It is possible that there are uglier towns in the world than Walsall, but if so I do not know them: and I consider myself better than averagely traveled. But while Walsall undoubtedly exists, it is difficult to know where precisely it begins and ends, because it is in the middle of one of the largest and most depressing contiguous areas of urban devastation in the world, the Black Country of the English Midlands. There is nowhere in the world where it is possible to travel such long distances without seeing anything grateful to the eye. To the hideousness of nineteenth-century industrialization is added the desolation of twentieth-century obsolescence. The Black Country looks like Ceausescu’s Romania with fast food outlets.

I have been to Walsall twice in my life. The first time was to visit its then principal attraction for outsiders, an establishment called the Serpentarium, which advertised itself as the largest reptile petshop in Europe. It has since closed its doors, after the owner was found floating in a greasy and chemically polluted local canal. The coroner’s explanation of his demise was suicide, though rumors persist that he was killed by rival reptile smugglers, the illegal importation of venomous snakes into Britain now being big business. I discovered in the course of my desultory inquiries after the owner’s death that my own city council employs an official whose function is to grant licences to people who wish to keep such household pets as rattlesnakes and banded kraits: the would-be licensees having to prove to his satisfaction that they have rendered impossible the escape of their beloved serpents into what is euphemistically known as, and frequently called, “the community.”

I asked the official how many licences he had issued the previous year.

“None,” he replied.

“And how many applications for licences were there?”

“None,” he replied again.

Busy man: but since in my hospital we occasionally treat rattlesnake bites, it must be presumed that the unregulated sale and harboring of venomous snakes continues. No one in my city can know for certain, therefore, where the speckled band—the dreaded Indian swamp adder that put paid to the cunning and evil Dr. Grimesby Roylott—may not strike again. Sherlock Holmes scotch’d the snake, he did not kill it.

Since the Serpentarium ceased trading, however, a new public attraction to replace it has arisen in Walsall, a large new art gallery, in its way every bit as surprising as was the largest reptile petshop in Europe: for one no more expects to find art in Walsall than king cobras or bearded basilisks.

More surprising still than the mere existence of an art gallery in such a place is the fact that it now positively dominates the town. No medieval cathedral ever loomed over its surrounding city more overwhelmingly than does the New Art Gallery loom over Walsall. But while the function of most cathedrals is perfectly clear from their architectural form—the first-time visitor to Chartres, for example, doesn’t really need to be told that the cathedral is a cathedral—the first time visitor to Walsall might experience some difficulty in divining the function of the gallery building. A postmodernist grain silo, perhaps? Something more sinister, probably. The structure of the building— two lumpen perpendicular cubes covered in pink-gray rectangular scales—suggests nothing definite or clear to the mind, though thoughts of the Stasi or South American secret police soon rise to consciousness. Perhaps they torture people in there, though it would have to be on a very large scale to justify so big a building. And art, of course, has traditionally been regarded as a form of torture by a substantial proportion of the British population, to be looked at only under extreme duress.

The building is hideous, completely lacking in grace or unity of conception: one would have expected no less from contemporary British architects, who have, over the last half-century or so, definitively ruined the townscapes of the nation and thus contributed powerfully to the dissolution of its identity. The excuse sometimes offered for the wretchedness of their efforts, a lack of money, certainly does not apply in this case: for the gallery, housing only a small collection, cost $32 million to build. It is lack of taste, not lack of money, that explains the vileness of modern British architecture.

The building has been widely praised in the press, however, not so much for its beauty—a totally subjective quality, we are always assured, and therefore scarcely to be taken seriously by the wise or the prudent— but for its originality. For it can be proved beyond reasonable dispute that there is no art gallery anywhere else in the world quite like the New Art Gallery, Walsall. This in itself is a cause for pride, irrespective of the other qualities of, or defects in, the building. One critic began his article of praise with the words, “Nobody really knows what a public art gallery should look like any more”: to which one is inclined to reply, “And whose fault is that?” Is not some kind of common agreement over standards of taste, proportion, scale and harmony precisely what is necessary for the creation of a townscape that does not act on the retina like a scouring pad?

