Kamran Nazeer
Balti Britain: A Journey Through the British Asian Experience
by Ziauddin Sardar (Granta, £20)
In Pakistan, a balti is a bucket. In Britain, it’s a dish served in Pakistani restaurants. So it is, as Ziauddin Sardar spends the first 30 pages of this book explaining, emblematic of British Asian identity: it’s not British, it’s not Asian, it’s British Asian. That’s a trivial insight, but I mention it to warn the reader that Sardar—a major Asian and Muslim commentator, a columnist for the New Statesman, a maker of programmes for the BBC and Channel 4—often spends a long time presenting arguments that no one disputes.
One other general assessment: Sardar can’t write. He renders interesting people into dull, overused adjectives. For example, the smart women that he meets are invariably “slim” (the slim women are invariably “smart”). And, once he has listed his four adjectives, all that remains of the people he introduces is the dull dialogue he gives them. As Sardar quotes himself asking, “Where does Afghan-ness feature in your mental makeup?” No one talks like this, and no one ought to write like this either.
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Magnus Linklater
In 1996, newly appointed as chairman of the Scottish Arts Council (SAC), I was required to approve an £8,000 grant to an unknown author called JK Rowling. A single mother, living in Edinburgh, she had written a book with the unpromising title Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. Since it was a sizeable grant, I asked about its rationale. “It’s simply a brilliant book for children,” said the head of the literature department. “I loved it—I think they will too.” It was a reasonable explanation. We moved on to other things.
I was able recently to ask Rowling what difference the money had made in those early days. It had, she said, transformed her life. By allowing her to pay for childcare during the whole of a year, it had allowed her to complete the second Harry Potter volume at a time when she had no prospects of success for the first. The point, however, was that the grant had been made unconditionally, free of the box-ticking criteria that surround so much of arts funding today. There had been no mention of social inclusion, thematic relevance, peer evaluation or comparative benchmarking. It was simply… a brilliant book for children.
The officer who made the decision is, I am pleased to say, still with the SAC. His opposite number in England, however, has gone. Gary McKeone, the greatly admired director of literature at the Arts Council England (ACE) for the past ten years, has been relieved of his job, one of five department heads and two executive directors whose posts are being “redefined.” He is to be replaced by a “director, literature strategy.” Staff at ACE’s headquarters are to be reduced by a third, with new departments such as planning and investment, resources, advocacy and communications taking care of overall strategy, while grant applications are decided at regional level—”a blueprint,” as the announcement puts it, “for a more focused, streamlined and effective organisation.”
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Jeremy Isaacs
With the BBC’s charter renewed and only the level of licence fee to be set, attention in the second half of 2006 has fixed on Channel 4. The question is asked, as it was in the beginning: what is 4 for? The 1980 Broadcasting Act said it was “to encourage innovation and experiment… in the form and content of programmes… to cater for interests that ITV did not… to provide overall a distinctive service.” It was also expected to pay its way, and its early programme mix aimed at both goals.
Channel 4 today, approaching its 25th birthday, is riding the crest of a wave. Its audiences are up and growing; its programmes win awards; it invests in new media; it plans expansion into radio. Selling its own advertising now, it triumphantly succeeds at it. Revenues from all activities in 2005 totalled £894m. The core channel alone, C4, took £735m, a surplus over expenditure of £80m. There were losses elsewhere of £30m. Financially, a solid performance, though it is odd that the core public service channel should fund losses in other ventures.
So what is the problem? There are two. First, commercial success on this scale sits oddly with the channel’s public service obligations. Does one smother the other? Second, predicting hard times ahead as rivals proliferate, the channel is lobbying to secure public subsidy of as much as £100m a year to underpin its public purpose (it currently receives free broadcasting spectrum in return for its public service obligations). Does it deserve this? Ofcom is reviewing C4’s finances, and is bound to consider its remit and positioning. It will report in March 2007.
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John Lloyd
Andrew Marr, the former BBC political editor, recently stood before an audience and said that “the BBC is not impartial, or neutral. It’s a publicly funded urban organisation with an abnormally large number of young people, ethnic minorities and gay people. It has a liberal bias, not so much a party political bias: it’s better expressed as a cultural liberal bias.”
Quite a few in the audience could claim to have been his boss. There was Mark Byford, deputy director general and head of journalism; Jana Bennett, head of television; Alan Yentob, director of drama and entertainment; Helen Boaden, head of news; Mark Damazer, head of Radio 4… and so on. Highest of all was the BBC’s head of state, Michael Grade, chairman of the board of governors, who had called this meeting. The BBC had set aside a day for a discussion of impartiality—mainly for themselves, with some others invited to share in the reflections.
