notes

This morning I watched a Zoom presentation hosted by the University College London New York alumni club, and featuring a presentation by UCL Professor Ben Campkin. The focus was largely on the loss of ‘safe’ spaces for the LGBT community through intensive urban redevelopment and gentrification. What this meant for Professor Campkin was, largely, a loss of gay pubs in greater London. He pointed to, for example, the development of Crossrail and its impact in central London with the displacement of several gay venues, arguing that the change in the governance of London, from the liberality of Ken Livingstone in the early 2000’s to the more recent conservatism of Boris Johnson functioned to deprive the LGBT community of established safe spaces.

Well, maybe.

As someone who as a superannuated UCL student living in London in the 1990’s and early 2000’s, I can say based on my own lived experience that gay pubs were, in the main, no better than any other gay bars anywhere else in the world. They were and are, not to put too fine a euphemistic point on it, toilets. A not so subtle feature should be borne in mind that, in providing so-called safe spaces, landlords effectively victimize the LGBT community, realizing that that community is a captive market that will tolerate almost anything in exchange for a venue in which they can be themselves. There was a time, and the iconic Stonewall Bar is a good example, where many gay bars certainly in New York and San Francisco were actually owned by organized crime who were experienced at victimizing marginalized communities, and who also knew, to keep the LGBT community coming back, that they could pay off the cops- something about which they were also expert- to prevent police raids.

Mind you, Keith McCullar and I met in a gay bar, 41 years ago. At the time, I thought less about a safe space than I did about cruising, and if I wanted a drink, could always go to, shall we say, a more pleasant venue. Neither Keith or I were specifically looking for a life partner, but we found each other, and as a consequence, yet maintain a nostalgic fondness for the institution of the gay bar. ‘Safe space’, perhaps, but any gay man who denies that a bar served primarily as a place to pick up a trick has a loose grasp on the truth.

Frankly, I am not so sure that the gay bar as an institution hasn’t been dying a natural death. Grindr and other such apps that serve as a virtual safe space make the bricks and mortar space redundant. The other thing, and this will engender the ire of social activists everywhere, the LGBT community is more broadly accepted- mind you, with a long way to go, but enough forward progress that as a consequence can feel measurably more safe in taking their custom to non-LGBT venues. Moving from London to San Francisco after a long absence, I asked a gay friend in the city about any gay bars that might serve as a ‘local’ for Keith and me. He sort of curled his lip and said ‘When we go out, we usually go to a decent place.’

Yes, well- we never did find a ‘local’ although we regularly socialize in public venues with gay friends just about anywhere. Of course, our travels and habitations are in cities of a more liberal bent, and it may not be the same in Nether Wallop.

Still, I would argue that a gay bar is a cultural anachronism. Particularly in the context of a gay man in London, the prevalence of cottaging has declined with the liberality that has allowed the opening of the safer spaces of gay saunas. In today’s lecture, I didn’t hear Professor Campkin arguing for the preservation of cottages. Let’s look on gay bars and the necessity for them as safe spaces as emblematic of the bad old days where such venues were not just integral, but essential to the LGBT community. I don’t want to hide in the closet or in a gay bar, which in my view, is the real world equivalent. It seems to me the more compelling effort should be to continue to be out, to socialize the wider world toward ever increasing comfortability and acceptance of the LGBT community to which I am proud to belong.

Most of what my gentle followers will read in this blog post will seem familiar from past years but repeated as it’s worth repeating, and in no small part worthwhile for me to remember. No, not ‘remember’, but continue to remain mindful of.

For Keith McCullar and me, Pride month has a particularly special significance, as 41 years ago, it was in San Francisco yet limited to a parade on Sunday, June 29, 1980, designated Gay Freedom Day. It was though the night before- June 28- that Keith and I plighted our troth and through a variety of circumstances, mostly good and some terrible, we’ve been together ever since.

I’m not so ego driven that I can claim our own personal history is that of gay liberation in microcosm, but the two traditions do intersect, and at the end of the day, I remain a gay man yet trying to negotiate my way through a world that understands me, and my relationship with Keith, only marginally better now than it did 41 years ago. And witness the fact that the notion of gay pride is still fraught with controversy- I am not going out on any limb to suggest that my own history, or indeed that of any other member of the LGBT community, is not a metaphor for gay liberation. Note that I’ve written ‘liberation’- though the LGBT community is entitled to consider itself with pride, it does nevertheless still fight for liberation from the oppression and general opprobrium that waxes and wanes in society at large.

