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Metaphysical
pathos
William Clark
Care, Diligence and Skill
A handbook for the governing bodies of arts organisations
The Scottish Arts Council £5.00
Imagine a book which finally explains how to organise things in the arts,
and that this has been compiled over a period of twenty years by the people
at the very top of the Arts Council, with the assistance of legal and
financial experts. Well its been around for some time: the fifth edition
of Care, Diligence and Skill (CD&S) is to be re-printed and updated
some time this year; although it is a surprise it was funded, given the
present criteria. It is aimed at a tiny audience, which by its own reckoning
meet for only 18 hours each year. Although almost completely useless,
the publication's history, the people behind it, how and why it came
about - its underlying assumptions - reveals a very negative approach.
The 1986 version attacked 'non-incorporated organisations' inciting
that these vital and diverse forms be discouraged, disenfranchised and
branded as inherently useless:
"In short, the unincorporated association is not appropriate for
any organisation proposing to undertake ventures of any significance,
to handle large sums of money, to own or lease property or to assume legal
commitments."
This has been retained in all four editions and is one of the few points
the book makes. No explanation or evidence is offered for the hypothesis.
I would assume it is because individuals cannot escape being held responsible
for the consequences of their own actions.
Any serious revision should re-evaluate this generalisation in the light
of the enduring success of artist-run projects (mostly unincorporated
associations) and the spectacular collapse (and expensive bailing out
and quasi-legal swindling of creditors) of numerous thoroughly incorporated
associations throughout the UK during the '80s and '90s.
In the arts things have to start somewhere, and they tend to start small.
This book imagines that artwork comes from nowhere. To offer a self-fulfilling
prophecy where all artist-run projects are deemed improper purely through
their existence is poor leadership. Historically this dogma inhibited
or prevented the funding of artist-run projects at a crucial point in
their development. Suspicions of ignorance or worse are aroused when what
is presented as a positive guide for arts organisations, seems better
described as a negative document proscribing what is allowed. In this
review I will show that its root aims are to limit and exclude and that
they are ideologically flawed.
Bored of Directors
So who should be running arts organisations? The answer given in CD&S
is an illogical, tortuous, encroachment of dogma:
"First and foremost a board needs one or more members with professional
knowledge of the relevant art form. Of equal importance is having a person
with a knowledge of finance, banking, accounts and law. A business executive...may
be valuable." [emphasis added]
They may also run off with the money. But not all people with business
acumen are untrustworthy. Similarly, the SAC failed to realise that not
all unincorporated organisation are "not appropriate," simply
because they are unyielding to appropriation because they do not believe
that promises of commercial exploitation will lead to the Big Rock Candy
Mountain. Artists have the right not to act as a wholesale propriety for
certain standards of conformity and ownership as dictated by finance,
banking and business executives. No one holds these kinds of jobs up as
paragons of virtue anymore anyway. The many ways artists have organised
themselves (at no great expense to the tax payer) is written out of this
handbook because they haven't got a clue about what actually took
place.
CD&S' advice on professionalism is amateurish. It comes from
a period when arts funding (by that I mean actually funding art) was unbalanced
and conditioned by obsessive propaganda that the social value of art should
be welded to crackpot versions of the 'values of the marketplace'.
A very politicised period which pretended not to be.
The proud chairman of the SAC when CD&S first emerged was the economist
Sir Alan Peacock, at the time a trustee of the Institute for Economic
Affairs (IEA); eventually joining its advisory council in '91, when
questions were asked in the House of Commons concerning its status and
activities. These aimed to establish that it was covertly a political
organisation, and thus unworthy of its charitable status. An allegation
often levelled at small misunderstood organisations.
The economics or 'standards' propounded by the IEA, which were
openly taken up by the Tory government in '82, were, amongst others:
"...more denationalisation of industry; an extension of private medicine;
the introduction of education vouchers...; and more anti-union legislation."1
The formal political manifestation of the "nominally independent"
IEA was the Margaret Thatcher and Keith Joseph led, Centre for Policy
Studies (CPS):
"Both were in the propaganda business. Both have offices in relatively
unassuming private houses in SW1."2
The CPS concentrated on the Universities, the IEA on Fleet Street and
the City, Sir Alan was appointed by the government, to concentrate on
the SAC.
