Valuable sculpture sold off for a song by my old school

Thursday's Front Row on Radio 4 had an item on Historic England's forthcoming exhibition Out There: Our Post-War Public Art, which opens at Somerset House on 3 February.

The item runs from 7:38 to 12:32, though the opening one on how Elton John now fits in touring around the school run makes good listening too.

Sarah Gaventa, the curator of the exhibition, talks about some of the lost works she would like to locate (if they have not already been melted down).

I blogged about Historic England and its quest for these lost public artworks in December.

One of the works Sarah mentions in her interview is the sculpture Astonia by Bryan Kneale, which she said was housed at "a Leicestershire school" between 1973 and 2014.

That school was my alma mater - now the Robert Smyth Academy. I remember the sculpture clearly, though I am afraid we never thought much of it.

It was sold two years ago by Gilding's of Market Harborough (frequent stars of TV's Flog It!) from whose website I have borrowed this image.

Astonia fetched £360 but should have made something like £30,000. Its whereabouts are now a mystery.

Leicestershire County Council had acquired it at the end of a mid 20th century era when the authorities believed the people, and children in particular, needed good public art. The wonderful School Prints come from that era too.

I mourn that era's passing, even if Astonia does not appeal to me today either.

Thanks to @RutlandNed for the tip.

Later. @Stephen25367746 tells me Astonia was originally displayed outside Southampton Art Gallery.

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David Bowie, economics and education

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I have come across two reactions to the death of David Bowie that take us well beyond the world of music.

Stumbling and Mumbling - written by Chris Dillow and always interesting - quotes Danny Finkelstein before rightly taking issue with him:

He [Finkelstein] writes: 

David Bowie – undoubtedly one of the artistic geniuses of the past 50 years – was the great product and great producer of consumer capitalism…He was subversive because capitalism is subversive, overturning the status quo, restless, and profoundly democratic. 

I disagree. It is markets that are subversive; capitalists would much rather keep the status quo and the profits rolling in. Danny says that Bowie “was possible because in a consumer capitalist society nobody can ultimately stop anybody doing anything.” But surely the word “capitalist” is superfluous in that sentence?

Chris goes on to draw a very different moral from Bowie's career:

He only became wealthy after setting up his own management company. This tells us a lot. People don’t become rich by merely by being creative. They get rich from ownership rights: in was only when Bowie claimed these that he prospered. In this sense, capitalism is a means of exploitation. 

The conflation of capitalism with markets irritates me because I suspect it is a means whereby the right smuggles in support for inequality. Many of the virtues it claims for capitalism are in fact the virtues of markets, and in conflating the two the right thus gives the impression that the case for capitalism is stronger than it in fact is.

Kevin Maguire, writing on Politics Home, also questions modern pieties (and incidentally introduces our Trivial Fact of the Day):

There’s a lesson in the likelihood that a young David Bowie would today be considered an unfortunate teenager failed by his school, with Bromley Technical High’s staff fearing a dreaded visit from Ofsted’s inspectors. 

His single O Level, in art – a subject taught by fellow rocker Peter Frampton’s father, Owen, self-evidently an inspirational schoolmaster – fell a long way short of the five good GCSEs, including English and Maths, or its equivalent, that is considered by many of us, never mind officialdom, as a pretty good yardstick ...

I raise Bowie’s less than sparkling academic qualifications not to dismiss the importance of GCSEs, NVQs, Baccalaureates, Highers, A Levels, Degrees or A N Other certificate you care to name if it signifies achievement. Everybody, from pupils and parents to teachers and Education Secretaries, deserves applause if they’re striving to raise standards and, especially, improve the prospects of kids from poorer homes who too often are left behind. 

But Bowie, the boy from Brixton born into a working class home who finished school with that single O Level, is a reminder that passing exams isn’t everything; a dearth of formal qualifications is not the end of the world.

I do wonder how many of today's IT millionaires were chided for "messing about with computers" by their teachers in the 1980s.

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