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Home , Charles Saatchi, Frieze Art Fair, Iwona Blazwick, Nicholas Serota, Norman Rosenthal, Rachel Whiteread

Art Fund Debate 2012: without Frontiers Where next for the UK on the world art stage? Review by Ben Luke

As the world’s eyes have turned to the UK in this Olympic year, it is not just sporting excellence that has been celebrated. For the 2012 Festival, museums and galleries presented shows or commissioned works which reflected an extraordinarily rich artistic scene. Among the plethora of visual events in London alone were ’s recent at the Royal Academy, ’s permanent work for the facade of the , the brilliant scholarly Shakespeare exhibition at the British Museum and young East-End artists’ transformations of spaces across East London for Frieze Projects East.

The Cultural Olympiad gave the UK a chance to reflect on the remarkable developments of the last two decades, a period of international acclaim for British artists and dramatic transformation of our great museums by leading architects, with the opening of Modern, the British Galleries at the V&A, the great court at the British Museum. It was also an era of new regional contemporary galleries, most recently the Hepworth in Wakefield and Turner Contemporary in Margate. These public triumphs have been matched by a thriving commercial sector – an expanded gallery scene, the emergence of the , and success at the auction houses, making London an art market hub. It is arguable that the UK is the world centre for the , and particularly .

As we know from , the cauldrons of cultural life shift from era to era – from Paris throughout the first half of the 20th century to New York, which dominated the post-war period right up to the 1980s. As Stephen Deuchar welcomed attendees to Art without Frontiers, a conference at the British Museum, he asked a question about the UK’s current pre-eminence. “Will it last and, actually, does it matter if it doesn’t?” he enquired. “Do international boundaries mean anything to the world of art?” The conference sought to “uncover the dynamics of those questions”, as he put it, in the light of the growth of other art centres, particularly China, whose public museums and art market have recently boomed.

A perfect storm of events led to Britain’s rude health culturally. Robin Vousden, a director of the London branch of the commercial gallery Gagosian, said that there were four key individuals in the 1980s who transformed London from a relative backwater in terms of contemporary art: the director of Tate, , who was then at the Whitechapel Gallery; the former Exhibitions Secretary at the Royal Academy, ; the art dealer Anthony d’Offay; and the collector . “Between them, they were responsible for turning London into an international art city,” Vousden said.

Saatchi’s role in promoting the 1990s generation that became known as the [YBAs], including , and , is well known. But Michael Craig- Martin, who taught Hirst, Lucas and other leading artists at Goldsmiths college in south-east London in the mid to late 1980s, spoke of the vital importance of Saatchi’s former gallery in Boundary Road, north London, in inspiring their work. “Charles showed the greatest art in the world in perfect circumstances,” Craig-Martin said. “I took all my students always to see the shows at Boundary Road, because it was a way of showing them what was possible. The reason for the great ambition of the Young British Artists in the early 1990s was that they had grown up looking at the greatest contemporary art in the world.” Quinn, in conversation with Craig-Martin, agreed that it stoked artists’ ambition. “You felt that if you made something really great, you might see it in that space,” he said.

The entrepreneurial spirit among the emerging artists of that era was exemplified in , the now-legendary exhibition curated by Damien Hirst and featuring second and third-year students on Craig-Martin’s Goldsmiths course. Saatchi, Rosenthal, Serota and others saw that show, as did a wealth of fellow art students. It was a watershed in British art. “It really did start with Freeze,” Craig-Martin said. “Usually it’s an exaggeration to say that things can be traced back to a single thing, but Freeze did mark a different kind of interest.” Word quickly spread among art students and eventually momentum carried the new art far beyond the art world. “The most extraordinary thing that has happened in Britain is the change in the way in which contemporary art has moved to the centre stage, where many people think of it as a perfectly ordinary aspect of contemporary culture, like the cinema, like music,” Craig-Martin said.

These new audiences have been vital to the success of British museums and galleries, three of which – Tate, the and the British Museum – are now among the top five most attended museums in the world. Sir Paul Ruddock, Chairman of the V&A, argued that “government funding has clearly played a very significant part in providing an impetus for this success”. He cited the millennium building projects, regional initiatives and particularly highlighted the importance of free admission. Visionary museum directors like Serota, the British Museum’s Neil MacGregor, Mark Jones at the V&A and at the National Portrait Gallery have also been hugely significant.

