Happy Easter !

For those people with an interest in the history of eighteenth-century ideas, I recommend a new book which was published by Brill yesterday (available by mail order from Brill.com) on those people in the eighteenth century, including many now rather obscure clergymen and freemasons, who were interested in the Eleusinian Mysteries as a possible origin for Christianity.

It helps one to understand some of those undercurrents of eighteenth-century thought which have now been forgotten, including the work of William Stukeley who travelled the country looking at ancient monuments, was one of the founding members of the Society of Antiquaries, and became a freemason in 1721 – ‘his Curiosity led him to be initiated into the Mysteries of Masonry; imagining them to be the Remains of the famous Mysteries of the Antients.’

I have never previously been into 19, Princelet Street, a house which was built by Samuel Worrall, a builder entrepreneur, in 1718, for Peter Abraham Ogier, a Huguenot silk merchant.  In 1869, the ground floor was turned into a synagogue which was abandoned after the Second World War.  The house and its contents were acquired by the Spitalfields Trust in 1981 and for a time efforts were made to turn it into a Museum of Immigration and Diversity.  This seems to have failed and the lease has been reacquired by the Spitalfields Trust.

This is the Synagogue, nearly intact:-

So much survives – its artefacts and material culture:-

On the top floor, a reclusive Jewish scholar, David Rodinsky, lived, but disappeared in the late 1960s.  He was the subject of a book, Rodinsky’s Room by Rachel Lichtenstein and Iain Sinclair, published in 1999.  This room, too, survives pretty intact:-

It poses a classic problem – how to preserve its atmosphere, but make it in some way open to the public, if only for small groups on guided tours.

The Spitalfields Trust, of course, has good experience of how to manage this dilemma at Dennis Severs’s house in Folgate Street. 

I hope they can make it work.

A bit more about the Villa Ventorum:-

The site has been known as a possible Roman villa since the early nineteenth century when remains may have been discovered when the nearby turnpike road opened.  The Rev. William Phelps described it in his History and Antiquities of Somersetshire (1836).

Koos Bekker and Karen Roos bought Hadspen in 2015.  It’s a big project, based on their hotel Babylonstoren in South Africa.

Much of the work on the Villa was done during COVID, a pretty remarkable achievement.

It’s open to the public, but only if you buy an annual membership:  not cheap, but it’s a new model for museums – small numbers of visitors for a high-quality, all-day experience.

We had the opportunity of seeing the Villa Ventorum, a Roman archaeological site in the grounds of the Newt, the luxury hotel just south of Bruton, with Ric Weeks, the extremely well-informed, on-site archaeologist who has overseen much of it.

It’s an impressive project, based on meticulous archaeology run by the Oxford Archaeological Unit under the auspices of the Southwest Heritage Trust and then equally meticulous architectural reconstruction by Nicola du Pisanie of Stonewood Design, the design arm of Stonewood, high quality local building contractors based in Castle Combe.  It is all done to an incredibly high specification, including hand-made tiles from Italy to replace the initial machine-made tiles.

This is the reconstructed villa:-

The fresco of the Roman emperor is based on the Prince of Wales:-

And the Empress is riding behind with Prince Harry:-

The kitchen is strangely modern because so many kitchen implements are based on antique prototypes (I don’t doubt the care which has gone into the reconstruction):-

The reconstruction of the frigidarium looked to me more neoclassical than antique – not surprising since so many neoclassical interiors were based on what survives in Pompeii and Herculaneum:-

Outside is the herb garden:-

South of the archaeological site is a new museum.  We would have liked more time to linger.  Again, it was extremely impressive, done to meticulous high standards by Kossmandejong, Dutch exhibition designers.  I would recommend that the newly appointed Director of the British Museum pays an early visit.

We arrived at dusk:-

Today has been heavy showers mixed with bright sun.  I walked up a nearby hill:-

Romilly’s work is in the shop window of Make Hauser and Wirth in Bruton, based on nails from Old Master paintings:-

There’s another work – Land Sea and Night Sky – based on ebay finds (not from the British Museum) and now made into lapel pins:-

My article about Llanfairfechan, Herbert North’s model village and its magnificent Church Institute, has now appeared online. I very much hope an appropriate use can be found for the Church Institute:-

https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/march-2024/save-this-perfect-welsh-building

I have been fascinated, but also a bit shocked by the response to my blog post of yesterday about the report commissioned by the Arts Council on the future of opera.  I have obviously not been paying close attention to the way these decisions are made (or ducked).

In the first place, there does seem something a tiny bit odd in the fact that a report on the future of opera, a subject of great importance, should be subcontracted by the Treasury to DCMS who subcontract decision-making to the Arts Council who are expected surely to have the appropriate in-house expertise, but who decide instead to subcontract the report to a consultancy in Liverpool run by an ex-special advisor in the Department of International Development who recruits someone writing a PhD at the University of Nottingham whose expertise is not in opera, but in cultural studies.

Isn’t this a very long-winded and expensive way of avoiding responsibility for decision making ?  You get someone to say that you cannot make a decision based on excellence and then wash your hands of it.

It doesn’t look good.

After the mild shock of discovering that the Arts Council no longer believes in excellence as a criterion for assessment of arts organisations – relevance apparently replaced it some time ago – I have been trying to find out a bit more about its report on opera, the terms of reference, how it came to be commissioned, and why a belief in excellence is an indication of a hopelessly old-fashioned view of cultural practice and must be eradicated if possible.

For anyone interested in the article in yesterday’s Observer, here it is:-

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/17/arts-council-england-declared-war-on-opera-and-excellence-anti-elitism

You can download the report:-

https://www.artscouncil.org.uk/lets-create-opera-and-music-theatre-analysis#:~:text=Between%202023%20and%202026%20we,Developing%20Your%20Creative%20Practice%20programmes.

Its authors are Tamsin Cox and Oliver Mantell.

Tamsin Cox has just completed a PhD at the University of Nottingham which, as it happens and very appropriately, is on the subject of ‘Concepts of value and worth in relation to arts and culture in competing narratives across multiple discourses: the example of post-war Britain’.

So, I guess she demonstrates that the ways in which the idea of value (ie a belief in excellence) is a cultural construct. As she summarises her research, it ‘looks at the status and role of ‘cultural policy studies’ as an academic field in debates concerning the ‘value’ of culture in public policy in Britain. My study will consider both historical and contemporary academic material which constitutes the academic contribution/intervention in this area, and consider what claims are made for the purpose and application of such work. It will look particularly at the ways in which different kinds of knowledge and knowledge production are privileged or validated over others in certain discourses, and what the reasons for this are’.

It is not yet available.

But the idea of excellence, which Maynard Keynes believed in so passionately as a post-war democratic right, has presumably been superseded by a view that all forms of cultural judgment are essentially political.

The Arts Council slogan used to be (no doubt, many years ago in the Dark Ages when people were foolish enough to believe in such things) ‘Excellence for All’, which was a useful encapsulation of its beliefs. ‘Relevance for all’ doesn’t quite have the same ring to it and I wonder who and how relevance is assessed.

Does it mean political engagement ?

Relevance is surely even harder to judge than excellence. And who makes that judgment, one wonders, since the process of assessment behind Arts Council decision-making is a touch opaque ?

I have quite a bit of re-education to catch up on.