. I am very happy, however, to offer Bunny Smedley's 'Letter from London' on the upcoming British elections. Readers of Modern Kicks may recognize Dr. Smedley's name, as I am honored that she occasionally posts comments there. But she has many accomplishments to her name. A co-founder of now-dormant Electric Review, Bunny now writes art criticism for the Social Affairs Unit, a broadly right-of-center British think-tank with an emphasis on cultural affairs.
I realize that many readers of MK and Grammar.police do not adhere to viewpoints that, like Bunny's, may be generally described as High Tory. But it's always important to hear from other perspectives and in this case, doing so gains one a masterful view of Britian on the verge of an election. It may as well be instructive for American readers to consider a foreign example of how an opposition party (presumably) loses a contest to a relatively unpopular incumbent. Bunny's remarks here are offered as very much her own observations and not those of the SAU; as an admirer of her writing, I am very pleased to bring them to you. The SAU has also been running posts by an "Anonymous Commentator" on the imminent elections. For those interested in reading more detailed remarks on current British politics from an idiosyncratic viewpoint, do take a look.
Bunny Smedley holds a doctorate in history from Cambridge University. She lives in London with her husband and baby son.
‘Dull’, ‘predictable’, ‘ugly’, ‘a bit pointless’ …. no, the general election that takes place here on Thursday doesn’t really require much in the way of specialist language. Even an art writer can easily find the words to sum up this tiresome, pedestrian, please-God-can’t-it-just-be-over-now affair.
Part of the problem, of course, is the slight unreality of the whole enterprise, the phoney-war aspect of it all, since the generously-proportioned New Labour victory that will take place on 5 May is just a prelude to the really interesting conflicts. When, for instance, will chancellor of the exchequer Gordon Brown and his legions manage to wrest power away from prime minister Tony Blair, and how much blood will be left on the tiled floors of Westminster? Once the sheer magnitude of the Conservative Party’s electoral collapse sinks in and the ritual defenestration of party leader Michael Howard has taken place, who will win the inevitably quite nasty fight to succeed him? Presumably, if against all early expectations, Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy will be able to enjoy a period of security based on the ten or twenty seats that his party will have hoovered up, so there won’t be anything very exciting to watch there. North of the border, on the other hand, the Scottish Nationalist Party may want to reflect on missed opportunities. Over the water in Northern Ireland the historically formidable Ulster Unionist Party may find itself with only one MP, as party leader David Trimble and others lose seats to the Rev. Ian Paisley’s reinvigorated Democratic Unionist Party. Or to put it another way, while Thursday won’t, in itself, do anything very exciting to the political landscape of the United Kingdom, it’s a necessary, scene-setting first act in a drama that may well heat up considerably over the summer.
Yet at the same time, there’s a slightly strange mood in the air. For one thing, I can’t remember an election so completely negative in character. And by ‘negative’, I don’t mean purely in terms of the campaigning strategy of the protagonists, although quite possibly that, too, is true. Rather, I mean ‘negative’ in terms of the motivations of the electorate. Let’s get anecdotal: I know life-long Labour supporters who are voting Lib Dem to teach Tony Blair a lesson about being too arrogant; quite a few Tories I know are voting for the UK Independence Party to teach Michael Howard a lesson about having led one of the most shambolic and ineffectual campaigns in recent history; most of my ‘normal’ (i.e. apolitical) friends are exploring the wilder fringes of the ballot-papers, with recourse to the Green Party or the Save Our Local Something-or-other Party, to teach the mainstream parties a lesson about being so unappealing. And then, lurking somewhere out of sight, there are the legions who’ll simply stay home on Thursday, feeling too negative about the whole political process to do anything else. I can count on one hand the number of people I’ve met who claim to be voting out of positive enthusiasm for a particular party or individual — and since all of those are either actual candidates or party employees, I’m not sure I believe them anyway.
The Labour Party — or New Labour, as it calls itself, the ‘washes whiter and brighter’ rhetoric of which rebranding exercise probably tells you all you need to know about its recent history — has been in power here since 1997. Tony Blair’s period of leadership has seen the final stages of Labour’s transformation from a self-consciously socialist party to something apparently much more liberal (in the British sense) and less scary. Even the party’s many and various detractors can’t really deny that the past three parliaments have seen the sort of economic stability that reassures businesses and individuals alike. Meanwhile the Tories — although the party now rejects that label, an abnegation of centuries of history that is, again, almost aching with symbolic significance — have seen their epochal success under former prime minister Margaret Thatcher vanish away into a slurry of self-doubt and self-loathing. Hence recent attempts to recoup their position by borrowing New Labour’s policies, rather as New Labour borrowed from the Conservatives in the 1990s. And few people really know much about what the Liberals stand for, which is perhaps just as well. The result? An election where the field of political contention is both narrow and featureless. The parties can argue about who’ll do the best job trying to sort out the demoralised and defective spheres of state-funded education, the National Health Service and so forth. In terms of their broader attitudes towards the relationship between the state and the private sector, however, there’s not much to choose between them, with the Conservatives promising to match Labour’s spending targets, and with Labour’s tax pledges pretty much identical to their Conservative equivalents.
