Thatcherism and Visual Arts Since 1980s
Transcript of Thatcherism and Visual Arts Since 1980s
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Nicole SmithProfessor Donnellan
AH320 Modern British Art & Design16 September 2010
Look to Themselves First: An Assessment of the Impact of Thatcherism on the LondonVisual Arts Since the 1980s
[W]e have gone through a period when too many children and people havebeen given to understand I am homeless, the Government must house me!" and so
they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing!There are individual men and women andthere are families and no government can do
anything except through people and people look to themselves first...1-Margaret Thatcher, Interview forWomans Own, 23 September 1987
In the early 1980s, in the dawn of Margaret Thatchers 1979 appointment as the
first female Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and the Conservative Party take over
of political power, dramatic changes in the tasks and objectives of British political
agencies and, in turn, their function, relationship and responsibilities to the people of the
nation caused a simultaneous derailment and renaissance of the art world. Thatcherism, a
term which has come to describe the radical economic and social policy reforms of
Thatchers three term tenure of office, was based on Margaret Thatchers ultra-
conservative ideals which supported the deregulation of financial and industrial
enterprise, privatization of previously state owned companies, and a decrease in
governmental subsidizing of public institutions.2
Her politics reflected her belief that the
British citizen had come to rely too heavily on the provisions of public government
welfare and that reallocating this responsibility to the individual through the
implementation of strict economic and social initiatives would bring balance and,
1Interview forWomans Own with Douglas Kaey. Margaret Thatcher Foundation
Archives. Accessed 12 Sep. 2010. < http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/106689>2
David Willetts,Modern Conservatism (London: Penguin Books, 1992), 52.
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ultimately, a revitalized prosperity to Britain. These fiscal strategies penetrated all areas
of the public sector and left no aspect of British industry and culture untouched, not
excluding the way in which contemporary British artists, art collectors and institutions
operated.3 This paper aims to examine the effects of Thatchers open-market stance on
art patronage and how this shift of art funding from the public to private sector impacted
the London art world. Of course, the effects (both negative and positive) of Thatcherism
on the arts since the 1980s reaches far beyond the city limits of London and includes a
wide range of fields such as theater, film, literature and music. Indeed, the dramatic shift
of art funding from that of public government to private patronage spurred the emergence
of young proactive artists and corporate supercollectors, yet outside of centralized
London, smaller institutions and artists who had previously relied on government
subsidiary were now under the radar of influential patronage and faced with the challenge
of finding funding elsewhere.4
However, as a means of economy, this examination will
narrow in on the shift of visual art patronage into the hands of private corporations and
individuals, primarily focusing on the prominent Saatchi collection in London, the rise of
the Young British Artists, or yBas, and the transformation of London into a competitive
world center for modern art in the late 1980s as an indirect response to Thatchers call for
a society defined by entrepreneurial enterprise. This examination of Thatchers impact on
the visual arts first sets out to describe the social and economic climate of the nation
during the 1979- 1990 Thatcher years, and, in the second half, to illustrate the effect of
3Keith D Peacock, Thatchers Theater: British Theater and Drama in the Eighties
(Westport: Greenwood Press, 1999), 7.4
Geoff Mulgan Culture: The Problem with Being Public, The Ideas That Shaped Post-
War Britain, Ed. David Marquand and Anthony Seldon (London: Fontana Press, 1996),199.
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this climate through the emergence of the yBas in the 1990s and the prominent growth of
the contemporary art collection of Charles Saatchi.
Thatchers most significant and severe policies were those dealing with
economics, including the implementation of new Poll taxes and significant decreases in
government subsidiaries. From 1979-1980, the governments annual expenditure for the
arts had been reduced by 5 million out of an overall budget of 63 million.5
In order to
understand the role these policies played in the emergence of contemporary art after
during the 1990s, it is necessary to expound upon the intentions that drove Thatchers
economic reformation. During her first term from 1979 to 1983, Thatcher introduced new
economic initiatives, which were intended to promote individual enterprise, by cutting
back on government intervention and increasing the open market. Policies inclided an
overall increase in interests rates and strict limits put on minting.6 Her reforms were, in
principle, constructive for the nations return to economic stability, yet in practice,
extreme, as they left the working class and lower class plagued by increased indirect
taxes and decreased government dole. Instead, industrial enterprise, such as the Saatchi &
Saatchi Advertising firm, and the wealthy were able to successfully operate in a less
regulated and growingly privatized economic climate.
