While sending Christmas greetings by means of a newspaper announcement was – correct me if I’m wrong – always seen by most right-thinking people as the action of lazy toffs with an over-developed sense of their own importance, the democratic nature of the internet means that using email to distribute good wishes on any occasion has no such stigma. So a creative First Minister (or his clever advisors) could, instead of commissioning an already over-rewarded maker of undistinguished images to design his Christmas card, have circulated a sound sample of the work with which Susan Philipsz this week won the Turner Prize.
The coincidence of Alex Salmond revealing the tacky party scene that Jack Vettriano had created on the same day as Scotland’s fifth winner of the UK’s top art prize was announced was unfortunate – and not for Ms Philipsz. She joins a distinguished group and an accelerating trend for the prize to go to a Scot or Scotland-trained artist. Five years separated Douglas Gordon’s win from that of Martin Creed, and there were four between Creed’s and Simon Starling’s, and Starling’s and Richard Wright’s, but his gorgeous wall-drawings were made in the Tate only in 2009.
As Simon Groom, director of modern and contemporary art at the National Galleries of Scotland, told The Herald, there is something about both the site-specific nature of Wright’s and Philipsz’s work and its finely honed quality that the two artists share, although the latter’s sound installation could not, superficially, be more different.
In fact Groom’s first reported remark was that there must be “something in the water” to account for Scotland’s Turner success, which will not do at all – and Groom was quick to amplify that platitude. It is a little like the tired cliche that one hears all too often in discussion of the arts that Scotland “punches above its weight”. The next person to say that had better be ready to duck.
The problem is not so much the inappropriate metaphor (although that is bad enough), but the fact that that is normally the end of what the person has to say. Aren’t we grand? Look how well we do despite being few, small and scattered! Aye, it’s that auld highland water in our blood right enough, sure it is? Well, I’m damn sure it isnae. It is, however, a measure of how we fail to take the arts sufficiently seriously that this sort of glib nonsense is uttered by otherwise sensible people.
What I want to know, and what Alex Salmond should definitely want to know, is: what is it that is making a generation of Scotland’s artists the ones to watch if you care about the cutting edge of the contemporary scene? Groom went on to make a suggestion. “You cannot ignore the quality of the teaching at Glasgow School of Art and Duncan of Jordanstone,” he said. Yet the provision of tertiary education to those who have the ability, but possibly not the trust fund, has never been more under attack than is at the moment, and schools of learning are having to contemplate severe cuts and fill an increasing number of places with cash-generating overseas students.
There are other factors that also play an important part in the nurturing of such a remarkable run of success. Scotland has some truly inspired curators and agents, presenting artists from around the world and representing artists to the world. Inverleith House, doggerfisher, the Corn Exchange and the Ingleby Gallery in Edinburgh, the Modern Institute, Mary Mary, Sorcha Dallas and Transmission in Glasgow have all been operating at the highest level on the international stage – and those are only a handful of examples.
Then there is the community of artists, a mutually supportive body that transcends state lines as people take up residence elsewhere, and encourages new faces and voices as a matter of course. This is a network whose purpose is to interact with the wider public that is both its audience and its market.
It is not an adjunct to the life of the nation, but an integral part of it, not only because it is the livelihood of a large number of people but because it is constantly developing, thinking and growing, in a way that much else in Scotland – manufacturing, retail, financial services – no longer is. Far from squeezing resources, the only sensible course of action is to hitch Scotland’s star to it. Art, First Minister, is not just for Christmas.