Our museums and galleries and their leaders – Sir Paul might also have mentioned at the Whitechapel Gallery and Julia Peyton-Jones at the Serpentine Gallery – have also influenced the thriving commercial gallery scene in London. When David Zwirner, Pace and Michael Werner, all three major international art galleries, opened in London this autumn, their directors said that was the catalyst for their arrival, attracting artists, curators and collectors from across the world. Vousden argued that having galleries in London “opens you up to the world. You can sell to the Middle East, the Far East, to Russia, to North America, to South America and to Australia. You are absolutely connected.”

And the art shown in London has likewise become more diverse. Over the last decade, our museums and galleries have featured many more non-western artists. Key to this development, as well as the YBA explosion, was Iwona Blazwick. She believes that, just as contemporary art began to make an impact in the UK in the 1970s and 1980s, the approach to international art began to change. “There was a dawning realisation that when we used the word international, what we really meant was Paris, London, Düsseldorf and New York,” she explained. “It was through a number of different factors, but primarily artists, and artists of the diaspora who were in those centres, who insisted that the ideas about , modernity and the contemporary extended beyond the west, and that, actually, there were live modernisms all over the world, but we were blind to them.” The awareness also grew from the numerous international biennial exhibitions that “started to build an awareness of local cultures outside of the western sphere and outside of the northern hemisphere,” Blazwick said. “That kind of awareness has dramatically impacted on the understanding what modern and contemporary art is, who makes it, what it means and what it can be. We are in a very heterogeneous world, it is also very exciting and much of it comes to us here in London.”

Alain Seban of the Pompidou Centre remarked that now that this “global phenomenon” means that museums with collections, strong curatorial vision and expertise have a significant opportunity for change. “I feel that today there is a possibility for such museums to redefine the concept of a universal museum,” he explained. In other words, the breadth of contemporary art provides the opportunity to create new equivalents of the Metropolitan Museum in New York or the Louvre in Paris, telling a story about art history, but also of wider cultures.

Chinese contemporary art is firmly part of that narrative, but as Patti Wong, Chair of Sotheby’s Asia, said, Chinese collectors are largely uninterested in new Chinese art. Indeed, in 2010, the majority of the $8.5bn sales in Chinese auctions were traditional Chinese ink paintings, with historical works of art the second biggest category, and western contemporary art the third. A strong market for blue-chip western art in Asia has helped Sotheby’s attract Asian collectors to Britain – two Marc Quinn works sold to an Asian collector from a Sotheby’s exhibition at Chatsworth in Derbyshire, for instance. So China may be thriving, but if anything it is aiding rather than challenging London’s prominence.

The true threats come from within. The picture that emerged from Art without Frontiers is a flourishing but finely balanced industry, which could easily lose its way. London’s market buoyancy owes much to its prominence as a financial centre. “As long as no one really screws up London being the financial capital of the world, or screws up the tax regime, then I hope that will continue to be the case,” said Robin Vousden. Anna Somers Cocks explained further. “If London ceased to be a rich city, and became as unaffluent as the rest of the British Isles, there would be a drying up of the market, and particularly sponsorship,” she explained. “Fifty percent of the income of our great national museums, sometimes more, now comes from private funding, and we forget that if that were to go, then there would be a grave difference seen at the British Museum and the Tate. There would be a death above all of a sense of great possibility – it is possibility that is as important as the paying out of the cash.”

Craig-Martin argued that while everything else in the art world had improved, art schools are in decline. He said that 75% of the students he taught “would have thought twice” about paying £9,000 a year for an education as students do today, due to the change in policy announced by the UK’s Conservative-led coalition government. Added to that are the ways that art education is regulated and the dramatic increase in the number of students at art schools, with no increase in funding. “All of the things that made the richness on which the whole edifice of British creativity depends have been significantly altered,” he said.

Somers Cocks also raised the recent Economist editorial concerning the “folly of the governments’ lead policy which makes it very difficult for students to come and study at our universities and art colleges”, threatening the very diversity at art schools which Blazwick had hailed as a crucial factor in the UK’s success.

So this celebration of the UK’s prominence in the visual arts came with a warning. It is a rich ecosystem, which has provided some outstanding cultural moments in the last 20 years, but it is also distinctly, perhaps worryingly, fragile.