Notwithstanding the significant rise in unemployment in 1981, by 1983 the nation
had experienced a general economic growth and a lowered rate in inflation.7
These
conditions were fertile grounds for the corporate and individual ambitions of Charles
5Chin-Tao Wu,Privatizing Culture: Corporate Art Intervention Since the 1980s
(London: Verso, 2002), 54.6
Willetts,Modern Conservatism, 54.7
Ibid, 62.
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Saatchi and the yBas. However, it is during Thatchers second and third term, from 1983
until her resignation in April of 1990, that Thatchers stringent economic schemes,
government restruction and rapid public privatization produced considerable revolutions
in the way public and private art functioned. By the end of the 1980s, over twenty major
national industries were sold off to private companies, including British Petroleum,
British Gas, Rover Group, and the National Freight Corporation.8
Privatization of
industry and the discount of power among trade unions was a strategy intended to
increase industrial competition, improve productivity and to continue to decrease
regulation of industry and finance. In 1986, in a notoriously controversial decision,
Thatcher dissolved the Greater London Council and the six Metropolitan county councils
of England giving the Conservative Parliamentary government increased power,
transferring minimal power to smaller local councils and centralizing economic and
cultural growth in London.9
These are the political and economic circumstances that
broadly define Thatcherism and set the scene for the cultural climate contemporary
British artists, art collectors and art institutions have dealt with since the 1980s.
It seems that the Thatcher years brought with them both immobilizing challenges
as well as sparks of individual ambition. In conjunction with the governments decreased
subsidiary of public services, including welfare, museums, educational institutions and
theaters, the dismantling of county councils in 1986 left many smaller cultural institutions
outside of London, which had previously relied on government subsidiaries, without.
When young visual artists and art students for the first time confronted the conservative
world defined by Thatchers increased economic reformation and decreased spending
8Ibid, 68.
9Peacock, Thatchers Theater: British Theater and Drama in the Eighties, 13-14.
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policies, a realization sank in that their ability to survive and generate art work would lie
in their ability to break free of the dependency culture and to no longer rely on the
support of public funding or welfare.10
Without this provision, young artists were forced,
perhaps out of a necessity to subsist, to become more proactive and self-assertive in their
effort to create and gain support for their art. The endorsing power of this imperative self-
promotion is credited, most notably, with the rise of the yBas in the 1990s, in London. In
a way, the yBas precisely embodied the very entrepreneurial spirit Thatcherism aimed to
foster as they devised ways to make, mediate and market their own art.
Of these young artists, the most well known was Damien Hirst who, during the
summer of 1988, organized and curatedFreeze, a student exhibition featuring work by
him and his peers at Goldsmiths in South East London. This remarkable exhibition took
place in a dockside warehouse in London, and featured artists who would later come to
dominate the British art world. What setFreeze apart from other exhibitions during the
time and in the years that followed was the fact that it was executed, from concept to
realization, by Hirst and his peers and represented their collective ambitions. Hirst
seemed to have a clear understanding that art is not just about making a vision: it is also
about imposing that vision on others, and used not only his artistic ability but also his
skills in publicity to promote his work.11
Influential British art collectors and dealers
including Charles Saatchi, Nicholas Soreto and Karsten Schubert attended the
independent exhibition, in some cases having been personally driven to and from the
10Wu,Privatizing Culture: Corporate Art Intervention Since the 1980s, 200.
11Norman Rosenthal, The Blood Must Continue to Flow, Sensation: Young British
Artists from the Saatchi Collection (London: Thames & Hudson, 1997), 9.
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London dock by Hirst himself.12
With the presentation ofFreeze, Damien Hirst and the
yBas had demonstrated their ability to survive as entrepreneurial forces in Thatchers
world. In his contribution to the 1997 exhibition catalogue for the Sensation show of the
Saatchi Collection, Richard Shone describes the yBas artistic rearing at Goldsmiths as a
learning environment where choice enriched the individual who structured their own
course, giving life to an open studio where self-motivation was essential.13
His
account of the teaching methods at Goldsmiths in the late 1980s is curiously familiar to
the basic principles of Thatcherisms deregulated free market and individual enterprise
ideals. And, since most of the teachers at the college were artists active in the London art
world there was a maintained contact between art education and the world of dealers and
collectors.14
It is not surprising that Damien Hirst and the yBas demonstrated such
aptitude in self-management and promotion within the art world.Freeze came to
personify the independent attitudes and ambitious natures of the yBas as demonstrated by
their ability to publicize and notarize themselves as artists. While other art students and
cultural intuitions struggled to survive, the yBas brought an unparalleled enthusiasm,
youth, creativity and ambition that put their art in the public eye of the nation and
beyond.
