Our old journalistic alma mater, the Independent on Sunday, is to chop its arts coverage, the Guardian Media reveals. How very sad. The treatment of the arts in the Independent and its younger sister, the Independent on Sunday earned instant credibility when the papers were launched. If we may say so, in a ground-breaking article of 25 March 1990, (see our post of May 27, Fig. 12, “Funny Business at the Sistine Chapel: Has Michelangelo Been Found or Lost?”), the Independent on Sunday, under its arts editor, Michael Church, carried our first of many exposes on the destructive restorations of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling and at the National Gallery. From the start, under its founding art editor, Michael Crozier, the two newspapers’ uses of photography and illustration were bold and invigorating. The Independent’s first but now-departing arts editor, Tom Sutcliffe, assembled a crack array of stylish contributors – Mark Steyn, Sebastian Faulks, Bayan Northcott, Fiona Maddocks, Mark Lawson and Andrew Graham-Dixon, among many. It’s all desperately sad. This latest cull of critics of art, film, music and theatre shows a costs-cutting newspaper devouring its own soul. For a few decades the arts had come to matter there more than anywhere in Fleet Street.

There is little consolation to be had in these developments but the reported plaint from arts publicist Alison Wright suggests one possible chink of gratification in the gloom:

“Publicly funded arts organisations rely on intelligent arts criticism and critical appraisals of their exhibitions and events not only to attract audiences, but also for their funding applications and to attract sponsors and donors.”

Indeed they do – and how they do – but as tears are shed, led them be shed for all sectors of the arts, for private galleries as well as public, for all art lovers and players, and not just for, or especially for, the special-pleaders of the feather-bedded public sector that has too often seen its raison d’être to be the undermining of traditional disciplines and anything that might be taken for a conservative and un-edgy taste.

Michael Daley

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