Art is not hardware

Wednesday, 15 April 2009 17:55 Fiona Flynn

The Government has announced new money to help creatives keep the high street alive. Shouldn’t we be queuing up to get in there? No way, argues Fiona Flynn

Nobody likes boarded up shops. And like every other art student in the land, I’m always on the look-out for places to show the work I’ve made and am excited about.

So why did my heart sink at the announcement by Communities secretary Hazel Blears to help artists and community groups take over vacant shops and keep the high street alive?

The plan is to provide £3million for local councils to provide small grants under £1000 to anyone who can find a creative re-use for empty premises. The gist is that planning rules will be relaxed so an empty shop can be re-used in a way that might previously have gone against local rules for as long as the recession lasts.

Empty shops are certainly a problem. More than 70,000 retail outlets will close this year, apparently, and according to some analysts, retail space has been a tower of capital waiting to keel over. In the last 20 years, 88 million extra square feet of retail space has appeared, but with Internet shopping and out-of-town sheds and shopping centres, the blight of empty shops on our old high streets is worryingly contagious.

Imagine. All that space, just waiting to be used.

But, I insist, art cannot help the high street’s problems and artists will do art no favours by replacing local hardware, carpet and clothes shops with government-sanctioned, short-term gallery spaces en masse. High streets need proper shops that sell proper stuff. And proper shop owners and tenants need lower rates and rents to make it easier for them to trade in difficult circumstances, not the five per cent increase in business rates that was due this month.

Art spaces as alternatives to shops are, I say, no help to struggling retailers who need spending punters back on the high street. Indeed, to suggest that art spaces can act as a counter-balance to retail blight isn’t just mistaken, in terms of helping other shops attract customers. The idea of art as a government policy tool to dampen the effects of the recession and give a cheery outlook on blighted high streets demeans art itself.

Art is important – the best art can be a window looking onto our collective soul or even better, inviting us to step up into a new way of understanding ourselves and our world. And when artists squat old buildings and set up on their own initiative, that’s brilliant. That’s energy, anger and creativity working together.

But more council-encouraged space to show more art will end up, inevitably, being a window looking out onto the mediocre end of the art spectrum. That does favours for no-one – not for the public, the struggling retail businesses or even artists themselves. To put it simply, high streets full of dodgy art where shops should be will just piss everyone off.

You can have too much art. In London, I reckon we already have - with galleries on every corner, much of which is, sadly, forgettable.

Chatting with a boxing coach not long ago about the illustrious history of the Old Kent Road, I mentioned that the Thomas a Becket pub had become an art gallery.

“Not another bleedin’ art gallery,” was his take. He’s right.

Written by Fiona Flynn

9 Comments

Alias makes this comment

Saturday 18 July, 2009

Not sure i agree. Students/ young artists are always trying to find spaces to show work -especially in London. The rents are huge - especially in London. If i was offered a grant to help put on a show, near the time of my degree, for about a week, - especially one in central London - why would i not bite their hand off at the opportunity? Though perhaps the paper work involved (presuming there is lots) would stifle the idea?
Lauren makes this comment

Saturday 18 July, 2009

Hi Fiona. You have a very controversial opinion, which I am sure many would disagree with. I am one of them, and after reading your article, don’t feel swayed by your argument. For me it’s very weak. Fair enough, we do need local stores, but a recession is a recession, and small shops will always be a casualty. The government unfortunately can’t save everyone (the banks come first, which I personally also don’t agree with, but that’s a totally different argument altogether). You don’t want artists to take over these shops, but you do not outline what you want to happen to them? It’s a very exciting time to be an artist - most of art movements have occurred in difficult financial times (take the YBA’s as an example). According to Bouarriud, Postmodernism is dead, and whatever is next (whether it be Altermodern, or something else) it will be established over the coming years. Allowing artists to flourish at this time will be invaluable. Fair enough, there may well be a lot of ‘bad art’, but there will also be that percentage of amazing art, which will maybe pave the way for things to come. And I’d much rather hear someone say ‘Oh no, not another gallery’, rather than ‘Oh no, not another Starbucks’. I’d like to hear your opinion. Please do get back to me
Fiona makes this comment

Saturday 18 July, 2009

Hi Lauren Thanks for the response. I agree that it’s an interesting time for art in that people are desperate to find a way past the nihilism and narcissism that currently pervades. I don’t think that recession is necessarily good for art and I don’t think we should see the recession as anything other than a terrible and painful time. Shops and shopkeepers need more help - a cut in the business tax rate, for example, as I suggested. The problem for me, really, is that art shouldn’t be seen as a means for the Government to try and soften the effects of the recession. It’s not our job to make the Government look better. I think artists should angry, subversive and radical. Squat by all means, challenge orthodoxy wherever you can. We should be the vanguard, fighting for social change. This is not the same thing as helping the local council tart up the high streets where proper businesses should be. Fiona
Chris Woltman makes this comment