All of which is pretty dull, isn’t it? That, I suppose, is why it has also been a rather personality-led campaign. And by ‘personality’, I mean only one personality — that of the present prime minister. Did Tony Blair lie to parliament about the reasons for going to war in Iraq? Has he lied about other policy commitments? Is the electorate — Labour voters in particular — well, just a bit sick of him after so many years, just as they became a bit sick of Mrs Thatcher after her own three glorious parliaments?
This, anyway — boredom with Mr Blair and his increasingly presidential style and tone, in the face of what appears to be a reasonable degree of policy success — has to be the best hope for the other main parties, at least when it comes to chipping away at the Labour vote. (Getting out their own vote is another problem, especially where the Tories are concerned.) The Tories have gone so far as to accuse the Prime Minister of lying over Iraq. From an American point of view, accusing the nation’s political leader of lying may not sound very remarkable, but in Britain it’s still sufficiently unusual to attract attention. What Tory polling failed to work out until the damage had been done, however, was the sort of attention it attracted. For while Mr Blair’s record in office suggests he has no more of a veracity-fetish than anyone else involved in his dubious line of work, at the same time, the spectacle of the Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition in effect pointing at the Prime Minister and shouting ‘liar, liar, pants on fire’ has decreased Mr Howard’s own ratings, both in terms of his popularity and his perceived trustworthiness, while boosting the Prime Minister’s ratings. Remarkable, isn’t it? But then that’s just another miscalculation in a remarkably awful Tory campaign.
First, they came for the gypsies. How on earth Tory high command should have got it into their collective heads that land-hungry gypsies and travelling folk pose a clear and present threat to contemporary Britain is perhaps best left to certified psychopathologists. But then came a strident emphasis on what is politely called ‘immigration and asylum issues’, but what turns out to look very much like deep-seated unease at the fact that so much of Britain, especially our urban areas, is increasingly diverse in ethnic, religious and linguistic terms. A certain sort of Tory, sufficiently in touch with the real world to see how bad this case sounds, claims these policies aren’t racist, that they are simply about protecting our borders and our own national security. That sort of Tory points, trying his damnedest not to look tokenistic, to the number of brown faces and foreign-sounding names in the Tory candidates’ list. All of which is convincing, if you’re the sort of person who believes that immigrants and their children can’t be just as racist as native-born Britons, or that the huge emphasis on this whole issue isn’t cheap pandering to the send-them-back vote.
There’s not space here to get into discussing the rights and wrongs of immigration. As a life-long Tory, I am personally in favour of more or less free migration, which admittedly puts me in a minority not only within my party, but every other party in this country as well. Suffice to say, whatever advantage the Conservatives may have picked up from their rabble-rousing on this issue comes less from those seriously concerned with economic and social issues, and more from those who just basically don’t want more foreign people coming here. Mr Howard, for what it’s worth, is the son of a Romanian Jew who came to Britain as an economic migrant in 1937. As I said earlier, though, this is a remarkable election, isn’t it? It would be wrong to say that most Conservatives are racists or xenophobes, but at the same time, it would also be wrong to say that the current Conservative preoccupation with immigration is anything other than irresponsible, repugnant and short-sighted. Having campaigned for the party for decades now, this year I won’t be voting for them, simply on the basis of disgust at the direction the 2005 campaign has taken. Actually, I doubt I’ll be voting for anyone at all.
Still, having outed myself as a sort of once-and-future Conservative in that last paragraph, it’s probably worth sketching out an alternative direction in which the party might have taken its campaign. There were, first and foremost, doubtless some easy hits to be scored by making strong promises to cut tax, cut government spending and carve away at the enormous superstructure of government regulation. There was also something to be gained, as well as something to be lost, by articulating a strong line against further integration into the structures of the European Union. (Although UKIP have run a relatively low-key campaign this time, notable mostly for a party election broadcast featuring a huge green octopus devouring the Palace of Westminster which was a at some level the visual high-point of the present conflict, Conservatives forget at their peril how well UKIP did in the most recent round of European and local government elections.) But then, I don’t believe that there is any mileage in the Conservatives trying to pretend they are just like Labour when it comes to such issues. If nothing else, surely Labour are better at being Labour than the Tories ever could be, whereas the Tories might possibly have some success at being Tory, if they could ever just remember what that was like?
