Tyranny of taste
Sir: Giles Auty writes (Arts, 28 November) about the tyranny of taste forced upon us by the jury of the Turner Prize and others, and he ends his piece by asking the ques- tion, 'Why on earth do we put up with it?'
Not so long ago, we wrung our hands in dismay at the tyranny of modernist archi- tects and what they were doing to our cities. When the Prince of Wales made his now famous 'carbuncle' speech, he mobilised the opinions of the majority who had hith- erto felt totally impotent to change what was being built. The Prince wanted to 'throw a brick through the plate-glass win- dow of professional arrogance' and suc- ceeded. When he published his Vision of Britain he was inundated with letters of support from those who had no doubt pre- viously said 'why on earth do we put up with it?'
Mr Auty asks whether we would be happy to send our children through the pre- sent art education system and in asking gets straight to the nub of the problem; with architecture the Prince told us that throw- ing bricks was one reaction, but changing the future by offering an alternative educa- tion was a far more constructive approach. After exploratory summer schools, this year saw the launch of the Prince of Wales's Institute of Architecture.
If we are to shatter the glass of arrogance in the visual arts and do away with the nescient ordure that the Turner Prize judges tell us is the most significant work in this country today, we must offer a similarly revised system of art education to those who are inspired to produce work to grace our civilisation in the future. Such a system does not yet exist in this country and is much needed; to witness the burblings of the Turner Prize finalists on television is to see plainly their lack of education manifest in their ignorance of culture, impotence of skill and vacuousness of cranium.
That is one thing, but to see such work placed in the Tate Gallery, competing for the most prestigious art prize in the land, is to understand that their exists a conspiracy intent on replacing cultural integrity with a deception that borders on fraud; the win- ners are those within the system — dealers, museum curators, college tutors — and the losers are the public, the tax-payers who fund the system and who now throw their arms up in dismay at what it produces.
Reading Mr Auty and others who, bless them, can see through this conspiracy, it is plain that the root of the problem lies with the conspirators, and it is they who might benefit most from a revised art education system — before you teach the children you must teach the teachers. If that could be started, the likes of the Turner Prize final- ists would soon be trampled underfoot by the mass of artists out there who, like me, believe that the visual arts are a vast and respected culture that should not be mocked by those in the position of authori- ty. If the genuine quality of Fine Art was the yardstick by which the Turner Prize was judged, the result would be work of which the nation would be really proud. And per- haps the great Mr Turner could lie still in his grave once more.
Alexander Creswell,
Copse Hill Cottage, Ewhurst, Surrey
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