Founded in the '50s by Lord Ralph Harris, the IEA was the first organisation
in the UK to publish Milton Friedman's monetarist economics. It gets weirder.
Investigative journalists say it later took an active part in the cabals
which covertly drove the Conservative party rightwards in the 70s. Arthur
Seldon, deputy for Lord Harris, wrote a book with the notorious MI6 operative,
Brian Crozier. Lord Harris himself shared a platform with Crozier and
John Gouriet of the Freedom Association (founded by the far-right McWhirter
twins) addressing the officers of the Army Staff College at Camberly circa
'75. This was an effort to encourage direct military intervention
against "internal subversion" i.e. the left.3
Those were the days.
The IEA are more well known for their work in the field of privatisation.
It was they who commissioned Stephen Littlechild in '81 to write
the paper "Ten steps to denationalisation," Littlechild later
became one of the four "regulators" who oversaw 20% of the UK's
GDP in the form of the four utilities Gas, Water, Electricity and Telecommunications.
The IEA also influenced the Tory Government's minimum wage policy,4
promoted the racist notion that "non-traditional" families (i.e.
black and Asian) produce more delinquent children5
and advocated that "student loans should be charged at a higher rate
of interest."6 Mrs Thatcher herself
stated that
"What we have achieved could never have been done without the leadership
of the IEA."7
An IEA type influence on the SAC can be discerned in CD&S, in the
form of this politically biased managerialism. 'Administration'
is a vehicle of political persuasion because it produces an illusion of
impartiality while striking at the heart at how the arts are (and can
be) funded and organised. Arts policy of the period tried to develop forms
of privatisation. The Arts Council was perceived as a body, stemming from
the post-war creation of the "welfare state," which came under
such assault (through privatisation) by the Tory party; itself guided
by the IEA.
These drives encouraged the assumption that business is somehow apolitical.
For instance: if we adopt the outline given in CD&S, it follows that
an exhibition sponsored by Shell and ran by an organisation which contains
executives from Shell, is the best suited to promote the work of radical
Nigerian writers whose work deals with the activities of Shell in Nigeria.8
One can view the tendencies inherent in independent or indigenous or artist-run
projects as running counter to these notions because they lack faith in
what provisions they make for cultural freedom.
Going down under
CD&S says itself that it was based on an Australian book written by
Timothy Pascoe in 1979. His time with the Australian Arts Council is viewed
as a reactionary response to media attacks on spending on the arts, which
began as a minor part of the campaign which saw the Whitlam Labor Government
peremptorily dismissed in '75. In politics a soft targets get easy
answers. The new government with its (highly publicised attitude of) 'financial
accountability' towards the arts, came at a time of newspaper headlines
inveighing against 'subsidised scribblers' similar to the orchestrated
outcry over the Tate's 'piles of bricks' in the UK. When
the 1983 Labor Government re-took office (under Bob Hawke) it did not
replicate Whitlam's largesse; keeping to the reactionary 'financial
accountability' position on the arts, suspiciously similar to the
arts paranoia being run now by the UK Labour party. The Australian experience
is a useful mirror of our own because it ran ahead during the ugly craziness
of UK Conservative control.
"By now the business men and women were moving in and meeting government
on its own terms. The Australian Ballet went on strike over relations
with management. In 1982 Timothy Pascoe, arts business adviser and former
director of the Liberal Party, became executive chairman and set about
'restructuring' the Council."9
In 1983, Pascoe's "Excellence Isn't Always", pretentiously
outlined the 'negative effects' of the past government's
arts doctrine, as a preamble to justify cuts and the positive effects
of adherance to the new doctrine (potential funding!). Tim Rowse, a writer
on Australian arts, in his 1996 'Arguing the Arts' puts forward
Pascoe's' case:
"He proposed that the Council formulate a clearer definition of excellence,
that it include innovation more prominently in its criteria of the excellent
and that it 'limit the number and value of subsidies and programs
relating to excellence'."10
The function of Pascoe's writing was not as a statement of Council
policy. It was to insinuate a new persistent rhetoric to limit and exclude
what arts organisations could do if they expected their bread to be buttered.
