These retro times. No sooner had I finished stowing the candles I’d bought on the advice of the deputy prime minister, Oliver Dowden, who believes we should all prepare for darkness, than the latest winner of the Turner prize, Jesse Darling, was complaining in his acceptance speech of Margaret Thatcher, who had, he said, removed art from schools on the grounds it was not “economically viable”. Crikey. This was truly dizzying. Had I gone too early on the Warninks, or, like season nine of Dallas, had the last three decades merely been an extended dream?
Leaving aside the fact that when Thatcher resigned in 1990, Darling was nine, such talk, received so rapturously (and so unquestioningly) by the art world, seems very odd to me. There are plenty of people, elected and non-elected, who are far more deserving of our ire when it comes to the arts right now. Unlike Thatcher, they’re alive and kicking, and mostly went themselves to expensive schools where words like impasto and Velázquez doubtless flowed freely from the mouths of teachers, and flashy walk-in kilns were standard.
