Some of you may have watched the discussion organised by Factum Arte and Art Newspaper. I was very nervous about it, not least because whenever I have done anything on Zoom, it has always said that my internet connection is unstable. And it’s quite hard to chair a group of people onscreen. But I enjoyed it much more than expected, thanks to the quality of the panel, who seemed to have been especially handpicked to be in favour of digital and other forms of replication. Maybe that is the way we’re going. I couldn’t help thinking of my great grandparents who went to buy furniture in Tottenham Court Road because reproduction furniture was so much better quality than Georgian.

I am (is this ludicrously narcissistic ?) re-posting my most recent post, of many, about Charleston which I have loved and visited since the early 1980s, first when it was in the process of being restored, and then for many years as a trustee. I have been following its need for emergency funding with the deepest possible anxiety, since it, like so many small organisations, lives close to the brink, without a big endowment and wholly dependent on its income from visitors, its excellent shop and its wonderful Festival, which for every year since 1993 has been one of my highlights in May.

I’m sure Nathaniel Hepburn, its Director, would also want me to add a link to its fund-raising page to which I have just made a too modest contribution (www.charleston.org.uk/charleston-emergency-appeal).

https://charlessaumarezsmith.com/2019/09/15/charleston-farmhouse/

As readers of my blog will already know, I have been proseletysing for the attached initiative, which is making good the defects of central government ordering and pre-planning by just getting gowns made locally. I suspect it is a model of what should have been done more (eg local testing by labs, encouraging firms to switch to making gowns, not doing it all through systems of centralised bureaucratic control). Anyway, I am so glad it has been such a big success and so grateful for the financial support it has received.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/making-gowns-for-nhs-staff?viewupdates=1&rcid=r01-158833068161-f2036426698d4059&utm_medium=email&utm_source=customer&utm_campaign=p_email%2B1137-update-supporters-v5b

I’ve been looking back, as there is probably a tendency to do, at this stage of the lockdown, at its beginnings. Formal lockdown came on Monday 23rd. March. The two weeks before lockdown are in everyone’s minds as to whether or not the government acted fast enough. I find it interesting to look back at the three weeks before lockdown. Monday 2nd. March was the first time someone refused to shake hands and there was already an awareness of impending difficulties. Monday 9th. March was a dinner at the National Portrait Gallery. We already knew that we were on the decks of the Titanic and Roy Strong had said – in retrospect, very sensibly – that he didn’t feel able to come, but did. Wednesday 11th. March was the opening of Titian: Love, Desire and Death. I didn’t think it was a great idea to go and mingle with a lot of people, which was correct, although I bitterly regret now not having been able to see the exhibition. Wednesday 12th. March, we had lunch at the lovely new restaurant at the Whitechapel Art Gallery. We cancelled a birthday lunch on Sunday 15th. March because everyone by then knew it would be a really bad idea. I was by no means as well informed as a lot of other people who were already self-isolating. They must have been better informed about the progress of the disease in China. I mention this not to be macabre, but only to make the point that many people already knew what were likely to be the problems at the beginning of March. In retrospect – I know it is too easy to be wise after the event – we were all slow to react, including, especially, the government.

I am getting increasingly baffled by the suggestion that herd immunity was not the declared policy of the government in March. I thought I would check what I half remembered. A friend in Paris wrote me an email on 17 March, ‘Dear Charles, I hope you are well and safe, and not taken into the UK herd immunity policy’. I knew what he meant as did he: that the UK government was going its own way, independently of the rest of Europe, because it thought it knew better, whatever the consequences in terms of the numbers of deaths. It was maybe a defensible policy at the time. But it’s surely not defensible to now deny it.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/29/revealed-the-inside-story-of-uk-covid-19-coronavirus-crisis?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_WordPress

I’m so pleased to read of the determination of small museums in Paris to re-open. I had a conversation with András Szántó this afternoon (he is speaking in the Art Newspaper debate), who pointed out that hardware stores are open in the United States and that the logistics of opening hardware stores are not so very different from those of opening museums. Social distancing isn’t necessarily a problem. Numbers can be regulated. Masks can be worn. It’s bad to assume that museums can work just as well online.

https://www.theartnewspaper.com/amp/news/galleries-and-small-museums-to-re-open-in-france?__twitter_impression=true

I have been boning up for the discussion on the Future of Museums, which the Art Newspaper and Factum Arte have organised for this Friday afternoon (see attached). I’m looking forward to discussing the issue as to whether this prolonged period of seeing works of art online, on television, on twitter, will have made us more or less tolerant of reproductive technologies, only providing Zoom works, which seems to me to be an inadequate substitute for a Viennese café:-

https://www.theartnewspaper.com/amp/news/live-conference-digital-technologies-and-cultural-heritage?__twitter_impression=true

I’ve just been watching Simon Schama talking about The Young Rembrandt, the Ashmolean’s exhibition which has had to be closed because of Covid-19 (https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000hqpj). It wasn’t quite clear whether it was filmed before or after the closure, but either way it was a brilliant way of showing and experiencing the exhibition in absentia, with Schama as a profoundly knowledgeable guide looking not just at paintings, but drawings and etchings as well and giving a deep sense of Rembrandt’s humanity. A wonderful thing for the BBC to have enabled.

We were incredibly pleased by the attached good news that a cottage somewhere in North Wales has won the Architects’ Journal small projects award for the skill and sensitivity with which which Martin Edwards has added a bedroom extension to the existing nineteenth-century cottage, using the materials of an agricultural building to disguise it. I am particularly pleased that the judges could see the quality in something so low key, so carefully unostentatious, doing everything in its power to sit harmoniously in the landscape, but with it’s own integrity, independently of the existing cottage:-

https://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/news/aj-small-projects-2020-winner-revealed/10046900.article?blocktitle=homepage-big-pic&contentID=19632

Apart from the recent interview in the Financial Times with Emmanuel Macron which I did not repost because it’s behind a paywall, this is the single most thoughtful and reflective – and damning – piece that I have read so far about the political response to Covid-19 in this country:-

https://www.theartnewspaper.com/amp/comment/michael-craig-martin-from-my-isolation?__twitter_impression=true