Publications

O brave new world

By: Sunil Gupta

Sunil Gupta looks back to the revolution of the mid 1990s, when the artistic imagination was first allowed to direct cultural policy.

So in the middle of the last decade of the twentieth century it occurred to artists that their institutions were in crisis. The basis of collection-based institutions was being questioned but no satisfactory responses were forthcoming. Why for example was the leading collection back then, the Tate, still only collecting works by artists domiciled in NATO countries? It’s not surprising other collections have since way surpassed it in importance. But managers had to pay the price of war in the cultural arena. Artists involved with running art centres were burning out. The public subsidy system required too much personal energy from them and then prevented them from growing into anything big enough to compete with manager-led galleries and museums. Artists began to disengage from funding bodies – there was only a pittance on offer to them anyway – as well as from institutions that treated them poorly. Even those who understood the system and cooperated in an effort to get ‘success’, financial and otherwise, got fed up and began pulling out. As the last few years have progressed – through the ‘Year of this Artform and that Artform’ – and...

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