Saturday 18 July, 2009

Originally posted 09.06.09 Fiona,  From what I’ve read it sounds like you have a healthy distrust of the government and that’s commendable. But when you say,” “challenge orthodoxy wherever you can” it sounds like your miming a mantra, creating another orthodoxy.  “High streets need proper shops that sell proper stuff.” is a puzzling sentence which seems to be the crux of you’re argument.  What if miraculously the public started buying all this bad art your fretting about from these sponsored shops?!! What if instead of going down to ASDA to buy the latest Gossip Girl DVD, folks rushed to the high street to buy the neighborhoods latest London art college kid’s take on so and so French philosopher, is that not actually the utopia we’ve been promised will be the future?  Or to put it more succinctly, would you rather have a world full of bad art and government programs or people just sitting around, staying inside, playing video games and ordering pizzas? Please let me know
Fiona makes this comment

Saturday 18 July, 2009

(Originally published 12.06.09) Hi Chris Point taken about miming yet another mantra, though from where I’m sitting, it seems that we’re constantly being told that there’s a “right” way to think about the world - and to think otherwise is to be beyond the pale. In my kids’ school, for example, they get visitors talking to them who appear to be campaigning for teenagers’ voices to be heard - but only if those teenagers are arguing for a green agenda. Anyone who wants to talk about something different is considered irrelevant. I may be contrarian by habit, I admit to that, but it seems to me that there are a number of orthodoxies doing the rounds that definitely could, and should, be taken to task: green, community - whatever that means, anti-consumerist, anti-international, local, re-cycleable, organic… I could go on for ages. I have no doubt that people can and will get going when their candle is lit - and the touchlight can often be a surprising and unexpected one. That keeps me excited and in no doubt that people can and will make interesting things happen - when they want to and feel inspired or compelled to. I don’t get depressed by videos or pizza. But I don’t like having to dance to a government-sponsored script. Inevitably, the policy seems to have died as soon as it was born. It was ignored by commentators: at least, I didn’t see any responses, and the idea appears to be straight out of a “Thick of it” gag where a young policy wonk picks one at random out of his policy-hat-of-tricks. Confirmation, I reckon, that the idea was, at best, a cynical and temporary ploy to distract us from the disaster befalling our high streets and the people who work in them.
David Minton makes this comment

Saturday 18 July, 2009

(Originally published 15.06.09) I'm not a student, so don’t know if i should be here. A breath of fresh air fiona. We may well look back to these times as a period when the chatterati and curatorarti approriated art.
Andrew Bryant makes this comment

Tuesday 28 July, 2009

Fiona's anti-establishment sentiment tips over too easily into a reactionary rant when she expresses a preference for shops over art and takes sides with a philistine. Even 'bad' art (and who is to say what that is?) is preferable to shopping. 'Businesses', small or otherwise, represent the desire for individual gain over the community and an exploitative relationship to oneself and to others whilst art represents the desire for a creative and transformative relationship to these things. There is something in what Fiona says about political opportunism, but why doesn't she take up residence in one of these shops and put her art where her mouth is?
Josh makes this comment

Thursday 5 November, 2009

Hi Fiona. Tracey Emin, Sarah Lucas and Vivienne Westwood have been famous for their shops. Last month the Free for Arts Festival in Manchester used, among other venues, two large empty retail spaces in the triangle shopping centre. The art on show wasn't the best, but it gave the artists a space more likely to be stumbled upon by chance than a secluded gallery. Apparently at least one of the spaces has been used for the past couple of years. I would agree with you that giving spaces to artists when there are people who can't afford rent for their 'proper shops' does seem to be taking the mick. But ultimately, if we are talking about livelihoods, it all comes down to economics. I suppose that if artists are getting cheap/free space, they shouldn't be able to sell their work otherwise why aren't we offering cheap rent to other retailers too? Is the initiative aimed at the community/culture or profit? In any case its an opportunity. I think you should take a shop over yourself! Josh
Steve makes this comment

Monday 9 November, 2009

I agree. Galleries shouldn't be funded by the government either when that money could be used for hospitals. And art doesn't belong on high streets, it should only exist in collectors private houses and galleries that cost at least £50 entrance fee so that it can only be seen by a select few. Ridiculous article.

Add Comment

Interested in Writing?

Interest in writing for us? Then send an email to articles@q-artlondon.com

11 Course Leaders: 20 Questions

11 Course Leaders: 20 Questions - A collection of Interviews with 11 London BA Fine Art Course Leaders Interviews and Foreword by Sarah Rowles. Introduction by Patricia Bickers, Editor Art Monthly.

Available from 23rd July 2011

More info click here...

Newsletter Subscription

Search

Community Forum

We want you to join our forum and become part of Q-Art London’s growing community. Discuss and debate any art-related topic of your choice…

Donate to us online

Q-Art London is a not-for-profit forum. Any money made from the selling of publications or from donations etc contributes directly to the running of Q-Art London.

Q-Art London