Volume 40 no 6 July – August 2026
For those of you who wish to know, and there are a few, the legal process rumbles on and may stretch into next year but the accusations against me have been dropped and unprovable – by the other side. I no longer stand accused of unduly influencing Derek Guthrie or attempting to steal his assets.
In a funny say this whole experience exemplifies the art arena today. Little people squabbling over money which Derek wished to be spent on the Examiner and give in a more stable future. A future he was unable to inspire in the US. I am not well versed in US culture but I would suggest if an art magazine that champions free speech and open discussion, found itself squashed at every turn by the art arena in Chicago and Washington then there is something very wrong in the States and it has been very wrong for decades.
We have just seen a Pollock sell for over $180; work that was promoted by the CIA as being so unlike the figurative Communist art of the 1950s it had to be pure capitalism. Much of what was written about him was augmented by the CIA and work was bought to keep the prices up from government budgets. Even Clement Greenberg was fooled but he was a willing outlet for western art trumpeting the changes as the greatest leap forward since the development of perspective (my analysis not his) and drip painting proved the ‘truth’ of art in that the abstract is authentic as anything that pretend to be three dimensional on a two dimensional surface cannot but be (to borrow a phrase from Carl Sagan) a shadow of the actual.
And yet it is in shadows that we talk. An art arena broken by wealth into the playthings of commodity specialists. Culture as nothing more than investments.
An entire history of thinking reduced to the gavel and often taken into ownership of people who only let their friends view them.
The mismanagement of the art arena has many proponents: government that want art to be an extension of the nation advertising itself; egos that want to own bits of the country as they would own buildings or land; lazy curators in charge of well-endowed complexes who sit back and let promoters send them exhibitions; artists ready to copy anything in vogue in New York, London or Paris. And art aficionados so in love with themselves they have a romantic vision of art and money as some sort of intellectual / creative perfection.
Right at the bottom is an artist who wants nothing to do with any of it and it is they who will be lauded long after they are dead and gone.