Some social Darwinism had just popped into existence. According to Rowse:
"Into its uses are packed a number of deeply felt assumptions about
the relationship between Art and power. 'Excellence' reverberates with
that bourgeois utopianism in which money and political power are politely
separated from and subordinated to the higher things of life, such as
Art. Excellence makes another implicit and equally utopian appeal to its
users; it implies the user has an authority to make distinctions of quality
and intelligence and to have those distinctions accepted as authoritative
throughout the nation. It implies a kind of sovereignty of good taste.
Excellence is a language of the powerful, which effaces the social basis
of that power."11
Katharine Brisbane's "The Arts and the Pre-emptive Buckle"
provides further inside assessment of Pascoe's worth. An original
member of the Australia Council, writing in 1999, she speaks critically
about the Faustian bargain whereby the larger organisations had become
the captives of their sponsors and subscribers, more 'mono-cultural'
and regressive than they were in the '50s and '60s.
She identifies Pascoe's pursuit of bureaucratically contrived forms
of 'excellence' in others, as a root problem. The authors of
CD&S viewed his work uncritically as the basis for a solution. Brisbane
categories the practical out-working of Pascoe's policies as a period
where the growth and career of the artist was left out of the equation,
with their working conditions suggesting that they were seen as no more
than "pabulum for production values". She criticises those who
have acquiesced to the climate of dependence, bounded by guidelines which
conspire against individual artists entering public controversy; or revealing
the reality of their lives. Guidelines which set at a premium the young,
the new and the correct while discounting everyone else in the name of
'inclusion.'
"The ABC's John Cleary has coined a phrase to describe this condition.
He calls it the Pre-emptive Buckle. The occasion was a discussion with
Rev. Tim Costello about the rise of gambling addiction in Victoria and
his perception that the charities now dealing with the problem had earlier
failed to oppose government-supported gambling for fear of losing their
subsidies. It was, said Cleary, a pre-emptive buckle. I believe that 30
years of subsidy has brought about a similar genuflexion in the arts'
way of thinking: I think it is time for a moratorium."12
As with the UK, the Australian Arts Council was devised by bankers. Dr.
Coombs, who retired as Chairman of the Reserve Bank to form the Australia
Council, was one of the iconic figures in the history of fiscal policy
not unlike Keynes. According to Brisbane - who was appointed by Coombs - as
Pascoe and the Australia Council moved in line with the arts policy of
the Federal Government:
"The changes lost sight of community, of the reasons we once believed
making the arts was important: that the pursuit of excellence, by its
nature, has divided the arts from everyday life...In pursuit of 'professionalism'
healthy amateur culture was discarded. Subsidy to new competitors drove
the commercial theatre to bankruptcy. Early support for research and development
sought from universities was eroded by ill-run residencies and mutual
distrust. The politics of subsidy inevitably ensured that the product
became the measure of progress, not the arduous process of artistic development.
No national cultural policy was drawn up which took account of all the
aspects of cultural life. No industrial infrastructure was built to support
the artist from youth to age."13
Does this sound familiar? The Australia Council's major problem related
to Pascoe being accountable to government, who will dogmatically want
short-term visible results and be recalcitrant towards long-term 'invisible'
investment. Brisbane is an ex-colleague of Pascoe's summing up his
performance as chief executive. According to CD&S
"the chief executive...is the key person in determining the success
or failure of an organisation."
Pia Pressure
In Scotland, back in '86, the then chairman of the SAC, little Timothy
Mason (who had worked for the Australian Arts Council from 77 to 80) and
his acquaintance Paul Pia, who worked next door to the SAC's Charlotte
Square offices, took Pascoe's other work "Strengthening the
Covenant's of arts organisations" and used it as the basis for
CD&S.14
Paul Pia puts pay to the Biblical warning that 'no man can have many
masters'. His interest in the SAC stems from his use of 'culture'
as a veil in his 'activities' as a middle-man for multi-nationals.
As a member of Scottish Council for Development and Industry and Scottish
Financial Enterprise he is in an envious position to advise development
agencies as to which multi-national should get the cash and also while
chairman of the Japan Society of Scotland and director of the Scottish
North American Business Council advise the "multi-national companies
on international trade and inward and outward investments." Ideally
the multi-national comes in, gets a grant from nice development agencies
and the profits go outward under the name of urban renewal or the latest
political slogan, then the multi-national goes away. During the process,
while they are waiting they may brush against some art.
