Thatcherism and Visual Arts Since 1980s

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Nicole SmithProfessor Donnellan

AH320 Modern British Art & Design16 September 2010

Look to Themselves First: An Assessment of the Impact of Thatcherism on the LondonVisual Arts Since the 1980s

[W]e have gone through a period when too many children and people havebeen given to understand I am homeless, the Government must house me!" and so

they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing!There are individual men and women andthere are families and no government can do

anything except through people and people look to themselves first...1-Margaret Thatcher, Interview forWomans Own, 23 September 1987

In the early 1980s, in the dawn of Margaret Thatchers 1979 appointment as the

first female Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and the Conservative Party take over

of political power, dramatic changes in the tasks and objectives of British political

agencies and, in turn, their function, relationship and responsibilities to the people of the

nation caused a simultaneous derailment and renaissance of the art world. Thatcherism, a

term which has come to describe the radical economic and social policy reforms of

Thatchers three term tenure of office, was based on Margaret Thatchers ultra-

conservative ideals which supported the deregulation of financial and industrial

enterprise, privatization of previously state owned companies, and a decrease in

governmental subsidizing of public institutions.2

Her politics reflected her belief that the

British citizen had come to rely too heavily on the provisions of public government

welfare and that reallocating this responsibility to the individual through the

implementation of strict economic and social initiatives would bring balance and,

1Interview forWomans Own with Douglas Kaey. Margaret Thatcher Foundation

Archives. Accessed 12 Sep. 2010. < http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/106689>2

David Willetts,Modern Conservatism (London: Penguin Books, 1992), 52.


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ultimately, a revitalized prosperity to Britain. These fiscal strategies penetrated all areas

of the public sector and left no aspect of British industry and culture untouched, not

excluding the way in which contemporary British artists, art collectors and institutions

operated.3 This paper aims to examine the effects of Thatchers open-market stance on

art patronage and how this shift of art funding from the public to private sector impacted

the London art world. Of course, the effects (both negative and positive) of Thatcherism

on the arts since the 1980s reaches far beyond the city limits of London and includes a

wide range of fields such as theater, film, literature and music. Indeed, the dramatic shift

of art funding from that of public government to private patronage spurred the emergence

of young proactive artists and corporate supercollectors, yet outside of centralized

London, smaller institutions and artists who had previously relied on government

subsidiary were now under the radar of influential patronage and faced with the challenge

of finding funding elsewhere.4

However, as a means of economy, this examination will

narrow in on the shift of visual art patronage into the hands of private corporations and

individuals, primarily focusing on the prominent Saatchi collection in London, the rise of

the Young British Artists, or yBas, and the transformation of London into a competitive

world center for modern art in the late 1980s as an indirect response to Thatchers call for

a society defined by entrepreneurial enterprise. This examination of Thatchers impact on

the visual arts first sets out to describe the social and economic climate of the nation

during the 1979- 1990 Thatcher years, and, in the second half, to illustrate the effect of

3Keith D Peacock, Thatchers Theater: British Theater and Drama in the Eighties

(Westport: Greenwood Press, 1999), 7.4

Geoff Mulgan Culture: The Problem with Being Public, The Ideas That Shaped Post-

War Britain, Ed. David Marquand and Anthony Seldon (London: Fontana Press, 1996),199.


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this climate through the emergence of the yBas in the 1990s and the prominent growth of

the contemporary art collection of Charles Saatchi.

Thatchers most significant and severe policies were those dealing with

economics, including the implementation of new Poll taxes and significant decreases in

government subsidiaries. From 1979-1980, the governments annual expenditure for the

arts had been reduced by 5 million out of an overall budget of 63 million.5

In order to

understand the role these policies played in the emergence of contemporary art after

during the 1990s, it is necessary to expound upon the intentions that drove Thatchers

economic reformation. During her first term from 1979 to 1983, Thatcher introduced new

economic initiatives, which were intended to promote individual enterprise, by cutting

back on government intervention and increasing the open market. Policies inclided an

overall increase in interests rates and strict limits put on minting.6 Her reforms were, in

principle, constructive for the nations return to economic stability, yet in practice,

extreme, as they left the working class and lower class plagued by increased indirect

taxes and decreased government dole. Instead, industrial enterprise, such as the Saatchi &

Saatchi Advertising firm, and the wealthy were able to successfully operate in a less

regulated and growingly privatized economic climate.

Notwithstanding the significant rise in unemployment in 1981, by 1983 the nation

had experienced a general economic growth and a lowered rate in inflation.7

These

conditions were fertile grounds for the corporate and individual ambitions of Charles

5Chin-Tao Wu,Privatizing Culture: Corporate Art Intervention Since the 1980s

(London: Verso, 2002), 54.6

Willetts,Modern Conservatism, 54.7

Ibid, 62.


