He approved of Mrs Thatcher even less than he approved of Kenneth
He approved of Mrs Thatcher even less than he approved of Kenneth Clark. His campaign against the closure of the art schools in the early 1970s was, I felt, one of his finer hours. All that had resulted from Antonia's first trip was a shadowy drawing of her aura, all hair and no face, which was not really what the trustees of the National Portrait Gallery wanted at all. He was slightly apt to tell the same stories over and over again but, as with good story-tellers, they got better every time He called it his anecdotage. There was one about Kenneth Clark, whom he didn't really approve of. And the time that he and Henry Moore went to see Mrs Thatcher about the closure of the art schools. I think she had a good time, because they both loved to talk: about painting, about writing. It made me think of the week I spent with him and Antonia Byatt, while Antonia was having her portrait painted.
He had invited her down to stay at Eagles Nest, his house at Zennor, four miles west of St Ives in Cornwall. It showed him as I remember him: humorous and quizzical in a way which was both cheerful and slightly child-like, as if he had lived his life perfectly contentedly, but some time ago. Oddly enough, I had turned up a photograph of Patrick Heron on the day that I heard he had died. And if the clamour of voices competing for our attention (and mostly pushing the same songs) threatens to drive us mad, then we can always potter round a museum for a while.Cultural Trends 30: Policy Studies Institute, pounds 25.. The average hour of television costs pounds 99,000 to make; on radio it costs only pounds 3,500 Stand by for a major assault on our eardrums.
It is poised to take another leap forward with the introduction of digital radio transmission, which will enhance quality and, more importantly, shrink the bandwidths of each station, permitting many more radio signals to be squeezed on to the spectrum. The first independent radio station was launched only 25 years ago, yet independent radio now represents more than half our listening pleasure. Each year, 12 million radios are sold in Britain; and radio is by far the most important media in the country until 4pm: we listen (or background-listen) to an average of 20 hours each week.Here again, Cultural Trends is drawing useful attention to an easily overlooked national habit, and one which is changing rapidly. The average British household, it reveals, owns between five and seven radios, which seems a high number until you remember London car-owners, who surrender two or three a year to thieves. The chapter on radio, for instance, is full of eye-opening facts about the way we live now. Its stinging conclusion is that we need "a more managerialist approach to conducting the local authority's business, as in the manifestation of more mission statements and clear corporate goals, and conscious attempts to re-align budgets to meet these new objectives."It is an awful waste of such good work.
The new issue casts its cold eye over three arenas - film, radio and government policy - and the arts, in this strange dull universe, are not for the faint-hearted. They are all about policies'n'objectives at the local'n'regional level. Indeed, it represents one of the minor tragedies of modern British life: the burying of patient and intelligent research in language so deadly, it wouldn't command space even in a museum of endangered idioms. Museums, by their very nature, inhabit a world of old news, but sometimes the old stories are the best ones. Perhaps we ought to scrap minority television programmes like Top of the Pops and replace them with museum hit parades.Cultural Trends rarely allows itself to speculate in this vein. Many more people go to museums than go to pop concerts (there are over 60 million visits per year to the 1,443 institutions now operating), but you wouldn't know this from the media coverage. But the entrepreneurial liveliness of Britain's many new museums has been under-celebrated.One reason we think of museums as old-fashioned is because they rarely rate a mention in the eager-beaver media coverage of cultural affairs.