According to his blurb what Pia does is set up "appropriate corporate
structures for international business; international tax and transfer
pricing; international contracts; international protection of industrial
property rights and issues of risk management."15
He is also a member of the Scottish Oil Club (Scotland being the only
country to discover oil and get poorer), a legal firm W & J Burness
and a fellow of the Institute of Directors. Through acting for large numbers
of businesses from North America, continental Europe, the Far East and
the Pacific Rim, Pia is used to dealing with companies from different
business and legal cultures, and indeed quasi-illegal cultures: what is
legal in one place may need more discretion in another.16
You should see what RTZ get away with.
Proven lawyers
Laurence Harbottle of the show-biz law firm Harbottle & Lewis (who
handle Richard Branson) are cited for further legal advice and assistance
with CD&S. Someone should contact him and enquire whether he wants
to be a witness for the prosecution or the defence. In his article 'Do
We Want An Arts Council?' published in '99, Harbottle puts the
Arts council on trial, focusing first on the Lottery:
"The modern Arts world has also been seriously affected by the Lottery.
It might have been a new dawn but proved otherwise. We have lived through
three stages: the first employing a welter of consultancies saw the Lottery,
having spent money lavishly on its own organisation and a plethora of
business plans, giving profligate awards; the second saw the problem of
matching funding absorbing private and charitable funds which should have
been spent more productively; the third saw the Government robbing the
bank in ill advised tribute to its own distant origins."
Then he becomes a character witness for the kind of people the Arts Council
em...get to advise it:
"The Arts Council itself always had difficulty in finding sufficient
staff with sympathetic knowledge. Multiplying Regional Arts Boards across
the country makes the task ten times more difficult. A new untrained Civil
Service is the result and accordingly instead of reacting to artistic
initiative both Council and Boards take refuge in formulae, using patterns
to create pictures they can recognise and then providing a limited number
of stock reactions to fit the patterns they have themselves created. Regional
Boards which fail to accept any Court of Appeal or even the superiority
of the Arts Council, cause structural rigidity. Inadequate provision,
uncertainty about continuity, lack of funding in adversity, capital funding
without sustained support, untrained bureaucrats, self reproducing oligarchies,
the distancing of experienced practitioners all provide a bitter inheritance."17
This is not exactly a testimony for the defence. We should realise that
in respect of CD&S many readers will feel that the advice must cut
both ways. The Arts Council is a "governing body of arts organisations"
itself: the target audience of CD&S. Is it actually able to take the
advice of its legal advisor? The reality of the "bitter inheritance"
identified by Harbottle is - yes, the situation whereby the same people
(DEMOS being the worst and himself included) advise, administrate and
run arts organisations for their own financial gain - but also it is
the effect it has on the lives of those who choose to be artists. The
criminal waste of lost opportunities. With his previous chairmanship of
the ICA, Harbottle is as guilty as anyone here.
How can experience be brought to bear on an organisation which does not
want to hear it? Harbottle's 'new structures' will not
emerge from feeble publications such as CD&S, which he endorses, but
which deliberately exclude and ignore. The meagre legal advice given in
CD&S states that you should 'seek advice'. One also wonders
why in the light of his criticisms the firm have let their company name
endorse bathetic statements like this from page 21 of CD&S:
"Lobbying for public grants and donation. A board that fails to lobby
vigorously for grants and donations from public bodies is leaving its
organisation at a competitive disadvantage relative to other arts organisations
and other community projects. It is inappropriate to explore here the
intricacies of lobbying. However, any board that is unaware of how to
go about it should quickly seek a board member who does."