It was an extraordinary day, momentous even. Extraordinary in that it did not discuss impartiality as one might have expected: as a set of practices for use in describing events through broadcast journalism. These concerns did come up, but mainly from the invited audience. Tim Gardam, former director of programmes at Channel 4, said the approach of BBC journalism must be one of rational scepticism displayed on all occasions—a remark which acted as a leitmotif of later debate. Jean Seaton, the professor of media studies at the University of Westminster, Adam Bolton, political editor of Sky News, and I all talked of how journalism must seek something which was at least a sketch of the truth.
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Jim McCue
Sotheby’s has announced that it is to auction a copy of the first folio of Shakespeare, which is expected to fetch £2.5-£3.5m. The 1623 first folio is probably the most important book in English literature, and this copy, which is in especially fine condition, is of particular interest because it contains early annotations.
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Emma Crichton-Miller
On 19th July, the Tate announced the purchase of one of the most acclaimed works by a British artist of the last five years, Chris Ofili’s 13-canvas installation The Upper Room (right). When this was first shown to the public three years ago in June 2002, the Guardian’s Adrian Searle judged it, “the bravest, and one of the most original works I have seen by a painter for years,” while the Telegraph’s Richard Dorment praised “a palette so rich, so saturated and so gorgeous that I can remember thinking when I first encountered it that I’d never seen another work of art like it.” Searle finished his review: “The Tate should buy it.” The critical consensus was that the installation as a whole should be held by the nation, on view to the public, and that it would be a shame either if it were split up into separate canvases or if the whole were sold abroad.
You would have thought, then, that the purchase announcement in July would have been welcomed by those who claim to love British contemporary art. Instead, stirred up by the Stuckists—a gang led by Charles Thomson, a conservative painter, hammer of the YBAs and thorn in the side of both Charles Saatchi and Nicholas Serota—the press has crackled with charges of cronyism and corruption. The controversy hinges on Chris Ofili’s role as a Tate trustee, a position he has held since 2000. The scandal-mongers argue that it is a gross breach of public responsibility for the Tate board of trustees to authorise the purchase of a work by one of its members. The Tate has responded that occasional exceptions have been made to this rule—works by Michael Craig-Martin and Bill Woodrow were purchased while the artists were trustees—and that Ofili left the room when the purchase was discussed in order to avoid conflict of interest. Moreover, while the Tate has contributed £120,000 from general funds and a further £100,000 from Tate members, and the NACF (National Art Collections Fund) has contributed £75,000, the rest of the £705,000 price tag was raised from private individuals. So only £120,000 out of Tate’s annual acquisition budget of £1.5m has been spent on this installation, which it is surely in the public interest for the Tate to retain.
The matter might have been allowed to rest there, had it not been for an embarrassing coincidence. In October 2004 the Tate announced a new initiative, “Building the Tate Collection,” which invited leading artists and collectors to donate works free to Tate Modern. Ofili wrote an eloquent article in the Guardian supporting the initiative, pledging that he would himself give a work. This all sounded very generous and high-minded, and very necessary, given the Tate’s lack of purchasing power in today’s inflated contemporary art market. As Serota said last year, the level of government funding for the Tate has been steadily reduced over the past 20 years, while market prices have risen by as much as 1,000 per cent. Unfortunately, Ofili’s very public support came at just the moment that his dealer, Victoria Miro, was delicately putting the finishing touches to the deal to enable the Tate to buy The Upper Room for what remained for a long time a suspiciously mysterious amount of money.
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Deyan Sudjic
Dear Deyan
26th March 2005
Over the last four years, you and other architectural critics have been regularly announcing the death of the iconic building—that Eiffel Tower for which every declining city yearns. Like Nikolaus Pevsner, who often proclaimed the terminal illness of movements he didn’t like, your description of historical change carries some heavy baggage.
You described in the Observer (26th October 2003) the attention-seeking structures of Will Alsop, Frank Gehry and Santiago Calatrava, and ended with an ominous prediction: “Perhaps, like art nouveau which flourished briefly at the end of the 19th century, the icon has become ubiquitous just as it is about to vanish.” Then, a year later (8th August 2004), you announced that this had now happened. Alsop’s Fourth Grace for Liverpool was cancelled, as was Daniel Libeskind’s V&A spiral. “The icon is all over,” you wrote, “and the very word has become too embarrassing to use.”
