Strategy: Stop Art

Just when you think Douglas Degeneration Parsnips (having collaborated with the Department of Home Affairs to prevent free speech in communal spaces) cannot do more to screw up the quality of Manx life, this (see

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.

Brand Zero

For the last few months I have been a reluctant local observer to a pointless ‘rebranding’ exercise. In the last few days the noise from empty heads stopped and the ‘product’ was launched at a glitzy private reception.

It would be too cruel to identify it. Suffice to say it flopped within 10 minutes but the self-obsessed marketers were too dumb to notice the sniggering of their guests, many of whom were present by compulsion rather than choice.  Seriously (or should that be “not so seriously”?), I was laughing so hard I had to sneak out after less than half an hour of the most ill-advised antics since 1980’s rock stars (allegedly) served coke on the shaven heads of dwarfs.

As I said to some real creative friends elsewhere that night, “Now I know what David St. Hubbins and Nigel Tufnel did when Spinal Tap broke up.” Yes, it was that bad, and at least one screw-up was eerily similar to the ‘Stonehenge’ cock-up in that classic send-up of naff arty types with delusions of adequacy.

Many months back, I had visions of what we might be in for when I accidentally discovered that the chumps trousering a six figure consultancy fee were led by someone who insisted on being called Binky, who appeared to have graduated from Cheltenham Ladies College circa 1970, dropped some bad acid and lived off the commissions of fellow rich inbreeds ever since.

It never ceases to amaze me how expensively educated people can have nothing but belly-fluff where most people keep their brain cells. I was around folk like Bill Drummond and Tony Wilson when they were starting out. I enjoyed myself, and I have a real soft spot for eccentrics and mavericks. But that was 30 years ago, and they were working on a shoestring and investing all they had.

Dipshit corporate ‘characters’ who risk only the family lives of real people are another matter. And anyway, while the business world talks vapidly of ‘edginess’ or ‘thinking outside the box’ the council estate all-or-nothing visionaries I loved, laughed and learnt with were simply not constrained by a box which only exists as a sort of collective hallucination.

Another thing you notice on these occasions is that, sadly, most of the brightest, most interesting people on the island are working for peanuts in the hospitality industry. More accurately, serving peanuts to clueless wasters who were lucky enough to be born here, or to be the offspring of economic refugees from emergent democracies.

It was like that back in 1983, when I first arrived here. These days the nationalities have changed but the pay has not, and the working conditions have got worse.

I hope those bright and beautiful wage slaves go on to better things, because they deserve it. But like me, at least for now they can laugh at naff products spawned by the stunted imagination of those employing them for less-than-minimum wages.