No one expects the Spanish Inquisition
And this is the problem with criticising this book - it may be the
product of the best minds we have had running things in Scotland: but
it is almost impossible to take seriously. The frightening thing is that
CD&S (unchanged for decades) is also touted in a SAC Report on financial
monitoring as one of the three things offered to assist the four Scottish
national companies–who have merged their administration - from
future (further) collapse:
"To assist boards, SAC funds a development programme, produces a
publication to assist new board members and trustees to understand their
responsibilities and duties, and encourages those with an interest in
the arts to become board members. Advice on the range of skills represented
on a board which an arts organisation is likely to find beneficial in
managing its affairs is also provided."18
Of course sound business sense these days can mean sacking most of your
employees and getting things done cheaper, preferably in places where
you can get away with murder. But even the consultants for the above report
observed an anomaly which underlines the impractical nature of CD&S'
long-term advocacy of simulating an idealised business structure predicated
on the profit motive:
"Companies supported by SAC are encouraged to accumulate reserves
and provisions, (General Conditions of Grant), because of the lack of
any initial capital sum it is extremely difficult for any arts organisation,
which is effectively prohibited from generating profit by its charitable
aims, to create sufficient contingency against future losses or to make
further investment."19
Fundamental criticisms of the Arts Council also point to the organisational
secrecy and unaccountability. Although personal enmity motivated the exchange,
this surfaced in the Scottish Executive's questioning of the present
chair of the SAC at Select Committee on 16/12/97. Here the chairman is
honest enough to state that a genuine appeals procedure rather than the
present sham would get in the way of how the SAC does things and the government's
immutable plans for the arts:
"[Mr McAllion] What kind of appeals procedure is it that does not
even allow the appellant to be present when a decision about them is being
taken? This appeals procedure which you operate is honestly unparalleled
throughout the whole of government in this country. It would not be tolerated
in any other area of government. (Mr Linklater) If you do not mind me
saying so, I think you are overstating it. [Mr McAllion] Except the police.
Maybe the police would be a parallel but nobody else. (Mr Linklater) I
would like to make this central point which I think goes to the heart
of what you were saying. If every time The Arts Council either withdrew
a grant, withheld a grant, or decided that a revenue funded grant should
not be renewed, if every time we took that decision–and we take that
kind of decision the whole time, it is part of our duty and our job–an
organisation disagreed with that (and of course they disagree, they all
disagree with it, I know of no arts organisation that has willingly said,
"Thank you for taking away our grant, we are delighted you took that
decision", they all oppose it naturally) and you then said that each
of those decisions should be a matter for appeal and that an outside independent
body should then rule on it, we might as well give up our strategy altogether."
That refers to the old strategy, not the present one, or the new one.
Later exchanges reveal that the ideas behind the present restructuring
of the SAC were pre-emptive of whatever restructuring the new Scottish
Executive would desire.
Care Diligence & Fascism
The Arts Council struggles with the difficult pretence of implementing
a government arts policy which the government themselves stated should
be judged on their performance directly running the New Millenium Experience
Company. I doubt very much that Timothy Mason the director of the Museums
and Galleries Commission - which advises rich people on tax avoidance - who
left when it was 're-structured' in 2000 (to be run by Lloyd
Grossman), will be passing out copies of his CD&S to help Museum directors
with their present difficulties. According to an article in the Evening
Standard 30/10/00 the folly of government 'control' will continue
on grander scale. They had been leaked a confidential working paper which
said that:
"...the Prime Minister should appoint the chairmen [sic] of such
institutions as the National Gallery, the British Museum, the Science
and Natural History Museums and the National Portrait Gallery. Under the
proposals, the Culture Secretary would appoint their trustees rather than
allowing them to be elected by their own boards. The proposals would have
represented a huge concentration of political patronage....the director
of one major institution described the original circular as "an absolutely
straightforward attempt by central government to control what have until
now been independent bodies, and are successful and flourishing because
they have always been independent...As fascists have always done, this
government is using tidiness as the argument. It is a very totalitarian
notion of having power in the centre. It is extremely sinister that they
are putting this forward as primary legislation with which they could
then do what they wish, and that they are not allowing this consultation
document to be available publicly. The conference of National Museum Directors
has unanimously voted for it to be made public. The department has refused."
After promising to abandon the ideas and lying to the Directors to shut
them up, the Culture Secretary started up the plan again. A Guardian report
(23/12/00) states that Chris Smith will:
"take away the power of their trustees to elect their own chairperson
without consulting the government..."
The latest twist has Smith lying to them again and the process being done
through the back door. The good old system of government appointees, political
patronage is not discussed in CD&S.
Pluralism and relations of production
Ultimately government interference, all the criteria and control, makes
people reluctant to be honestly creative. It is impersonal. It kills real
art, real freedom of expression of the reality of our lives: it makes
people frightened to be creative.
