My Dad was an autodidact. He would take us to the Tate, park himself in front of Turner’s Peace – Burial at Sea, get out his sketch book and then unravel the mysteries of its geometry.
Most Saturdays my sister and I would wander around galleries while father transcribed various paintings that interested him. We were an unusual family.
He started his working life selling vegetables on North End Road market and stirring huge vats of margarine in the Blue Band margarine factory, which was then located on Wandsworth Bridge Road. Because he could draw like an angel, he was ferociously intelligent and curious about everything.
His life was transformed and, by the time my sisters and I arrived, he was the principal of Chelsea School of Art.
If you are a talented kid where do you start? Where does that engine of curiosity begin? What is the catalyst for personal innovation and inspiration?
For my parents and for me it was in the museum. I am an incredibly privileged person. I went to a huge comprehensive school that had a well-equipped art block full of well-trained and energetic teachers. Because of my parents’ interests I knew about art but I did not want to be an artist.
The day I decided art was for me was when my school suggested I went to a workshop at the Whitechapel Gallery. The exhibition had been curated by Nicholas Serota and was of the German expressionist painter Max Beckmann.
Jenni Lomax, who was the education officer (now director of the Camden Arts Centre), told us about the Weimar Republic through the prism of the paintings.
Then we were taken into a huge studio gallery and given large sheets of paper and told to forget about the paintings, just to “make something big”.
The experience – simply of space, mental and physical, and close proximity to the real thing: great art – expanded my sense of self.
I am not so art-centred that I think only the arts have the power to invest in the next generation, but our museums and galleries are the spaces where our generation cherishes and informs young people through pleasure and information, inspiring and igniting minds.
There is no government arts policy. Art education (or what’s left of it) is looked after in a department ironically entitled Business, Innovation and Skills.
In the Department for Education, which should be called the Department for Misinformation, education secretary Michael Gove tells children that culture is not worth studying.
The department for culture has pointlessly hacked the budgets of the larger museums and strangely encouraged the arts council’s vocational offering of apprenticeships. Meanwhile some cash-strapped local councils are butchering local museums and threatening a wholesale sell-off of public sculpture.
With this disjointed approach, one could be forgiven for thinking the government merely sees art galleries as prime real estate, waiting to be sold as flats.
While Gove is busy enabling an anti-culture where museums are seen as strange places full of pointless objects, future generations of disadvantaged kids will not think that culture has any relevance for them.
Thank God for the Art Fund and the Clore Duffield Foundation, who, amid all that is going wrong, offer some hope and love to our great museums and art galleries.
Sorry not to be more upbeat, but there is not much to be upbeat about. Ed Vaizey, the minister for culture, who is a decent guy, is wrong to say the arts are in “rude health”. They are being fucked and he knows it.
Bob and Roberta Smith is an artist also known as Patrick Brill. He is a judge of the Art Fund Museum of the Year 2013
Most Saturdays my sister and I would wander around galleries while father transcribed various paintings that interested him. We were an unusual family.
He started his working life selling vegetables on North End Road market and stirring huge vats of margarine in the Blue Band margarine factory, which was then located on Wandsworth Bridge Road. Because he could draw like an angel, he was ferociously intelligent and curious about everything.
His life was transformed and, by the time my sisters and I arrived, he was the principal of Chelsea School of Art.
If you are a talented kid where do you start? Where does that engine of curiosity begin? What is the catalyst for personal innovation and inspiration?
For my parents and for me it was in the museum. I am an incredibly privileged person. I went to a huge comprehensive school that had a well-equipped art block full of well-trained and energetic teachers. Because of my parents’ interests I knew about art but I did not want to be an artist.
The day I decided art was for me was when my school suggested I went to a workshop at the Whitechapel Gallery. The exhibition had been curated by Nicholas Serota and was of the German expressionist painter Max Beckmann.
Jenni Lomax, who was the education officer (now director of the Camden Arts Centre), told us about the Weimar Republic through the prism of the paintings.
Then we were taken into a huge studio gallery and given large sheets of paper and told to forget about the paintings, just to “make something big”.
The experience – simply of space, mental and physical, and close proximity to the real thing: great art – expanded my sense of self.
I am not so art-centred that I think only the arts have the power to invest in the next generation, but our museums and galleries are the spaces where our generation cherishes and informs young people through pleasure and information, inspiring and igniting minds.
There is no government arts policy. Art education (or what’s left of it) is looked after in a department ironically entitled Business, Innovation and Skills.
In the Department for Education, which should be called the Department for Misinformation, education secretary Michael Gove tells children that culture is not worth studying.
The department for culture has pointlessly hacked the budgets of the larger museums and strangely encouraged the arts council’s vocational offering of apprenticeships. Meanwhile some cash-strapped local councils are butchering local museums and threatening a wholesale sell-off of public sculpture.
With this disjointed approach, one could be forgiven for thinking the government merely sees art galleries as prime real estate, waiting to be sold as flats.
While Gove is busy enabling an anti-culture where museums are seen as strange places full of pointless objects, future generations of disadvantaged kids will not think that culture has any relevance for them.
Thank God for the Art Fund and the Clore Duffield Foundation, who, amid all that is going wrong, offer some hope and love to our great museums and art galleries.
Sorry not to be more upbeat, but there is not much to be upbeat about. Ed Vaizey, the minister for culture, who is a decent guy, is wrong to say the arts are in “rude health”. They are being fucked and he knows it.
Bob and Roberta Smith is an artist also known as Patrick Brill. He is a judge of the Art Fund Museum of the Year 2013