I can see why the “end of the iconic age” has made headlines and don’t doubt the distaste for what you and many British critics call “exhibitionistic iconic design.” It has obvious faults. Among these are the self-cancelling gestures that not only upstage each other but also destroy urban coherence. Moreover, these structures are often absurdly expensive and maladroit one-liners, turning the Thames, as one angry architect has dubbed it, into “the Costa del Icon.” Two other crimes are that it makes architecture a transitory fashion, and architects into celebrity chefs, confectioners who have to whip up ever greater wedding cakes, as did those hacks of Franco and Lenin.
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Emma Crichton-Miller
At the grim north end of London’s Gower Street rises the sleek new glass-clad headquarters of the Wellcome Trust. Britain’s largest independent research-funding charity, the Wellcome invests over £400m a year in medical research. Among other things, it enabled John Sulston, at the head of the Sanger Institute in Cambridge, to make the single largest contribution to unravelling the human genome. It is a bastion of British science.
Luring you in, however, is a piece of art – an elegant, scintillating coil of glass spheres falling through a 30-metre high vertical void, and suspended on almost one million metres of fine stainless-steel wire. Visitors to the building, which opens officially in early December, usually assume it must illustrate DNA, memorialising Wellcome’s role in Crick and Watson’s discovery. In fact, Thomas Heatherwick’s astonishing sculpture does not refer to science at all. It is called Bleigiessen, the name of a new year tradition in central Europe where molten lead is poured into water, producing peculiar shapes from which you tell your fortune for the coming year. The sculpture is meant to render permanent the split second a drop of metal is let fall. The idea is all poetry, but its accomplishment was all science: the installation alone required the collaboration of architects, designers, art historians, a construction manager, a photographer and a rally driver. The finished structure is an appropriate blessing on the house of Wellcome, but it is also a potent example of the kind of cultural activity that the Wellcome Trust champions: sci-art, the marriage of science and art in the creation of pieces that owe their creation to both.
Wellcome has announced a £20m commitment to its public engagement with science, at the core of which is this crossover. But sci-art is a recent and still controversial phenomenon, seen by some as mere window dressing for an otherwise haughty and inscrutable scientific establishment, by others as a grant-grabbing exercise for artists of no distinction. The genre’s most outspoken critic is Lewis Wolpert, professor of biology as applied to medicine at University College London, who insists that it is wrong-headed in principle to suggest any possible common purpose between professional artists and scientists.
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Annabel Freyberg
The beautiful and architecturally important building of Christ Church Spitalfields, designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor in the early 18th century, reopened this autumn after major restoration to a fanfare of praise. It had been in a parlous state since the 1950s, and decades of campaigning and fundraising had achieved little more than holding up the roof. It took a £2.4m grant from the still fledgling Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) in 1996 before a proper programme of restoration could be embarked upon, and a further award of £3.5m in 2002 to complete the project.
The Christ Church project exemplifies the HLF’s remit: to safeguard buildings, objects and environments which have been integral to the formation of the character of Britain. The church had failed to qualify for funds elsewhere, the cost was substantial but not outrageous, and there was a carefully monitored programme over a number of years. This was an HLF success story.
But there is another kind of HLF story. Daniel Libeskind’s abortive spiral at the Victoria and Albert Museum, for example. The Millennium Commission – the obvious funding body for such a project – turned down the bid in 1998, and five years on, after due modification, the £70m scheme was submitted to the HLF, with a grant of £15m requested. At the HLF’s most recent major grant meeting (held biannually, for sums over £5m), the vote went against the spiral, thus scuppering the scheme. When the HLF says no, a project is usually doomed. Brighton’s West pier is being left to rot after the HLF’s decision in January not to award the £14.2m it had put aside for restoration six years ago.
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Caroline Thomson
Barry Cox, the deputy chairman of Channel 4, accuses the BBC of a “category error” in drawing parallels between broadcasting and other public services like health, education, parks and museums. In his view, the expansion of choice is making broadcasting more like a normal consumer market. Moreover, he believes that changes in technology will lead to the BBC becoming a subscription-based service after digital switchover.
The intellectual origins of this view can be traced back to the Peacock report of 1986. But for the BBC, such arguments lead us into a trap where public service is replaced by market economics as the basis of policy decisions. Moreover, they are based on a technological determinism which dictates that because something is possible, it must happen.
The BBC does not pretend that health and education are perfect analogies for broadcasting. The scale of market failure and public intervention in the former is, of course, greater. But we do argue – in the document “Building public value” – that all three have many basic characteristics in common.
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