http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/isle-of-man-news/market-hall-to-become-base-for-arts-degrees-1-6282129
) is announced.
Oh joy! A perfectly respectable refuge for low
rent bohemians (not to mention a treasure chest of arcane knowledge
you cannot find anywhere else locally) is being swept away, just so
arty upper middle class dullards who are too arrogant to work in the
real world (and too thick to know they have nothing to contribute to
the arts) have yet another place to play.
How dumb. How utterly, utterly depressing!
If you cannot be bothered to root through the
whole PR sick-bag, read this and try not to puke...
“Speaking on behalf of Douglas Corporation,
Chris Pycroft said: ‘It is a really exciting prospect to work with
the college in a partnership between the council and the college to
breathe new life back into the Market Hall and make it a place really
for the whole community, to start to be creative and think
creatively.’
He added: ‘The project should allow the market
operation to continue, not in the same format as it is at the moment,
but at weekends and holiday times, but with additional uses happening
in the building as well.’”
Oh............. piss off and get a proper job,
Pie-Chart, I'm sick of us taxpayers subsidising anti-democratic
clowns like you.
Has anyone actually talked to any of the island's
art veterans? Has nobody noticed that internationally known Manx
born sculptors, conceptual artists and painters cannot actually get
employed to teach arts locally?
Has nobody asked why Manx fine arts students
almost never go on to reputable British courses? Could that be
because fine arts was phased out of local college courses two decades
back in favour of 'practical' arts (graphic design, fashion...)
taught by losers who couldn't get an industry job even when there was
an industry, when just three decades back a lowly foundation diploma
from the Manx FE college was almost a passport to Goldsmiths, St.
Martins or even the RCA?
Even leaving aside 'career' arty types, I can
remember in the mid-1980's spending free afternoons from split shift
'day jobs' browsing two incredible book stalls in that market, and
amongst the usual airport novels and conspiracy theorists
discovering a shelf-load of not only Michael Moorcock and other new
sci-fi writers, but rarities ranging from Algernon Blackwood and H.P.
Lovecraft through to Henry Treece (a mid-twentieth century New
Apocalyptic chum of Dylan Thomas and Kenneth Rexroth, known to
school-kids of my age for his Celtic twilight stuff, but also the
author of adult versions through which Moorcock and others discovered
something more imaginative could be written even in Cold War
conformist Britain).
Certainly, the little community of truly
knowledgeable Manx art and book-sellers which existed until around
2000 has been replaced by anal 'collectors' who know the investment
value of everything and the intellectual value of nothing, but that
is not the point.
I was back there, by chance, last weekend, and it
was the same as ever. A bunch of wheelchair users having an animated
meeting in one corner, an unpretentious caff and small shops, the
book stalls.....
The source material is still there to be
discovered by any chance explorer willing to risk 50p, but we are now
to lose, forever, the only place on the island comparable to, say
Liverpool Whitechapel in 1979 with Bill Drummond and Teardrop
Explodes chatting to Pete Burns in Brian's Caff, Burnsy on a lunch
break from Zoo Records, the legendary punk venue Eric's 50 yards
away. And, yes, even the School of Language, Dreams and Pun with the
statue of Jung (where the kind of pretentious rich thickos DDP want
to attract hung out) got blitzed in the 'regeneration' of the area,
and Eric's, having been shut on health and safety grounds, is now a
Cavern museum for Japanese tourists while the much bigger and more
important 'Mersey scene' of the late 1970's and early 1980's is wiped
from 'official' Liverpool history.
But doesn't that just prove the point?
What you actually need in order for creativity to
run riot is a low rent space full of odd source material which can
become the stuff of new and better dreams, and for rich poseurs and
bureaucrats with pebble-dash for brains to butt out.
By the way, returning to the matter of free speech in
public places, you may want to take a look at
http://www.secularism.org.uk/news/2013/11/feel-free-to-annoy-me--new-campaign-launched-to-protect-free-expression
, a defence of the concept in which even the National Secular Society
and Christofascist loons like the Christian Institute are united.
Because as the NSS point out:
“The proposed new law is contained in the
Anti-Social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill . Clause 1 of the bill
introduces "Injunctions to Prevent Nuisance and Annoyance"
(IPNAs), which seek to suppress anything deemed to be potentially
"annoying", however vague the justification. IPNAs will
replace Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs), which had been
introduced under the Labour government.
Whilst in order for an ASBO to be issued, a court
has to be satisfied that someone had at least caused or threatened to
cause "harassment, alarm or distress" to someone else and
that the order was "necessary" to protect the victim, the
proposed new law would allow a court to impose sweeping curbs on
people's liberty if it thinks they are "capable of causing
nuisance or annoyance to any person", and so long as it is "just
and convenient" to do so.”
Anything their colonial cousins in Westminster
think a wizard wheeze, our chumps in the Wedding Cake and their
(Westminster trained) 'expert advisors' are bound to swallow whole,
without even a tentative “Are you sure about this?”, never mind
“Has anyone actually thought this twaddle through?”
I would be willing to bet that at some point in
the next year the DHA (or perhaps even their house-trained monkey,
Juan Watterson) announces plans for IPNAs . So follow the UK campaign
now, so that when (or perhaps if) we get a public consultation over
here you can make informed comment.
P.S. The title of this rant is a pun on Reg Quayle's groundbreaking Strategy:Get Art campaign in the early 1980's, which put on (in empty shops during the worst recession the island had then seen) the work of truly inspiring Manx art experimentalists like Kevin Atherton. As folk like Reg never get credit for keeping this septic isle out of the Dark Ages during the knock-on effects of Thatcherism, and nobody in the current Manx government arts administration will even have heard of the project I thought I should mention it.
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