Andrew Kay: What price Art

Some day my plinth will come

Nothing starts tongues wagging more than the cost of art. Auctions rack up almost unbelievable prices for works that fall under the hammer and the world gasps with incredulity. Heaven forfend that anyone might suggest that a sum of public money might be spent on a piece of public art, something that might well be provocative or simply decorative, the tongues will start to wag. “Just imagine what that money could have been better spent on.” I’m not going to list the suggestions that already spring to mind, you all know what they are because I believe that Latest readers are universally well educated, informed and intelligent.

I woke up today to see on FB that there are plans to fill an empty plinth on Hove seafront. I knew immediately that it would be followed by lots of jabber about public spending and wasted money and cynicism, and it was – at 6 am. I didn’t join in. I love public art and for many years it kept me alive as my father was involved in restoring, renovating and repairing public works of art, from cathedrals to tiny churches, from small memorials to massive carved stone edifices. He was an artist of the highest order, although he very much thought of himself as a craftsman. I rather despair of the fact that the word ‘craft’ has become debased and now, in my view should be read as ‘hobby’. Not that there is anything wrong with hobbies per se, not in the least, but please don’t ask me to view your ‘craft’ if it is little more advanced than that ancient kid’s toy Fuzzy Felt!

As we enter a second term of tory rule let’s be very aware that but for a few MPs, the arts are pretty dismissable. Art education has been sidelined so often in the last few years that it really is becoming the domain of foreign students or the offspring of the well heeled.
Now if this continues our arts will become even rarer and probably more obscure and challenging. I don’t want that, I want to see works of intrigue and of beauty on the streets and in our galleries and public spaces. I want those who make them to be able to make a decent living in return for brightening our lives.
I watched with fascination the Channel 4 series in which Grayson Perry created amazing portraits of a fascinating group of people. He may be better known in the tabloids as the cross-dressing potter, but my word the man has the most perceptive mind, creative skills and the ability to draw. You will seldom find the mass media pointing that out but there is nothing new there, how many of the great artists of the last few hundred years were scorned for the free nature of their work. Turner was ridiculed, Picasso and too many more to argue the case here.
So what will we get on that empty plinth? I dread to think really, because my fear is that Brighton and Hove remains a city that is far more ready to sally forth and say no than it is to rise up and say yes. If I mentioned Gehry would anyone agree? A few I am sure, but too late.

I give full marks to the team that realised Adrian Bunting’s vison for an open air theatre and all those who got behind that. BOAT is a beautiful monument to a man’s vision and a need for culture, so let’s put paid to all the silly “Oh we could have bought a new minibus for a school with that money”. Well maybe we could but what would they go to see in it?