Centrepiece

out The jury is

Colin Welch

Wolfe on Art: Pablo who . . .?' — a headline from the Evening Stan- dard. Tom Wolfe had told an occasionally rebellious New York audience of museum patrons, gallery owners, collectors and socialites that tastes are changing so quick- ly that Picasso and Henry Moore will be all but ignored by 2,000 AD. Picassos will then be roughly on a par with Adolphe Bouguereau, once doyen of French academic painting, now discredited and forgotten (not by me). 'The big shift,' Wolfe calls it: 'this avant-garde to the rear, this forward march backwards, is occurring in all the serious arts.' Bourgeois elements of realism, content, structure and form, banished by the avant-garde, are on the brink of a furious revival. A boom in Bouguereaux is predicted, has in fact started.

An art professor described Wolfe's lec- ture as 'a penance'. I might have found it more congenial, though from the report I guess that Wolfe is talking only about movements of fashion. These waves do indeed consign lesser artists now to the basement, now to the place of honour. But surely greater artists somehow survive their buffets, retain a faithful following. The warmth with which Henry Moore has spoken of some of the pre-Raphaelites is memorable, and to Wolfe corrective. And even I, scant as is my sympathy and respect for Picasso, can see that he is better than Munnings (as also that both were better when they were young).

At the height of the avant-garde reign of terror, when it was death to produce academic work, the witty Irish writer Ar- land Ussher invented for Peter Simple an abstract or action painter of the most furious sort. This painter had a dreadful secret. For trusted friends he would unlock mysterious rooms and draw back thick curtains, dramatically revealing the works in which he truly took pride and pleasure. Kittens in boots, sweet curly-headed little girls blowing irridescent bubbles — 'Ah, what a feeling is there, what sentiment! There's painting for you' — meticulous portraits of Tory mayors and bigwigs — 'See what haughty intellectuality, what power to command, shines from those noble features! To capture them, true art!' When the Zhdanovs and Andropovs of the Western avant-garde terror are over- thrown, will paintings of his inspiring sort emerge in triumph from obscurity? Shall we live to see them?

I was sorting through press cuttings, some of which seemed to me still to retain their power to astonish, move, enrage or provoke reflection. A pity to chuck them

away. Item: 'Libraries in East Sussex', the Daily Telegraph reported, 'are to stop buying pop records, because they go out of fashion too quickly.' Good news or bad? They bought them till recently. Do other libraries buy them still? You bet they do. Libraries and MPs on their behalf are always hollering for more money. None should get it while they thus waste it and are untrue to their purpose.

Item: from the Daily Telegraph: 'Rector in Car Case Quits'. A rector who pleaded guilty `to damaging a woman's car with intent to endanger life' got two years' probation and resigned his living. His bishop explained that he needed time without heavy responsibility to benefit from psychiatric treatment. He therefore accepted his resignation on medical grounds. Are not psychiatry and religion mortal enemies, fighting for possession of the same territory? If so, is it not odd that the Church should so readily ascribe to psychiatric disorder what might be the fault of sin?

Item: '1 plus 1 equals an anti-racist sum', and 'ILEA's modern maths adds up to integration' — headlines from the Sunday Times and Daily Telegraph. The stories underneath describe how maths is to be made 'anti-racist' thus, more attractive and 'relevant' to black children. Instead of traditional sums about buying and selling sweets and workmen digging holes, chil- dren will calculate the profits made by Western multinationals 'from' (yes, 'from', not "in': their activities are presumed to be totally extractive) the Third World, and draw graphs showing the effects of apar- theid on the wages of various racial groups in South Africa or showing the incidence of unemployment among different racial groups here.

ILEA's head racist (sorry, anti-racist, though the words are becoming near- synonymous) is, like Hitler, a socialist too of a sort. Western maths teaching is not to him neutral. Many problems involve pro- fit, loss and interest rates, borrowing and paying back, terms which to him all reflect the ideological concerns of mercantile capi- talism. (Do tribal Africans, incidentally, never borrow or pay back?) Equally attractive and 'relevant' might be sociological maths. Its problems would involve, say, a deprived family squatting in an unfit tenement from which the landlord is trying to evict them. The father is in jail. His common law wife is black, Lesbian and disabled. Three of her children are by another man. Her elder daughter is a prostitute on drugs. Her second daughter is autistic. Both her sons are coloured, there-

fore disadvantaged. One is on probation, the other plays truant from school to sniff glue. All are on social security.

This sad but sociologically representa- tive family is cared for by four social workers, two housing officers, three legal advisers, two probation officers, several school attendance officers, four ethnic officers and three gay rights counsellors, all under the direction of numberless senior co-ordinating officers who hold ceaseless meetings. Problems might be to express the numerical relationships between the family and its attendant caring army in terms of percentages; to adjust these to take account of the arrival on the scene of five researchers from a university socio- logical department, and later of a 30-strong BBC television team to make an investiga- tive documentary. Add up all their salaries to find out what 'profit' they are making 'from' each deprived family, and calculate how much each deprived family would get if the 'profit' were redistributed to them.

Poignant cries for help from the New Statesman's 'Heartsearch' small ads. ROI: 'ENLIGHTENED, LIBERATED Jewish male sought to provide tranquillity for independent, assertive, complex Jewess, 31, single, tall, attractive, but overweight (sex maniacs need not apply).' H'm: am I ruled out on four counts, or more? Item: 'LECTURER — Irish and resident in small Irish town, peaeeful, aged 48 ..• • wishes to meet intelligent, home-loving person to share life and interests.'

`So, Sean, how did the lecture go last night?'

'Diabolical. One old bostoom there, an he'd drink taken and — would you believe it? — a sow come in from the cold.'

'Sure you'll be packing them in soon, like George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde — standing room only.'

'I wish we could move to a bigger town, like Athenry, perhaps, with more class and less gurrier.' 'Come now, Sean, I love this home and share your interests. There'll always be one to listen to your lectures. Now, what about a jar, or a rasher and a hin egg?'

They embrace.

Item: 'Campaign to get jury service for over-65s' — a cheering headline from the Daily Telegraph. Fine: but why not recruit juries entirely from over-65s? They have the time, the experience and the motive — self-preservation. Over-65 juries .would mean fewer muggings and more over-65s. Last a year a young West Indian terrorised London tube passengers with a knife, shouting and swearing and demanding money, drawing the blade across an elderly woman's throat till she shook with fear. Ile had previous convictions for having drags and knives. The Clerkenwell magistrates set him free at once, and paid his fare home to Birmingham. 'Cheers, you're cool,' commented the West Indian; 'A bloody joke,' said a senior police officer. I doubt if a jury of Bouguereau-buffs would have been quite so cool.