Thanks, Phoenix.

Having googled a word for Phoenix, I came across a site, apparently run by two gentlemen, who live on opposite sides of the "pond".

I have just started to delve into the contents of this place, and already I find that I have made a semi connection with the English "Gentleman".

The archetypal grumpy old man.



Here is a letter from him, entitled

"Britishness, bad art and Swedish gymnasts", dated Sept 18th 2003.

You will see what I mean. Please excuse the swearing....


Dear Boy,

Sometimes I'm proud to be British. I'm sure it hasn't troubled the American media at all but your irritating David Blaine is over here at the moment.
Having performed his ?'Man in an ice block' to wondering throngs in New
York he has come to London to perform ?'Man in a perspex box hanging from a crane at Tower Bridge without food or water for forty four days'.

Far from "wondering", the Great Sun-reading herds have turned up mob handed to taunt him.
Initially it was kids throwing eggs and bags of chips but soon someone had positioned a greasy burger van right underneath the box,
Yahoos were driving golf balls off the bridge at him and someone, doubtless incensed at his comparison of his suffering to inmates in concentration camps, has begun pelting him with bacon sandwiches and bagels.
This morning it was announced on national televison that a parade of homosexuals will be marching to the site to throw sausages at him.

It speaks volumes that, while New Yorkers gathered to marvel at his endurance, Londoners are holding a round the clock vigil with powerful flashlights to catch him taking a sh*t.

Yesterday, one of the bright, late summer days for which England is justly
famous I saw a man on a Segway weaving down Marylebone High St. It's the first I've seen in the UK and the driver wore the smug smile of a man
who had evolved above the need for dreary bipedal locomotion (why are
Segway drivers always short men? Is it the added six inches that appeal?) and could ease, effortlessly between the common masses.

The street was crowded but passers-by, to a man, conspicuously ignored
him.
Three people pointed in an animated way but they turned out to be
students from the American University (BA. (hons) Window Treatments and Gift Wrapping). The only other response I could detect was from a fantastically aristocratic old dame sitting outside Patisserie Valerie who muttered, under her breath "C***", before returning to her Earl Grey and tarte de framboise.

There are, of course, less laudable national traits. For the past six
weeks the BBC has been running ?'Restoration'. In this programme a selection of collapsing ?'heritage' sites, from what the BBC still insist on referring to as ?'The Regions', bid for public sympathy. The winner, after a public telephone poll, gets three million quid's worth of lottery funds. As it
combines our national fascinations for cheap audience participation programming and the unquestioning preservation of any heap of crap over fifty years old ?'Restoration' has been an instant success. It's finally hooked the Aga classes into Pop Idol style viewing.

Of course, in the interests of research I've watched a couple of episodes.
Each venue has had to describe its plans for the future if granted the
funds and all but one of them aim to relaunch the building as a "community arts centre/gallery/space".

Words almost fail me. I, like you, benefited from an art college education
and, like you, pursued a discipline based in a craft. Don't get me wrong,
I wouldn't have missed it for anything and I feel it has helped me through
much of my later life. What worries me is the assertion that everyone
has the fundamental human right to express themselves through the fine
arts at the public expense. This flatulent liberal notion, traceable to
Morris, Ruskin, Toynbee and their ilk is a corruption of the Victorian
belief that the masses could be prevented from rising up and raping their
redhaired muses in their agreeable pseudo rustic studios by teaching them copper beating, pokerwork, country dancing and lino cutting at ?'Institutes' in underprivileged areas.
Most of the dangerously intelligent members of the lower orders would have been more than happy to put the reformers straight on the realities of this had they not been fortuitously slaughtered on the Western Front.

Social engineering through crap crafts was b*llocks then and is b*llocks
now.
The problem is that if we have art centres, galleries and ?'spaces' everywhere, people will make sh*t art to fill them. In the past, at least art had some social purpose. Craftsmen painters were hired to record and commemorate the patron's wealth, possessions, taste, wife or piety. Nobody was ?'expressing themselves' and certainly not at public expense.

Do you think Michaelangelo Buonarotti went to art college?

Leonardo: Oi Mike. Wasssuuuuuuuup?

Michaelangelo: F**k off Leo. I've got a head like barrel of sick.
I was up all night in the Union bar slamming Aftershock.

Leo: So you're not going to Cenino Cennini's lecture on ermine
tail brush making and rabbit skin gesso?

Mike: Na, f**k that. Can't afford the materials. I've already
blown my grant on drugs and outfits to make me look like a twat. Have
you seen how much the Egyptians are charging for lapis lazuli this year?
Either I do next term entirely without the colour blue or I piss off to
Goa for six months and stay stoned ?'till Dad coughs up again.

Leo: You could get a job

Mike: A job? Like I'm going to spend three years up a ladder
doing ceilings for that old poof Sixtus. You're having a laugh.


I still teach at colleges occasionally. Last year's diploma show for
my old place featured the same embarrassingly adolescent showing from
the photography dept.

Every year there will be…

1. A breast obsessed soft pornographer

2. A vicar's/academic's/policeman's daughter who exorcises her repression by getting her kit off for sensitive self-portraits at the drop of a lenscap.

3. Two people slavishly copying either David Bailey or Irving Penn

4. Some twat with a Hoxton fin who knows someone on Dazed and Confused who's shot three pages of his girlfriend in thrift shop knickers looking like an underage Ukranian prostitute on ketamine.

5. A bloke with a whispy beard who's spent three years doing ball-achingly detailed palladium prints of driftwood in situ

6. Someone who shot a sequence of a week in the life of the ashtray in
his flat, the only work he's managed to get off in three subsidised years
which he claims is ?'Conceptual' and can't be hung alongside mainstream
photography.

None of it has any social value. All of them will end up either with
proper jobs or hanging one exhibition every ten years on one of those
subsidised public ?'spaces'.

Last week I passed a fly poster for a one man ?'exhibition of black and
white images' (?'images' is always a giveaway) called ?'Perspectives on
Hackney'. Who's perspective? Is it likely to add richness to my appreciation of the area? Do I give a f**k?


Perhaps art does have a social purpose. Perhaps, by enabling this talentless Hackney epsilon semi-moron to believe he's a struggling artist, he can be made more content to live on his risible social security payment. It is notable that the most fertile ground for arts centres is invariably the desolate hell holes where manufacturing industries used to be.

This is so uniquely, mimsily British though. The terrible notion of the
Great and the Good, elevating the downtrodden through art.

I can't imagine the Senator for some benighted industrial sump in Michigan
telling the hairy knuckled sons of toil…

"I'm sorry, guys. We had to close the meat packing plant, the blast furnace and the wharf. But we're using a substantial government grant to convert some of the warehouses into a multi-use arts
centre/performance space with a vegetarian café, wheelchair ramps and
a mission statement built on cultural diversity".

The most burning irony of all is that this crap is paid for out of Lottery
funds, the de facto tax on the hopeless and desperate.

I've just noticed that the building at the end of the street has a cartouche
over the door engraved ?'The Institute of Swedish Gymnastics'. Initially
I found myself wondering at the enthusiasm of the founders and their belief in the secure longevity of their endeavour. It takes some kind of belief in an exercise regime to invest in a five-storey beaux-arts pile in the heart of the metropolis. Does anyone still do ?'Swedish gymnastics'?

I'm further amazed by the fact that current owners haven't been up there
for a bit of discrete work with the chisel. I'd have excised the I and
C to read ?'Institute of Swedish Gymnast s" and waited to see if any dropped
in.



Pulchitudo et Salubritas