CD&S perpetuates hierarchical structures in the arts. It is predicated
on the assumption that a form of pluralism exists in the arts at best
the book is tenuous and anachronistic. Pluralism holds that power is distributed
between labour, management and capital (and sometimes customers and clients)
and that there is no coercion. A handy illusion which ignores social relations
and the exercise of authority.
In art organisations pluralism is rhetorical, while groups and interests
dominate agendas behind the scenes. The display of art is thought to advocate
liberalism in itself, while the organisational structure (at times secretly)
reflects more authoritarian principles the higher one looks. Looking at
the arts generally, pluralism is used to impute impartially upon a hierarchically
co-ordinated social organisation which is far from impartial. It is not
that pluralism is suppressed; pluralism is itself an illusion.
In CD&S all arts policy and practice is supposed to find expression
in one inaccurately defined, idealised form of organisation. It is silent
on the effect of this, silent on its roots and silent on what forces impinged
upon it. It censors and censures awareness of different forms of co-operative
or collective structures, dismissing them as early as page 10. This has
continued unnoticed for 14 years too many. What comment there is on 'other
forms' is deviancy amplification; distortion to magnify relatively
minor patterns of stigmatisation, where deviance is the 'unintended'
consequence of control and the reaction to stereotypes. CD&S'
discourse becomes a ready-made way of thinking with an effect similar
to that of ideology–i.e. ruling out alternative ways of thinking
and hence preserving a particular distribution of power. In other words
discrimination and prejudice.
The government funding system is now the main economy in the arts. No
one believes it is democratic in form. CD&S' re-publication comes
at an interesting moment, with the Directors of most of our leading artistic
institutions now making the claim - the accusation - that the state
is undermining their authority with fascist means. They are exaggerating,
but at the same time the state's activities do concur with some of
fascism's defining characteristics. In the early '90s ex-SAC
director Seona Ried (who introduces CD&S) famously stated that the
SAC was 'not a democracy'. What is it then? One could easily
say that the funding system attempts to create a Malthusian form of organisation
i.e. the capacity for reproduction excels the rate at which subsistence
can be increased; thus the artistic population should be checked. Artistic
poverty is the result of moral licence; upper class moral licence is not
a source of poverty.
Do funding bodies - with their systems of political appointees and
an ever changing criteria index - believe in evolution? Is it social
Darwinism we see? the formulation of laws purportedly similar to natural
laws to govern society with the unjust demand that these should be underlying
and be irresistible.
Less medicine is better
They say it is not insanity which creates the need for asylums but rather
asylums that create the need for mad people. CD&S' diagnostic
categories would seems to express, not a neutral science, but a set of
dominant values which stigmatise and are of uncertain value. It puts forwards
an imaginary 'total institution' which can be defined as a number
of like-situated individuals cut off from wider society leading the reader
towards a closed administrated existence. How many arts organisation in
the UK never mind Scotland have both paid "legal advisers" and
"company secretaries." Chief executives (which the book states
should not be someone with any knowledge of the arts) should be people
with "outstanding political and administrative skill." Then
the book notes that "many" (in fact it is most) organisations
cannot offer enough money to "attract adequate talent–particularly
for administration." What does that imply? Is that not something
of an insult to practically every arts organisation?
It is only recently that paintings and sculptures became more than commissioned
tableaus of government ideology and military conquest. Today, types of
government sanction and subsidy, how these are administrated and with
what bias, have encouraged a 'gallery system' highly ramified
in approach and running parallel to (and becoming little more than) private
dealerships - an organisational form which itself has remained largely
unchanged for the last 100 years.
A hierarchy of (in descending order): Museum, Modern museum, Contemporary
Exhibition Space and then Independent Exhibition Space has evolved to
represent a traditional cycle of: hostility, familiarisation, acceptance
and absorption. The lower end of this circulation is in many general respects
becoming disciplined to reflect and confirm the cultural agenda proscribed
by interpenetrations of aspects of government, private sector interest
groups and the cultural 'gate keepers' of the day. Unfortunately
they are all bickering amongst themselves. Yes, they lack a handbook.
Bureaucracies can embody vicious circles of decreasing efficiency, groups
of colleagues often attempt to maximise their freedom of action by paying
lip-service to the rules but in reality bending them when they can. That
has been how we have all got by. Sociologists say limited information
is available to decision-makers regarding alternatives and consequences.