Outside of the yBas, the 1980s also saw a considerable rise in corporate art
collections and patronage, specifically the establishment of the significant relationship
between Charles Saatchi of Saatchi & Saatchi Advertising and the Young British Artists.
Norman Rosenthal describes Saatchi as a collector with a patience and enthusiasm for
12Richard Shone, From Freeze to House: 1988-94, Sensation: Young British Artists
from the Saatchi Collection (London: Thames & Hudson 1997), 18.13
Ibid14
Ibid
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contemporary art that is second to none.15
Saatchi began collecting in 1973, and opened
his first gallery at Boundary Road in 1985. After visiting Hirsts Freeze exhibition in
1988, Charles Saatchi began a close relationship with the yBas as an art sponsor and
collector of their works.16 While corporate involvement in cultural endeavors and affairs
was not unusual before the 1980s and the implementation of Thatchers economic
reformations, the size and shape which corporate participation in the arts and culture took
on during the late 1980s into the 1990s was unprecedented. As opposed to their
traditional role as sponsors or infrequent contributors to museums or cultural institutions,
the role of corporate art patronage become much more involved and less passive as
wealthy individuals and corporations completely overtook the functions of art institutions
from collecting, to housing and even curating.17
In Chin-Tao Wus Privatizing
Cultures, Wu makes the argument that contemporary art, along with other cultural
products, functions as a currency of both material and symbolic value for corporations.18
Her argument goes on to connect the rise in corporate wealth take over of the art world to
the increased power invested in board and trustee members made up predominantly of
corporate heads and government appointed officials.19
Charles Saatchi established a
collection that was particularly successful because of his ability to transform cultural
capital, that is the art he collected, into monetary capital, that being the profits he could
make on showing, leading and selling works. Wu attributes this ability to the fact that
personal fortune and affluence (in this example, the tremendous success of the Saatchi &
15Rosenthal, The Blood Must Continue to Flow, 9.
16Shone, From Freeze to House: 1988-94, 20.
17Wu,Privatizing Culture: Corporate Art Intervention Since the 1980s, 2.
18Ibid, 6.
19Ibid, 99-104.
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Saatchi Advertising firm) afforded the wealthy elite access onto boards and trustees of
museums and galleries and therefore gave them the advantage on insiders knowledge.20
In this way, Charles Saatchi was in fact a product of Thatcherism and not only in their
connection to the Conservative Party. Aside from the fact that the Saatchi & Saatchi
political advertisements for the 1979 Conservative Party campaign were among the most
significant in recent years, their personal enterprise represents the epitome of the free
market culture at work.
Today, simply mentioning the name Margaret Thatcher, the Iron Lady, will buy
a range of responses from those who have lived through and presently live in a nation that
still reflects, operates within and reconciles with the significant transformation that the
1980s and the rise of the Conservative Party brought to the United Kingdom. Ranging
from outrage to gratify, possibly the only response not to be found would be indifference.
Buzz words such as limited government, deregulation, privatization and
enterprise culture may have dismantled smaller institutions in the North of England,
but brought a prosperity and centralized growth of culture into London enterprise which
placed contemporary British art and culture in the worlds view. Godfathers of the
London contemporary arts movement, Gilbert & George, remember Thatcherism with
veneration: "We admire Margaret Thatcher greatly. She did a lot for art. Socialism wants
everyone to be equal. We want to be different.21
And different it was, as Thatcher sought
to transform he nation from a body of dependants to individuals who took their work and
20Ibid, 120.
21The Telegraph. Gilbert and George: Margaret Thater Did Alot For Art, The
Telegraph Online. 5 Jul 2009. Accessed 15 September 2010.
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lives into their own hands. While her politics were aggressive and her policies extreme,
the spirit of entrepreneurial enterprise Thatcherism brought to the United Kingdom seems
to have sparked a catalysts in the production, promotion and patronage of contemporary
art in London. The late 19080s saw the birth of the hardworking yBas as an unstoppable
body of artists who practically herded and hand feed their audiences as they took the art
world by force. Corporate sponsors stepped out of the shadows and began taking a more
active role in collecting, sponsoring and curating art to a degree that was unprecedented.
Private wealthy collectors and art patrons like Charles Saatchi provided the monetary and
promotional support artists needed in order to have their works distinguished and in
return, were able to turn over a profit on the growing London art market. Thatcherism
may have left a bitter after taste, but its influence on the emergence of young visual
artists, encouragement of individual entrepreneurship and privatizing of culture
revitalized the London art world.
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Bibliography
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Kong: Ellipsis, 2000.
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The Telegraph. Gilbert and George: Margaret Thatcher Did A lot For Art. The
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