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Saatchi and the yBas. However, it is during Thatchers second and third term, from 1983

until her resignation in April of 1990, that Thatchers stringent economic schemes,

government restruction and rapid public privatization produced considerable revolutions

in the way public and private art functioned. By the end of the 1980s, over twenty major

national industries were sold off to private companies, including British Petroleum,

British Gas, Rover Group, and the National Freight Corporation.8

Privatization of

industry and the discount of power among trade unions was a strategy intended to

increase industrial competition, improve productivity and to continue to decrease

regulation of industry and finance. In 1986, in a notoriously controversial decision,

Thatcher dissolved the Greater London Council and the six Metropolitan county councils

of England giving the Conservative Parliamentary government increased power,

transferring minimal power to smaller local councils and centralizing economic and

cultural growth in London.9

These are the political and economic circumstances that

broadly define Thatcherism and set the scene for the cultural climate contemporary

British artists, art collectors and art institutions have dealt with since the 1980s.

It seems that the Thatcher years brought with them both immobilizing challenges

as well as sparks of individual ambition. In conjunction with the governments decreased

subsidiary of public services, including welfare, museums, educational institutions and

theaters, the dismantling of county councils in 1986 left many smaller cultural institutions

outside of London, which had previously relied on government subsidiaries, without.

When young visual artists and art students for the first time confronted the conservative

world defined by Thatchers increased economic reformation and decreased spending

8Ibid, 68.

9Peacock, Thatchers Theater: British Theater and Drama in the Eighties, 13-14.


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policies, a realization sank in that their ability to survive and generate art work would lie

in their ability to break free of the dependency culture and to no longer rely on the

support of public funding or welfare.10

Without this provision, young artists were forced,

perhaps out of a necessity to subsist, to become more proactive and self-assertive in their

effort to create and gain support for their art. The endorsing power of this imperative self-

promotion is credited, most notably, with the rise of the yBas in the 1990s, in London. In

a way, the yBas precisely embodied the very entrepreneurial spirit Thatcherism aimed to

foster as they devised ways to make, mediate and market their own art.

Of these young artists, the most well known was Damien Hirst who, during the

summer of 1988, organized and curatedFreeze, a student exhibition featuring work by

him and his peers at Goldsmiths in South East London. This remarkable exhibition took

place in a dockside warehouse in London, and featured artists who would later come to

dominate the British art world. What setFreeze apart from other exhibitions during the

time and in the years that followed was the fact that it was executed, from concept to

realization, by Hirst and his peers and represented their collective ambitions. Hirst

seemed to have a clear understanding that art is not just about making a vision: it is also

about imposing that vision on others, and used not only his artistic ability but also his

skills in publicity to promote his work.11

Influential British art collectors and dealers

including Charles Saatchi, Nicholas Soreto and Karsten Schubert attended the

independent exhibition, in some cases having been personally driven to and from the

10Wu,Privatizing Culture: Corporate Art Intervention Since the 1980s, 200.

11Norman Rosenthal, The Blood Must Continue to Flow, Sensation: Young British

Artists from the Saatchi Collection (London: Thames & Hudson, 1997), 9.


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London dock by Hirst himself.12

With the presentation ofFreeze, Damien Hirst and the

yBas had demonstrated their ability to survive as entrepreneurial forces in Thatchers

world. In his contribution to the 1997 exhibition catalogue for the Sensation show of the

Saatchi Collection, Richard Shone describes the yBas artistic rearing at Goldsmiths as a

learning environment where choice enriched the individual who structured their own

course, giving life to an open studio where self-motivation was essential.13

His

account of the teaching methods at Goldsmiths in the late 1980s is curiously familiar to

the basic principles of Thatcherisms deregulated free market and individual enterprise

ideals. And, since most of the teachers at the college were artists active in the London art

world there was a maintained contact between art education and the world of dealers and

collectors.14

It is not surprising that Damien Hirst and the yBas demonstrated such

aptitude in self-management and promotion within the art world.Freeze came to

personify the independent attitudes and ambitious natures of the yBas as demonstrated by

their ability to publicize and notarize themselves as artists. While other art students and

cultural intuitions struggled to survive, the yBas brought an unparalleled enthusiasm,

youth, creativity and ambition that put their art in the public eye of the nation and

beyond.

Outside of the yBas, the 1980s also saw a considerable rise in corporate art

collections and patronage, specifically the establishment of the significant relationship

between Charles Saatchi of Saatchi & Saatchi Advertising and the Young British Artists.

