Quick-fix solutions

Here’s a random sample of my postbag: an invitation to a mixed exhibition of nine artists’ interpretation of ‘focus’ through painting, photography, digitisation and computer manipulation; notice of a show of photo-text, photo-document and photo-juxtaposition-cum-montage pieces about HIV and place; and the press release for an installation of scarlet mobility scooters which is supposed to be ‘a reflection on age, youth and contemporary Britain’.

Clearly Britain is in a bad way. A watered-down conceptual art is the current orthodoxy. Much of what looked new and radical when it first emerged in the 1960s is now being run past us again, and it’s limping badly. And so much of it is the same. It really looks as if art students were issued with a pattern book of how to come up with a show – six ideas on the back of an envelope: good tried-and-tested old concepts that won’t cause anyone too much trouble. How has this come to pass? The decline of one of our greatest glories – the art schools – has much to answer for.

The artist Ian Welsh (born 1944) is ideally situated to comment on the situation. Besides making his own work (Welsh is a distinguished painter specialising in the depiction of water and reflections), he taught for 25 years in the public and private sectors because he believes that art schools can offer a unique education. He himself studied painting at Chelsea School of Art (1963-66), when it was in its heyday under the enlightened direction of the painter and art historian Lawrence Gowing. He then studied sculpture as a postgrad with George Fullard (1966-67), after which he began to teach himself. He returned to Chelsea to do an MA in printmaking in 1976-67, and was finally appointed head of printmaking there in 1992. He gave up teaching in 1993, utterly disillusioned with the way art schools were now administered and structured.