Once upon a time - when most people still actually worked for a living, a bunch of faces deep etched by the daily Elememts they toiled in , on a rugged and windswept yet beautiful , far lung fringe of this land, opted to wile away times not spent toiling or drinking ….. on a few renderings ! Quite often composed out of left over tins of antifoul or homemade watercolours - this for me . is where the real guts of the ' Cornish Art Scene ' began !
and Cornwall remained for many years - a bit of a nostalgic throwback for decades after this actually - Humble / Rugged / Quant / Raw and Real x
That is of course until around the late 1960's and through the seventies , at this point legislation overtook production in this country full stop !
The ' Tourist Boom ' really began to take hold as the notion of recreationalism and ' obsessive compulsive acquisition ' really became a corner stone of a once proud ' ish ' economy . ! but the little seaside getaways were now beginning to be replaced by cheap foreign holidays instead !
but even so rents were reasonable and a sleepy yet ratifying existence could still be eeked out here, that is of course until the artificial inflation of the property market in the greater London area began to spill its poison out into the surrounding counties and like some untended infection ran rampant!
Fringe communities stared to spring up in greater and greater numbers ! Beatniks , Poets , Artsists and Hippies of all kinds would live in and travel around this last little avenue of freedom in these far flung places of cornwall, wales and scotland… away from the ministrations of our ever expanding yet increasingly inept administrations - looking for a more low cost / creative orientated way to live …. connected to the land and environment ! and in doing so really reinvigorated the Cornish art scene with a little innovation and recourceful ness...I recall moving to the area in the early 1980's and there really was still a rebellious / salty / piractical / farmer character to the place ...
this in turn encouraged the new waves of burgeoning Bourgeoise classes from Reagan and Thatchers delapidated and economically depleted urban areas ….. to come and ' Find out ' what was going on in Cornwall ( after all Bo Ho communities have always been where te party is … I know these days its all been rebranded into some weird amalgamative cross over between ' High Tea ' and ' Mad max but I do still think that between the bare lightbulbs - and upcycled palette bar installation - its still easy to see the genuine article over the bank balance orientated bullshit )
so these Hipsters ( Yuppies at the time ) unable to slow the degeneration of the boroughs they invested in - began to ' invest ' in the holiday home fairytale from Margaret thatchers nonsensical ' property ladder ' voodoo … which in turn of course , drove up prices and reduced the scale of attraction, and by default the flow of paradigm contesting art and artists that had been swarming to the region
Towards the end of the 1980's the ' Art Scene ' indeed much , was in Dire straits - most of the small independent Artists Studios had closed or relocated to the far more embracing and liberally minded Artists Communities in Europe and Further afield
Compounded by this was the infiltration of the Yuppy ilk from the London Class of Economics! came up with a con !
for about a decade you could find where once there was an actual working studio - a retailer of cheap Chinese and Taiwanese ' art ' ( mass produced in factories by unnamed unknown factory workers ...en mass ! ) in every Cornish town were these cheaper distributors of even cheaper wares posing as ' Cornish art ' by ' Cornish artists '
but it was a total scam and a lot of tourists got burned with this !
Fortunately this practice became so rife as to become blatant and people actually started noticing that instead of a Cornish fishing trawler in the painting … that if you looked closely it was actually a Chinese junk … in more ways than one !
so for a short while people did actually start questioning what they wee buying !
What was left of the original lobster pot hut , independent artists studios that had managed to survive the previous decades were constantly having to fight with their audiences - offering assurances of originality ( but like buying glass in venice … it can be pretty hard to be sure )
So Larger and Larger ' Collectives ' started to form …. these days try walking from one end of cornwall to the other and you cant travel five miles without tripping over some half baked collective or other ( we actually seem to be doing exactly the same with festivals at the moment too )
Roll on to Present Day
and all of these collectives are filled with ( at least it seems to me anyway ) a load of inept early retiring civil servamts and failed hairdressers from the home counties, that like nothing more than to sit around in edinburugh woollen mill garments that are at least two sizes too big for them …. and according to their ' artists statement ' they occaisionally take fido out for a couple of hours in some light drizzle so that they can chanel all of that ' raw energy ' and inspiration through some shitty ceramics process … or the smearing of a lot of tones of beige about !
if I could get it to convey appropriately …. I would fart loudly here ! but the point is lost a little in this written medium of choice
Of Course amongst all of these menopausal women posing as actual artisans simply because they had revenue to buy a house here ( all terribly dubious you understand ) you will find the now well established and royaly endorsed whistlefish - that for legal reasons cant call themselves an actal gallery anymore x and like jimmy Saville … the less said about that the better x ( a bit like a budget Tate - a load of corporate and government assholes that don't really know much about anything but how to manipulate fools … and in turn markets )
so now instead of Taiwanese paintings filling vacant overpriced premises , you will find on every Cornish highstreet one of these mcdonalds art distributors ….
and that's the situation as she stands !!its gone from bad to worse to dire … and I don't see any sign of improvement at all …. anywhere !!
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