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.

After a conversation at lunch about productions of Wagner in the autumn, I have been puzzling over a sentence in an Arts Council report which is quoted in today’s Observer: ‘Terms like excellence are indicative of the way in which opera and music theatre still retains unhelpful hierarchies about what kinds of work are valued’. 

Can this seriously be true ?  The Arts Council of England is saying that excellence is no longer valid as a judgment in opera and, I assume, also in art, music and literature too.  All things are equal in the eyes of the Arts Council and all forms of discrimination are automatically signs of an unacceptable elitism.  How much, one wonders, were the consultants paid to make this startling and revolutionary assertion ?  The good, the bad, and the ugly, they are all equal in the eyes and ears of the Arts Council and there is no possible way of differentiating between them.   THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS EXCELLENCE.  If you suggest otherwise, you will have your funding cut.  Actually, more than the implication.  Who have they cut ?  Those organisations that had the stupidity, the temerity, still to believe in that outmoded thing called excellence which, once upon a time, the Arts Council was set up to promote.

I spent the day devoted to the minutiae of professional architectural history – new archival research, new discoveries, new attributions, all in honour of Richard Hewlings, a former Inspector of Ancient Monuments and Editor of the Georgian Group Journal who seemed to have been a friend, colleague and correspondent of nearly all the speakers, each of whom was only allowed ten minutes to pose an architectural historical question or announce an architectural historical discovery.

I was one of the many people in the room who has benefitted from his advice, archival tips and all-round expertise.  He joined what was the Historic Inspectorate of the recently established Department of the Environment in 1972, after, I think I am right in saying, reading history at Pembroke College, Cambridge (he has recently written a biography of Queen Anne).  The only thing I missed was more about his own work which was briefly evident from a photograph of him seeking out information from his card index of building craftsmen. 

The lack of an easily available online image of John Miller has been rapidly rectified by Margot Jones, as I hoped it would, who has sent me several recent ones, including a particularly characteristic one of him in dialogue with Ken Frampton, maybe after a good lunch:-

I have only just heard the sad news of the death of John Miller, an extraordinarily nice, thoughtful and avuncular architect, who did a wide range of good work, as described by Deyan Sudjic, his son-in-law (see below), including, which Deyan leaves out, the new ground floor of the National Portrait Gallery which opened in late 1993 and which John never particularly liked because of the touches of luxury – was it the marble floor to which he was allergic (it has now been obliterated by the latest reconfiguration) ?

I think his best work, as Deyan implies, was his excellent enlargement of the Whitechapel Art Gallery in the 1980s:-

And the way that Tate Britain was enlarged and reconfigured with its Manton Entrance and new entrance staircase which opened in 2002.  Also, the Elizabeth Fry bulding at UEA:-

They were considerate and undemonstrative, like the man himself.

I have tried to find an image of him, but with difficulty. Neither the NPG nor the RIBA seem to have one, something which should be rectified. The only one I could find is by Sandra Lousada and I hope she won’t mind me reproducing it:-

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2024/mar/08/john-miller-obituary

I have been sent a copy of Libby Purves’s exceptionally sensible and level-headed article in this morning’s Times, which I was for some reason able to read online (We squander our heritage in wasteful demolitions (thetimes.co.uk).

It puts the case very clearly. Not everyone loves the existing Marks and Spencer building in Oxford Street, but this is no reason to knock it down. Most people, especially the next generation of young architects, accept that we need to change our views towards wasteful and unnecessary demolition, but not apparently Marks and Spencer, who have been jubilant at the recent decision of the high court, which I hope may have alienated some of their customers.

I have been reading the absolutely excellent and illuminating book by Amy Thomas, The City in the City: Architecture and Change in London’s Financial District, recently published and beautifully produced by MIT Press. 

It helps to explain a lot about the radical changes in the architecture of the City in recent decades: essentially since Big Bang when the City’s traditional ways of working which were were conservative, allowed time for long lunches and were based on trust were replaced by a much more aggressive, testosterone fuelled style of trading requiring the exchange of information on huge, self-contained trading floors. 

I am sure I am over-simplifying, but it obviously helps to explain the eruption of big, aggressive, free-form buildings which pay no attention to, in fact, deliberately look down on, the existing more traditional streets of the City.

There are questions, however, which are perhaps inevitably unanswered because of the timing of the book.

The first is what exactly happened – if anything – post the 2008 crash. 

The new style of buildings post-2008 is more anonymous.  The great skyscrapers are over 50 stories high and  accommodate shops and gyms within the building, so that workers never have to go out on to the street. 

But do people actually like this style of working ?  If all work can be done on a laptop, why not sit in a café or at home, rather than in an anonymous open-plan office, as people learned to do during COVID ? 

The fourth chapter ends with a question. ‘As real estate strategists and their clients begin to decrease their real estate holdings, and as desks disappear from offices and resurface in co-working hubs, cafes, snugs, and sitting rooms, the question is: What value does the City have in a digital, postpandemic (not to mention post Brexit) world ?’ (p.297)

This presumably helps to explain the current orgy of destruction and the City’s willingness to disobey its own code of practice with 75 buildings in the City currently scheduled for redevelopment.

The book shows very clearly that the culture of the City can, and has, changed very fast in the past. 

Maybe it has done so again and we are only just waking up to its consequences.