This includes sub-ordinates withholding or distorting information so that
senior managers do not know exactly what is going on. Senior managers
know this so they create more rules to regulate what goes on below them.
Hi ho.
But what is needed are chances for those of us who choose to inhabit these
institutions (and who are only interested in the money) to adapt and modify
formal systems of bureaucratic surveillance. The tactics of bypassing
and altering the forces, the modes, the relations of production won't
be found in a handbook. The subject of CD&S' helpful hints will
be utterly unpersuasive if it says it is about the arts but it offers
no assistance to artists and then excludes and ignores the fact that together
artists have organised better exhibitions than heavily funded organisations
packed with administrators and arts council appointees.
Many artistic 'movements' seem to start as groups of friends
(and end as groups of enemies), some never grow beyond that. The majority
of 20th century artistic groups conform to this. So would Zurich Dada
have benefited if it had become Dada Ltd? Should Apollinaire have went
on a management course?
Notes
1. William Keegan, Mrs Thatcher's Economic Experiment, Penguin 1984.
2. Ibid. Private Eye 1017 states that the CPS were the architects of the
privatisation of pensions and the swindling of millions by those companies
which supported and financed the CPS.
3. For an overview of the complexities of the period see Smear! by Stephen
Dorril & Robin Ramsay, 4th Estate, 1991, page 224 - 228. For the reference
to Lord Harris see Free Agent by Brian Crozier, Harper Collins, 1993,
page 122. Peacock himself has connections with the intelligence services
through his tenure as an executive director of the Economist Intelligence
Unit from '77 to '84, which according to Crozier and other authors had
an extremely intimate relationship with MI6.
4. Sunday Times 19/2/95.
5. Financial Times 9/1/95
6. Financial Times 9/1/95. Hopefully it can be seen from this that the
IEA have a wide area of interest. Peacock himself has written on "The
Composer in the Market place" (1975), "Public expenditure and
government growth" (1985) and "Corporate take-overs and the
public interest" (1991).
7. Spectator 23/4/88
8. CD&S was initially sponsored by IBM UK Holdings PLC, the board
of which reads like a who's who of the British State: including, Sir Edwin
Nixon (Nat West Bank), Sir Robert Ball (Legal & General), Sir Adrian
Cadbury (Bank of England), Lord Chalfont (VSEL), Lord Hunt of Tamworth
(BNP, Prudential Corporation), Sir John Kingman (Smithkline Beecham) and
Sir Evelyn de Rothschild (N.M. Rothschilds & Sons). Ironically enough
IBM threw out their old management practices of vertical integration,
when the company lost millions in the early nineties. No business sponsorship
has been found for the latest re-print.
9. http://www.currency.com.au/buckle.html
10.
http://wwwmcc.murdoch.edu.au/ReadingRoom/Rowse/Rowse2.html
11. Ibid.
12. http://www.currency.com.au/buckle.html
13. Ibid.
14. http://www.earthwatch.org/australia/annrvw.html.
Pascoe–I believe–is now a supporter of the Australian Earthwatch
Institute. Earthwatch's "unique role in educating the public"
and "making a significant contribution to the debate on sustainable
development in Australia" is in partnership with Rio Tinto Zinc and
models deceptive propagandistic co-operation between the corporate sector
and the NGO sector. In 1999, this formed into a partnership with Rio Tinto
globally. It also engages in 'partnerships' between the Shell
Foundation and DuPont amongst many other corporate funders. Cynics (and
the relatives of those who died) will wonder why global land rapists and
polluters on the scale of RTZ and Shell indulge organisation like the
Earthwatch Institute. Is it to put a PR puff on things such as RTZ's
and the Oil companies infamous involvement in Indonesia during probably
the worst totalitarian regime the region has seen?
15. http://www.icclaw.com/l500/formex/pps/ukp4714.htm
16. http://www.burness.co.uk/html/partners/profiles/paulpia.htm
17.
http://www.harbottle.com/i_articledetails.asp?type=article&P_ID=162&ID=42&SuperID=11
18. http://www.scotland.gov.uk/library2/doc11/sacmr-01.asp
19. Ibid.
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