Contemporary Art Fail
November 3 2014
Picture: via dezeen.com
A zippy new 'contemporary art space' which opened in Colchester in 2011, funded by taxpayers (via the Arts Council) at a cost of £28m, seems to be heading for disaster. FirstSite's café, a hoped for money spinner, has closed, there are no exhibitions planned for the new year, and after renting itself out for 'Christmas-themed events', the whole place will shut down for a couple of months while they figure out what the hell to do with the place.
For more on what appears to be another disastrous attempt to impose contemporary art spaces on the masses see here and here.
FirstSite isn't a patch on the £60m flushed down the toilet by the Arts Council on The Public in West Bromwich. It's a mystery to me that the culturati assume that if you spend millions on a contemporary art gallery, but have no idea of what's going to go in it, that somehow it'll all work out, and that people will come and visit.
Shouldn't we use such funds instead on helping to show the thousands of masterpieces hiding in museum storage? And help support excellent ideas like Mr Ruffer's? I suspect the people of Colchester would rather see a few of Tate's stored Constables (43 out of 50 at the last count) in FirstSite than a few neon light installations by an artist they've never heard of.