Norman Rosenthal describes Saatchi as a collector with a patience and enthusiasm for

12Richard Shone, From Freeze to House: 1988-94, Sensation: Young British Artists

from the Saatchi Collection (London: Thames & Hudson 1997), 18.13

Ibid14

Ibid


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contemporary art that is second to none.15

Saatchi began collecting in 1973, and opened

his first gallery at Boundary Road in 1985. After visiting Hirsts Freeze exhibition in

1988, Charles Saatchi began a close relationship with the yBas as an art sponsor and

collector of their works.16 While corporate involvement in cultural endeavors and affairs

was not unusual before the 1980s and the implementation of Thatchers economic

reformations, the size and shape which corporate participation in the arts and culture took

on during the late 1980s into the 1990s was unprecedented. As opposed to their

traditional role as sponsors or infrequent contributors to museums or cultural institutions,

the role of corporate art patronage become much more involved and less passive as

wealthy individuals and corporations completely overtook the functions of art institutions

from collecting, to housing and even curating.17

In Chin-Tao Wus Privatizing

Cultures, Wu makes the argument that contemporary art, along with other cultural

products, functions as a currency of both material and symbolic value for corporations.18

Her argument goes on to connect the rise in corporate wealth take over of the art world to

the increased power invested in board and trustee members made up predominantly of

corporate heads and government appointed officials.19

Charles Saatchi established a

collection that was particularly successful because of his ability to transform cultural

capital, that is the art he collected, into monetary capital, that being the profits he could

make on showing, leading and selling works. Wu attributes this ability to the fact that

personal fortune and affluence (in this example, the tremendous success of the Saatchi &

15Rosenthal, The Blood Must Continue to Flow, 9.

16Shone, From Freeze to House: 1988-94, 20.

17Wu,Privatizing Culture: Corporate Art Intervention Since the 1980s, 2.

18Ibid, 6.

19Ibid, 99-104.


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Saatchi Advertising firm) afforded the wealthy elite access onto boards and trustees of

museums and galleries and therefore gave them the advantage on insiders knowledge.20

In this way, Charles Saatchi was in fact a product of Thatcherism and not only in their

connection to the Conservative Party. Aside from the fact that the Saatchi & Saatchi

political advertisements for the 1979 Conservative Party campaign were among the most

significant in recent years, their personal enterprise represents the epitome of the free

market culture at work.

Today, simply mentioning the name Margaret Thatcher, the Iron Lady, will buy

a range of responses from those who have lived through and presently live in a nation that

still reflects, operates within and reconciles with the significant transformation that the

1980s and the rise of the Conservative Party brought to the United Kingdom. Ranging

from outrage to gratify, possibly the only response not to be found would be indifference.

Buzz words such as limited government, deregulation, privatization and

enterprise culture may have dismantled smaller institutions in the North of England,

but brought a prosperity and centralized growth of culture into London enterprise which

placed contemporary British art and culture in the worlds view. Godfathers of the

London contemporary arts movement, Gilbert & George, remember Thatcherism with

veneration: "We admire Margaret Thatcher greatly. She did a lot for art. Socialism wants

everyone to be equal. We want to be different.21

And different it was, as Thatcher sought

to transform he nation from a body of dependants to individuals who took their work and

20Ibid, 120.

21The Telegraph. Gilbert and George: Margaret Thater Did Alot For Art, The

Telegraph Online. 5 Jul 2009. Accessed 15 September 2010.


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lives into their own hands. While her politics were aggressive and her policies extreme,

the spirit of entrepreneurial enterprise Thatcherism brought to the United Kingdom seems

to have sparked a catalysts in the production, promotion and patronage of contemporary

art in London. The late 19080s saw the birth of the hardworking yBas as an unstoppable

body of artists who practically herded and hand feed their audiences as they took the art

world by force. Corporate sponsors stepped out of the shadows and began taking a more

active role in collecting, sponsoring and curating art to a degree that was unprecedented.

Private wealthy collectors and art patrons like Charles Saatchi provided the monetary and

promotional support artists needed in order to have their works distinguished and in

return, were able to turn over a profit on the growing London art market. Thatcherism

may have left a bitter after taste, but its influence on the emergence of young visual

artists, encouragement of individual entrepreneurship and privatizing of culture

revitalized the London art world.


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Bibliography

Willetts, David. Modern Conservatism. London: Penguin Books, 1992.

Mulgan, Geoff. Culture: The Problem with Being Public. The Ideas That Shaped Post-

War Britain. Ed. David Marquand and Anthony Seldon. London: Fontana Press,

1996.

Hatton, Rita and John Walker. Supercollector: A Critique of Charles Saatchi. Hong

Kong: Ellipsis, 2000.

Mulholland, Neil. The Cultural Devolution: Art in Britain in the Late Twentieth Century.

Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2003.

The Telegraph. Gilbert and George: Margaret Thatcher Did A lot For Art. The

Telegraph Online. 5 Jul 2009. Accessed 15 September 2010.

Peacock, Keith D. Thatchers Theater: British Theater and Drama in the Eighties.

Westport: Greenwood Press, 1999.

Wu, Chin-Tao. Privatizing Culture: Corporate Art Intervention Since the 1980s. London:

Verso, 2002.

Rosenthal, Norman. The Blood Must Continue to Flow. Sensation: Young British

Artists from the Saatchi Collection. London: Thames & Hudson, 1997.

Shone, Richard. From Freeze to House: 1988-94. Sensation: Young British Artists

from the Saatchi Collection. London: Thames & Hudson, 1997.

Thatcherism and Visual Arts Since 1980s

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