What's behind the Big Display?

DAVID Cameron may want the Big Society, but cities on the east coast of Scotland, it seems, want the Big Display. In Dundee, the promotion of the Victoria & Albert at Dundee - a design that totally ignores the original idea of an intimate centre for Scottish contemporary crafts and, instead, will boast an enormous central hall and two eateries - comes at the cost of emasculating the McManus Museum & Art Gallery which, despite its recent renovation and remodeling, has lost three of its galleries, its Curator for Decorative Art, its Deputy Curator, its photographer and its taxidermist. It is hard to see how the McManus can continue to function in the way it has since it opened in 1867.

The same drive towards a Big Display is also affecting Aberdeen, which has been showing six designs by some of the world's leading architectural practices for the transformation of the Union Terrace Gardens.

They range from one described as the 'Granite Web,' that looks as if it's a hard-edged version of what Charles Jencks might have done, and a Winter Garden that doubles the size of the existing gardens and has a curved, glass canopy at its centre, to a very architectural design that features a huge, granite cultural centre at one end of the gardens whose appearance has been likened to a Star Trek 'Borg' cube.

However, what is missing is any reference to a fully-funded alternative, that prepared by Brisac Gonzalez Architects for the Peacock Visual Arts Centre.

It seems that the Union Terrace Gardens competition sets out to ignore any other possibility - let alone the evidence provided by the Friends of Union Terrace Gardens, who claim that the public wants the gardens to remain as they are.

And then, there is the question of Aberdeen's Art Gallery & Museum, which would like to extend its exhibition space by building an additional floor on its roof. Will that idea be abandoned in favour of the Big Display?

Corrupted by moth - and rust?

SCOTLAND'S PR machine is being cranked up for a major exercise in the spring when the shiny 'new' Forth Bridge will be formally re-opened after its very extensive - and superb - re-paint job.

No doubt we will be treated to the usual self congratulatory pr guff and a good time will be had by all.

It is worth reflecting, however, on the background to this happy outcome. When the railways were in the care of the appalling Railtrack there was a very real chance that the bridge would be left to rust away.

In one of their more fatuous declarations, the bosses of Railtrack revealed to the world that the nasty brown flaky stuff falling off the bridge was not rust as we know it and the problem was merely a 'cosmetic' one which could be dealt with by, if you please, Historic Scotland.

With hardly an exception the press were prepared to buy the pr version of events, dutifully reprinting the Railtrack ptess releases as they landed on their desks and lining up for their free lunches when they were laid before them.

Thanks to the tolerance of our long suffering readers, ArtWork was able to put the other side of the story. (We even commissioned a silver necklace from a promiment Scottish silversmith incorporating a piece of the infamous 'rust' that wasn't rust.)

Yet it could so easily have been different. In all the agitation about phone hacking there is a real danger that the far more serious threat to our press will be ignored.

As budgets come under increasing pressure the resources devoted to serious news gathering are further depleted to leave the columns open to straight press release material and the inane witterings of the blogosphere, which might or might not bear some relationship to the truth.

Proper investigative research? You can forget it.

And why bring Turner into it?

THE NEWS that, yet again, Scottish artists are in the race to win the Turner Prize (they are Martin Boyce and Karla Black, both ex-Glasgow School of Art; the other contenders are George Shaw and Hilary Lloyd) no doubt raises a cheer from patriots in the Scottish art world.

Fortunately the voice of reason is still to be heard in the land. Under the heading "Even up north, the Turner Prize is still grim" the Scotsman's ever sane art critic Duncan Macmillan concluded his withering review with this question:

"Has the media machine worked its evil alchemy so that good and bad no longer matter? Is this the X Factor of art where occasionally a genuine talent may emerge, but quality is immaterial."

And yet… while this year's contenders paint the ugliness of run down shops and pubs (Shaw), sculpt sharp, aerodynamic triangular forms (Boyce), and landscapes created out of pale, chalked-up sugar paper (Black), and make videos of tower blocks and clock towers (Lloyd), all on display in the Baltic, there is a magnificent chance to see an alternative form of art as created by two Scottish colourists.

For feelings of warmth and good living in these harsh times, go to see the paintings Fergusson did in France on show in the Hunterian in Glasgow, or his paintings of women in the Scottish Gallery in Edinburgh; or, if you like looking at elegant women in big hats, visit the work of Cadell in the National Galleries of Scotland.

The latter died in penury in 1937 aged 54, while Fergusson, after living in Paris at a time when it was a centre for artists, returned to Scotland in 1939 in financially straitened circumstances. He died in 1961. Neither, if the record is anything to go by, would have been given a Turner Prize. And as for Turner himself…