No doubt many an ungracious exterior is saved by its interior (certainly the hopeful tenet of modern pop psychology): but not the New Art Gallery, Walsall. The visitor enters via a huge pair of sliding doors, activated automatically by his approach. These doors are on such a scale that they altogether dwarf the individual, and would be more appropriate to the entry of a column of cavalry than to that of a lone aesthete. However, nothing—not even these megalomaniac portals—could prepare the visitor for the atrium on their other side.

This enormous atrium seems to take up a third of the entire building. And one half expects to see Mussolini sitting at a table on a raised platform at the other end of it. The entrance to the gallery sends shivers down the spine: not of pleasure, but of apprehension. Here inhumanity is celebrated as an architectural virtue. The materials with which the internal walls are faced are cold and heartless. They are raw concrete that has been allowed to set against wooden planks—thus imparting to the brutal grayness a faint impression of the wood’s grain, visible only close up—and wood panelling of the Scandinavian type that was thought chic in the 1960s. One veers between thinking oneself in a fascist foreign ministry and a sauna of gigantic proportions. Here, truly, is size without grandeur.

It comes as a relief that the galleries themselves are on a much reduced scale: but the architects have here achieved precisely the opposite effect, smallness without intimacy. This is an art gallery as imagined by a petit bourgeois modernist, forty years ago.

All the works in the gallery belong to the Garman Ryan Collection, named after the two women who formed it. Kathleen Garman, the daughter of a doctor in Walsall, was the widow of the sculptor Jacob Epstein, of whose work the Walsall gallery has the largest collection in the world. Sally Ryan was the granddaughter of the American tycoon Thomas Fortune Ryan, who was both Epstein’s pupil and Garman’s friend. They left the collection to the people of Walsall, and for over twenty years it was housed, charmingly, in the reference room of the municipal library.

It is an idiosyncratic and miscellaneous collection, clearly reflecting the taste of the two individuals who assembled it. There are many minor works by major artists, and a few that are arresting. Modigliani’s drawing in blue crayon of a caryatid is wonderfully elegant; there are charming portraits by Degas of his sister, by Joshua Reynolds of a young ensign in the Royal Navy, by Corot of a woman reading, by Sisley of his son, Pierre, also reading, and by Veronese of a page boy. There is an exquisite skyscape by Constable. There are minor works by Bernini, Bonnard, Delacroix, Delaunay, Dufy, Géricault, Manet, Matisse, Monet, Pissarro, Rouault, Renoir, Turner, van Gogh and others. It is a strange experience indeed to come out of the stale-fat smell of fast food —the characteristic odor of modern provincial England—into a gallery that contains these small treasures of the western artistic tradition.

There are also works of lesser, or less well-known artists, as well as a leavening of artifacts from Africa and Polynesia— a Bamileke stool from Cameroon, for example—and of archaeological treasures, such as a mask of Nefertiti, Queen of Egypt. This is positively the last thing one expects to find in Walsall.

It is a fine collection for a small town, but oddly enough I haven’t met anyone who visited it when it was housed in the municipal library who did not prefer the old arrangement. The New Art Gallery is grandiose rather than grand, and completely out of proportion to the scale of the collection. One thinks of the frog in Aesop that tried to inflate itself to the size of a cow.

There is another disturbing aspect of the New Art Gallery, quite apart from its pompous ugliness: its creeping politicization. This arises from two factors: the government’s cultural policy and the source of funding for construction of the gallery: both of which have worked in the same baleful direction.

The government believes in something it calls “social inclusion”: which, when applied to cultural institutions, means that they should appeal to all sections of the population equally and without exception. It is not enough that museums should be free of charge to all who are able physically to enter and are inclined to do so: people must be attracted into them who are not normally interested in the kinds of thing that museums traditionally display. The measure of the worth of a museum is not in the intrinsic, civilizational value of what it contains, but in who visits it: and museum curators must therefore now ask Lenin’s question, “Who whom?” Indeed, subsidies for museums in England are henceforth to be made dependent upon the numbers of people from ethnic minorities who enter them: so if Rastafarians can’t be persuaded to look at the works of Piero della Francesca, there will come a time when, for lack of funds, no one may look at them. In practice, this can only mean the progressive Disneyfication of museums.

