My 30 years as Telegraph art critic
Richard Dorment
Late in 1986, I received a telephone call from Miriam Gross, arts editor at The Daily
Telegraph. She was calling out of the blue to ask whether I’d be interested in writing for the paper as its chief art critic.
Until then, I’d worked as a museum curator, freelance writer and exhibition organiser. The idea of a career in journalism had never entered my mind, but thank goodness I accepted. As I retire after almost 30 years doing a job I loved, I look back with amazement at how different the gallery and museum scene in this country is from the one I wrote about back then.
Any notion I might have entertained that my new job would be stress-free vanished within weeks. The problem was not how I wrote but what I wrote about. Most of my reviews were unproblematic because they dealt with Old Master and classic 20th-century art. But I also loved the challenge of reviewing contemporary art – and to my surprise, this didn’t always go down well with my employers.
My enjoyment of contemporary art had to do in part with my background. As a graduate student studying art history in New York at the age of 22, I fell in love with my first wife. Through Kate and her family, I became enthralled with the work of Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly and Robert Rauschenberg and came into frequent contact with them.
In photos of our small wedding in 1970, they are all among the guests – as were the gallerist Leo Castelli, architect Philip Johnson and the future biographer of Picasso, John Richardson. Only later did I come to realise how influential those experiences had been on someone who might otherwise have been locked into the study of 18th- and 19th-century art. To put it simply, they taught me the value and importance of art, both old and new.
I took for granted my obligation as a critic to tell readers about the art of my own time. That was naive. A deep mistrust of modern art existed at every level of British society. Just as I was starting out in the late Eighties, early exhibitions at the Saatchi Gallery, the first years of the Turner Prize, and the appointment of Nicholas Serota as director of the Tate Gallery followed in quick succession. The effect was to ignite smouldering resentment into open hostility.
There were many sources of artrage, but any favourable comment about the Turner Prize, Twombly or Gilbert and George guaranteed outraged press coverage in the Mail, Sunday Telegraph (when Peter Fuller
was its critic), The Spectator and the Evening Standard.
But not in The Daily Telegraph – at least not from me. Without intending to, I made life difficult for successive editors who were torn between support for their critic and profound disagreement with what he was saying. The solution was to run quite a few strongly worded leaders disassociating the paper from those particular reviews. That was fair enough. I reasoned that as long as the paper continued to print my views, it was entitled to take a different line.
Outside the organisation, things were more brutal. One art critic called on one of the Tate’s principal sponsors to withdraw its financial support, simply because he did not approve of a new display. Then a few Right-wing political columnists joined in the debate. Their pieces were contemptuous in a way I’d not experienced before. Only once did I feel that an attack was so personal – I was called a fool – it required a forceful public response if I was to retain the respect an art critic needs in order to write effectively.
On the other hand, there could have been no better time for a journalist to defend new art. An opinion piece I wrote stays in my mind. It was published on February 26, 1993. In it, I didn’t say that all (or even most) modern art had merit – only that readers were being shortchanged by reviewers who simply strung together adjectives like “stupid”, “aimless” and “rubbish” without feeling obliged to explain what the artist does, why he does it, and whether he succeeds or fails. I pointed out that they were getting away with it only because editors normally didn’t take much interest in art. Had the same critics been writing about film, sport or the stock market they’d have been rumbled in a week.
That, of course, fuelled even more controversy, but this time something felt different. Never before or since did I receive so many letters of support. The artist Michael Craig– Martin put his finger on the reason when he wrote that “to have published such an article anywhere would have been helpful, but in the
Telegraph was profoundly so”. That was perceptive. A conservative newspaper read by the Establishment is the ideal platform from which to defend tolerance, encourage curiosity and praise the virtue of keeping an open mind.
No one could have known then that over the next three decades museums and galleries in this country would expand and develop in ways not seen since the mid-19th century, or that in our own time the entire country would embrace new art in the way it did.
I will always be grateful to those editors for allowing me to write what I wanted. Because of their forbearance, Telegraph coverage of the visual arts in the years leading up to the opening of Tate Modern in 2000 reflected the profound cultural changes taking place in Britain in these years. In long reviews praising Richard Long, Anish Kapoor, Tony Cragg, David Tremlett and Richard Deacon, or in our support of video installations by Mark Wallinger, Douglas Gordon and Susan Hiller, readers were given an alternative to the irrational prejudice against new art expressed in some places. Those voices didn’t stop after 2000, but as the mood of the country changed they began to sound more and more irrelevant.
I do not, however, overestimate the importance of the Telegraph’s role. At best it amounted to a rearguard action in support of the achievements of Serota, Julia Peyton-Jones at the Serpentine, and James Lingwood of Artangel. Nor was it alone. Critics such as Richard Cork in The Times and Andrew Graham-Dixon when he was at The
Independent wrote eloquently about the same artists I did. Much more important than any of us for changing hearts and minds were the Unilever displays in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern such as Olafur Eliasson’s stupendous The Weather
Project in 2003, where a giant sun dominated the space, or Doris Salcedo’s unforgettable Shibboleth in 2007, where the length of the floor was riven by a crack.
By 1997, that massive cultural shift was already well under way. Then, overnight, New Labour made New Art acceptable. The Telegraph’s culture skirmishes were over.
As for me, I don’t think I got all of it right. But I have many more regrets about the artists I failed to appreciate – Peter Doig is a good example – than the ones I now think didn’t deserve as much attention as I gave them, including quite a few of the Young British Artists who came to prominence in the Nineties.
How would I like to be remembered? By reviews such as the one I wrote about the 2012 Turner Prize exhibition, when I saw the work of Elizabeth Price for the first time. After watching her video
The Woolworth’s Fire 1979 – which combined dry-as-dust images from a textbook on Gothic architecture with newsreel footage taken in the aftermath of a tragic blaze in Manchester to create an unforgettable collage of sound, image and text – I remained in my seat and sat through it twice more. Then I went home and wrote that I’d just experienced “20 of the most exhilarating minutes I’ve ever spent in an art gallery”. That’s the spirit in which I always wanted to write about all art – loud and clear and without hedging my bets. On my best days, that’s what I hope I did.
And with that, I’ll take my leave, with sincere thanks to my editors and colleagues at the Telegraph, and to the kind readers who have written to me over the years, particularly Barbara Duce, my correspondent from Canterbury whose letters never failed to buck me up.