Edinburgh’s Collective is the most beautifully situated gallery in Britain, perched on top of Calton Hill with glorious views of Arthur’s Seat and the sea beyond Leith. Unfortunately every time I go there, the art is rubbish. Ruth Ewan’s Marxist cartoon The Beast lives down to this gallery’s sloppy standards. Andrew Carnegie, the Scottish-born industrialist who became one of the US’s richest philanthropists, is berated by his own dinosaur “Dippy”, the famous diplodocus whose skeleton he put on display in Pittsburgh while sending casts to museums around the world, including Britain’s Natural History Museum, as an ambassador of world peace.
Ewan’s film has Dippy chastise a kilt-clad Carnegie for concealing his ruthless capitalism behind a generosity that included founding 2,509 libraries worldwide. That doesn’t wash with Dippy. “Turn to dust, Andrew Carnegie!” she urges. The animation is as crap as the argument is one-sided.