Museum directors are unlikely to be heroic types who will resist evil (in this connection, a recent book by the American historian Jonathan Petropoulos, about the co-operation by museum directors and other members of the artistic establishment with Nazi cultural policy, is highly instructive). In Britain, at least, museum directors are state functionaries, who must blow with the ideological wind for the sake both of their careers and of the funding of their institutions. And so it is not altogether surprising to read the following sentence in the catalogue: “There is a certain social and cultural egalitarianism … about the Garman Ryan Collection.” The word “egalitarianism” is here used as a semantic talisman, to attract government funds, or at least to keep reductions at bay. A sentence such as “There is a strong sense of aesthetic discrimination … about the Garman Ryan Collection” will have to await another government. For the moment, we must pretend that that every product of human endeavor is equally worthy of public display.

The “inclusiveness” of the New Art Gallery manifests itself in its efforts to attract children. That there should be a playroom set aside for small children, decorated with reproductions of works of art from the collection, and supplied with toys in the form of the sculptural exhibits, is no bad thing, allowing parents to visit the galleries on their own while their children are happily occupied elsewhere: though the cosy atmosphere is spoiled by a quotation from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights stridently painted on the wall in bold lettering. “Every child has the right to rest and leisure, to engage in play and recreational activity and to participate freely in cultural life and the arts.” This transforms children’s games into a political statement: and does to children’s play what the Soviet Union did to folk dancing.

A playroom is not enough, however. Under the new inclusionary dispensation, children must not only be seen but heard— everywhere in the gallery. And so, placed beneath many of the paintings, is a little table at which they may sit, doing jigsaws of the painting above them. It is now impossible to contemplate the painting without also contemplating the child beneath, fractious or content as the case may be.

It is not difficult to imagine the official justification for this departure in museum display. It is to induct children into the world of art through playfulness. Similar methods have been tried with arithmetic with the result that nine out of ten young adults in much of Britain are unable to multiply six by nine. You get the playfulness all right, but not the induction.

Moreover, once the little table has been set up beneath a painting, no one will ever again be able to look at the painting—or those paintings hung near it—in silence and tranquillity, at least not if the gallery’s desire to attract young children is fulfilled. The induction into the world of art thus results in the destruction of the world of art, which becomes merely another form of entertainment, if a rather insipid and slow-moving one. Why, then, not a fruit machine next to a Veronese? One can already hear in one’s mind’s ear the honeyed justifications of the museum director, as he seeks to earn the approval of his political masters: by placing the fruit machine next to the Veronese, he is trying to promote the idea that art should be part of everyday life, that there is no clear distinction between art and other aspects of human existence, that if one will but look aright there is art also in a fruit machine, that art is to be enjoyed and not treated as something holy or sacred. He discourses learnedly upon the disrespect in which artists and their productions have been held throughout history, how art has been an object of consumption and use rather than of worship, and how artists never intended their work to be set apart in the secular temples that museums have become. The placement of the fruit machine next to Veronese is, in fact, a return to authenticity.

The pressure to popularize—to become not so much democratic as demotic—arises not only from the government’s explicit Kunstpolitik, but from the source of funding for new buildings for cultural institutions such as Walsall’s gallery. For practically all public cultural projects in Britain are now paid for with money derived from the profits of the National Lottery, a distinctly uncultured, even uncouth, source.

Britain was a latecomer to lotteries as a means of taxation while you smile. There was much resistance to the idea both from the left and the right. But once it was established, the lottery rapidly became an institution, especially among the poor: a tax on stupidity, as a friend of mine put it rather harshly. I am not so sure he is right: infinitesimally small as are the chances of winning, for a poor person of little education, no talent and meagre resources, the lottery ticket represents his one chance of achieving great wealth. If nothing else, it allows him to dream of escape from his present condition: so it is not true that his subscription has returned him nothing when he loses, as he almost always does. But the lottery is undoubtedly a confirmatory instance of the biblical prophecy “from he who hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.”