Secondly, any emphasis on the Iraq War was doomed from the start. The strangely cheery anti-war protests of last year notwithstanding, Iraq doesn’t really send pulses racing here. Although, sadly, Britain is still losing men there, the casualty rate is fairly low and intermittent — a world away from the genuinely terrible losses being suffered by US troops, and hence far fainter a presence on the domestic radar. But most of all, the war was never going to work as a partisan issue from the Tory point of view. For while the Liberal Democrats were always against military action, the Conservative message, in the run-up to war, was basically ‘more, harder, faster’. So it is that the present-day Conservative line on the war is, as my colleague, the oddly-labelled yet admirably sharp-eyed Anonymous Commentator at the Social Affairs Unit blog put it, akin to conciliar debate amongst the 5th century fathers of the Church in the richness of its apparent paradoxes: for although, according to Mr Howard, it is terrible that the Prime Minister lied about the reasons for going to war, Mr Howard himself voted for the war, and indeed still thinks the decision to go to war was correct. And somehow, as a rallying-cry, I don’t think that’s going to send the nation galloping off towards the polling-stations, desperate to spill their ink and cast their votes in the Conservative, rather than fringe party, interest.
And yet it’s not as if there isn’t a bit of passion about, or as if the Tories might not, in some parallel universe, to have seized electoral advantage from it. For while in many ways New Labour looks, as I mentioned earlier, like a mainstream sort of liberal-type party, there are moments when its history and instincts catch up with it, with results that are anything but liberal in anyone’s language. The urge to ‘modernise’ — ‘wreck’ might be another way to put it — traditional institutions and practices is still strong. Thus it was that the office of the Lord Chancellor, having existed for over a thousand years, was abolished, for little other reason than to give the executive branch of government more control over the judiciary. Similarly, the House of Lords was stripped of its age-old hereditary element — something which, if you’re into utilitarian arguments, probably gave more normal, non-political types a say in government than any other structure could have done — and will replace it with a hand-picked set of political cronies, slavishly compliant to the executive. The right to trial by jury — again, dating back to Magna Carta — is under threat, while the concept of habeas corpus does not seem to have survived the so-called anti-terror legislation. Labour are also in the midst of introducing a compulsory ID card scheme, the justifications for which change almost with the hour. And one could continue this discouraging list at some length, but the general point is clear enough.
Hunting with dogs was also abolished during the course of the last parliament. Whatever one feels about the rights or wrongs about hunting — and no one who knows much about large-scale commercial abattoirs and what goes on there is likely to speak up very loudly about the ‘cruelty’ of hunting — this, too, was an ancient activity in these islands, very tied up with issues of liberty, which is now no more. There was no massive pressure to ban hunting with dogs, and much pressure to allow at least a more highly-regulated version of it to survive. In the end, it was hard to avoid the conclusion that the reasons for the ban came less from animal welfare concerns than from the twin misconceptions that hunting was simply a rich man’s pastime, and that what the rich do inevitably hurts the poor. In fact, however, it turns out, amazingly enough, that hunting contributed a lot to the economies of many rural communities, hard-hit in recent years by various livestock diseases. And although the central London bias to the media here makes it easy to miss, many people in the countryside, rich and poor and in between, are ferociously angry at Labour — just as many of Britain’s immigrant population and their recent descendants feel that Labour’s anti-terror laws amount to licensed persecution of ethnic minority groups.
There was, then, a missed opportunity to tackle Labour on exactly the territory where High Tory ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ respect for tradition dovetails with the laissez faire suspicion of authoritarian government that has also sometimes been an instinct of the Conservative Party. By building a campaign round the image of an arrogant, over-powerful, intrusive Labour government — contrasted with a Tory party promising less state intervention and a principled return to the rights and liberties of the very recent past — the Conservatives might properly have attracted to themselves both a traditional Conservative following (many of whom will simply fail to vote this year) and a variegated protest vote against Labour’s crimes of hubris. Sure, some of the protest votes would have gone to other parties — the Liberals, the Greens, UKIP, talk-show host Robert Kilroy-Silk’s Veritas, George Galloway’s Respect, what have you — but the strong argument could have been made that for all the Conservative Party’s faults, out of all these parties, only the Conservatives had any hope of forming a government. To do so, however, would have required a Conservative leader who respected the sensibilities of his own party’s grassroots membership, who preferred principle over short-term expediency, and who had both the self-confidence and the charisma to make the Conservatives a plausible party of government again, rather than the sad, self-doubting, desperate, panicky lot they presently appear. But this isn’t what happened, and by Friday morning the fruits of Mr Howard’s meanness of vision will be all too clear. Populism that gains votes is bad enough, but populism that is, well, unpopular is simply unforgivable. In short, we’ll all be glad when this election is over, putting the present Tory leadership out of its misery and leaving it a chance to engage in the one great tradition it still retains: savage yet sophisticated internecine warfare.
Still, since I’m really an art writer, rather than a political commentator, I’ll close by leaving you with the three images that sum up this wretched election campaign.
For Charles Kennedy, the memorable moment came during an early-morning press conference when he was asked an almost inexpressibly dreary question about his party’s tax policy. The bags under Mr Kennedy’s eyes were impressive. Stupefied and disoriented, he struggled to put together an answer. He failed. Nothing surprising in that, UK political observers might suggest: Mr Kennedy is, after all, a famously convivial soul, grand company at the bar in the wee small hours of the morning yet not necessarily at his best at 7.30 am press events. Yet in this case, Mr Kennedy had an excuse — his wife had recently given birth to the couple’s first child. And indeed, it is somehow emblematic of this campaign and the general of interest in policy that the Liberal Democrat leader’s most recent attack of early morning inarticulacy left him looking ‘human’ and ‘approachable’, actually boosted the party’s fortunes as well as Mr Kennedy’s own.
Michael Howard’s moment, by contrast, wasn’t a mistake — it was a purpose-build photo opportunity. The Tory leader went on a walkabout round a London hospital in an attempt to highlight the party's message on the so-called hospital superbug, MRSA. As signature issues go, wiping out MRSA isn't a very interesting one — after all, it's hardly as if any party is really going to come out in favour of more filth and infectious disease, is it? — but as his wife lost a family member to MRSA some years ago, Mr Howard has sought to make hospital hygiene — encouraging hospital staff to clean their hands between handling patients and that sort of thing — a minor focus of the campaign. (Well, at least it beats blaming the gypsies, I guess.) Anyway, in his haste to meet and greet and probably appall as many patients as possible, Mr Howard forgot to, well, wash his hands between patients. And since Mr Howard's campaign has criticised Mr Blair for a tendency to say one thing and do another, this venial sin of omission looked not — as it might have done in Mr Kennedy’s case — ‘human’ or ‘approachable’, but rather ‘incompetent’ and ‘irresponsible’. Still, Mr Howard continues to grin in that glib, complacent, profoundly alienating way of his. And that, at least, is an impressive performance, because he must realise by now what’s coming to him after Thursday’s defeat, if not how richly he, and those around him, deserve it.
Finally, there was the Prime Minister’s moment. Since party leaders here still have enough wit to refuse the cheap theatrics and hidden ear-pieces of the televised, face-to-face debate, the BBC cobbled together what it presumably took to be the next best thing, on a programme called ‘Question Time’, in the shape of three half-hour interviews, one after the other, with the three main candidates. Mr Kennedy, whose party will get the fewest votes on Thursday, took the stage to cheers and applause. Mr Howard, having presided over a mean-spirited, disreputable and wholly negative campaign, was received with sullen indifference. When, however, Mr Blair took the stage — this, the man who has led his party to three successive electoral triumphs, and who will surely win again on Thursday — he faced a barrage of boos, hisses and catcalls. The questions thrown at him had a nasty edge. Why did he lie about Iraq? Why are the public services in such a wretched state? Why is the status quo less than perfect, and who can we blame?
In 1997, when he became Prime Minister, Mr Blair was notably fresh-faced, almost boyish. Power, though, has aged him. Indeed, one of the few real shocks of this election has been the realisation that Mr Howard, now 64, now looks only slightly older than the 52-year old Prime Minister. The day of ‘Question Time’ had been a long one — in some ways the worst of the campaign for Mr Blair, with lots of froth being thrown up on the issues of Iraq, legality and integrity. Under the heat of the lights, as the questioning went on, his eyes began to go red and watery. After a while, his studio makeup couldn’t hold back the sweat that was soon covering his forehead and running down his face. Yet this man — who can run a nation, launch wars and make hopeless parties electable — could not be seen to wipe that sweat away, knowing all too well that if he did, that gesture would dominate the front pages of every British newspaper the following morning, the perfect accompaniment to the inevitable, unfavourable headlines. And still the crowd bayed and heckled, and still the Prime Minister faced them — tired, patient, yet rather magnificent in his calm acceptance of this strange, ritualised suffering to which the conventions of democratic politics subjected him. Perhaps, though, he recognised the moment for what it was? For while there’d have been no point in treating Mr Kennedy or Mr Howard li