As a form of taxation, the lottery is highly regressive: expenditure on it is inversely proportional to income. For the proceeds to be used on the construction of traditional cultural institutions seems, therefore, to be a case of the poor subsidizing the rich: for those who patronize such institutions are overwhelmingly from the richer and better educated sections of the population.

It cannot be said that there is any pressure from below to use the proceeds of the lottery in a demotic fashion: the poor are interested in winning, not in where their money goes when they lose, and they would not patronize the lottery any the less if they knew that the proceeds were spent exclusively on the purchase of champagne for the cabinet. But, stricken with what passes these days for a guilty conscience, the intelligentsia believes that the poor should get something back for their money. The destruction of cultural institutions, by turning them into fairgrounds, is thus the least the intelligentsia can do on the poor’s behalf.

Ideology and the mode of finance thus work in the same direction. But neither could have exerted their effect had there not been a fundamental loss of confidence in the intrinsic value of the culture to which we are all heir. And the work of undermining that confidence yet further continues, not least in the museums that are the product of that confidence.

Not far from Walsall is the town of Wolverhampton, glimpses of whose no doubt pompous and slightly ridiculous municipal pride and grandeur can still be seen under the patina of modern vulgarity. Wolverhampton also has an art gallery, which contains a small but distinguished collection of British eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art. And now it also has a children’s corner, which needless to say is interactive—that is to say, children may press buttons to see displays. But the chief characteristic of the children’s display is its blatant politicization.

Pressing one button, a Victorian genre painting of a rural family sitting round a table at an evening meal is displayed. Pressing another button, the child who presses it is asked, “Was Victorian Britain really like this?” The answer, of course, is no. Victorian Britain was nothing but a vale of tears for the people, where poverty and hunger stalked the land, injustice was universal, and resistance and strikes were continual. There were no achievements worth mentioning, only woes; and no rural families ever sat round a table to have a meal together.

Pressing another button, the child is asked why the painter did not paint Britain as it really was. The answer, of course, is that no one would have bought his paintings if he had. People, the child is told, preferred fantasies to reality. Victorians were simple liars.

The crudity of all this beggars belief: but it was prepared and organized by scholars. Its subversive tendentiousness is all the worse when one remembers that the great majority of the ten and eleven-year-old children who are subjected to its influence will not know a single historical date by the time they leave school five, six or seven years later, will not know when the Second World War took place to within the nearest twenty years, and will not be able to name a single significant figure from British history. They will not be multicultural: they will be acultural.

Another interactive display in the children’s corner of the Wolverhampton art gallery contrasts a Gainsborough portrait of a scion of the local gentry with an expressionistic portrait of modern urban man: earringed, mouth aggressively wide open, in casual clothes. What, the children are asked, is the difference between these two portraits?

Well, Gainsborough painted rich clients, who wanted realistic pictures of themselves. Therefore Gainsborough couldn’t paint what or whom he pleased. Also, poor chap, he had undergone an arduous training because he was expected to conform to the artistic conventions of his time. He couldn’t be himself, but was a mere servant of his patrons. Whereas the modern painter, lucky chap, could paint what or whom he liked, including the poor, without conforming to any convention: for modern painters were expected to develop their own style. Unlike Gainsborough, therefore, the modern painter was free to express himself.

It is surely unnecessary to point out the manifold distortions involved in this sinister indoctrination of small children, who are powerless to resist its insinuations. The aims of the indoctrination are authoritarian and populist at the same time: authoritarian because no discussion of the question at issue is invited or permitted, the indisputable truth descending de haut en bas; and populist because it suggests that artistic creation is merely a question of removing artificial barriers to the expression of the creative genius that exists equally within everyone. For everyone is an artist, merely by virtue of drawing breath: and so a cat may look at a king.

It is never too soon to teach children to judge everything by the simplest, crudest political criteria: and so the custodians of civilization betray and finally destroy it.

A Message from the Editors

Your donation sustains our efforts to inspire joyous rediscoveries.

This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 19 Number 1, on page 77
Copyright © 2024 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com
https://newcriterion.com/issues/2000/9/crudity-beyond-belief

Popular Right Now