Keith and I both have backgrounds that involve finance, and though you’re doubtless reading this post on our art and antiques website, our avocation as collectors became over time a business and we run it as one. Not precisely a question of old habits dying hard, but we’re by nature practical people, and although Keith’s numeracy skills far excel mine, both of us know that financial literacy is the difference between business success and failure and, of course, success means we can forever pursue our collecting passions. However, the larger world presumes that, in the trade in art and antiques, the purveyor is perforce gay, and as gay, necessarily falling into some kind of sissy-fied stereotype, whose lightness in the loafers is matched by a lightness between the ears- that is to say a paucity of grey matter.

Innumerable times over the past 4 decades, one or the other or both of us have been involved in some business meeting cum negotiation that, by in large, will proceed along a predicable give and take. However, in my own ongoing and long standing effort to socialize society at large to the presence of gay men, I have for years been given to remark somehow about my relationship with Keith in an effort to make it apparent that I’m gay. Very often, and still to this day, the weather within the room will change, and what might be a pleasant atmosphere, then becomes every so slightly, and occasionally not so slightly, fraught. I’ll find that the person seated across the board table becomes more insistent or more tedious in explaining some elementary point. Years and years ago, when I first became aware of this frequent phenomenon, its occurrence puzzled me. It then dawned on me that the gay stereotype of the limp-wristed sissy was so ingrained that those with whom I was dealing insisted that that, and only that, defined me. I couldn’t possibly be an able person of business who was also gay. But rather I was someone who was an interloper, and a stupid one at that- subversive in a straight world, and if I was to remain, I must then be taught to know my place. Which place, of course, was within the limits prescribed by an accepted and acceptably homophobic trope.

The thing is, I would very much doubt that any but a few of those with whom I had had the above described interchange would acknowledge any manner of homophobia and would quickly point to how friendly they are with their wife’s hairdresser, or how helpful the interior designer was when they purchased their new home. In a less politically correct age, I recall a friend in college describing these as, his words, ‘fag jobs’. Perhaps no one says this anymore, or perhaps not as much, but the notion of this, trust me, is yet pervasive and something with which most people in the LGBT community war on a sadly not infrequent basis. Although not expressed with such offensively overt precision, it is apparent that someone in the boardroom or the business community wonders in at least mild frustration and puzzlement why it is that Keith and I don’t know our proper place is behind the cosmetics counter at Macy’s. In this context, ‘uppity’ would be applied not just to a person of color.

It might just be that I’ve been worn down to accept the status quo, but perhaps there is a bit more societal freedom for Keith and me. Although we’ve been together for over four decades, and only able to file joint tax returns and claim social security survivors benefits for the last 8, it has to be acknowledged in lines that only too briefly describe a calamity that much of the tolerance we experience now cost many thousands of lives. HIV/AIDS is rapidly becoming a footnote even in the LGBT community but for Keith and me, who’ve lived to tell the tale what we saw and experienced in the suffering of so many people we thought would be friends for the rest of our lives is almost impossible to describe. What I can say is that we have very few gay peers- gay men of our own age and experience- as a majority of them died in the 80’s and 90’s. A very many of them, with very little in the way of established networks of support even in big cities, found it necessary to return to their childhood homes to die. The tragedy of HIV/AIDS brought a forced recognition of the gayness of someone’s son, grandson, brother, nephew or best friend back to a community they had left seeking tolerance and understanding somewhere else. What had been easy for the family left behind to generally ignore now had to be acknowledged.

I maintain that the tragic way in which the larger world had to come to grips with the LGBT community did at long last bring some legal recognition, if not societal redress. Cold comfort, of course, for those whose lives were forever rent with the loss of friends, loved ones or family members.

But Keith and I are together and happy with one another. Although older, though, I can’t say either of us is precisely mellowed with age, or at least I hope not. As I wrote in the first paragraph, this blog post is penned so that not just my gentle readers but also my own good self does not become complacent. Gay liberation, gay freedom, and now gay pride are empty expressions unless accompanied by an ongoing and sustained effort that may be as simple as wearing a flag pin, flying a rainbow flag or posting one on social media- or my favorite, making sure that anyone with whom I have had a word or two of conversation knows I am in a relationship with Keith McCullar. The pride flag may fly this month, but the effort to confront and overcome must be a daily and conscious task for any and all gay men, and all members of the LGBT community.

A term like conservatism now connotes what has become, amongst so-called conservatives and liberals, the mutually destructive circular firing squad that is now the political environment in Washington DC.

However, the death of HRH Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, puts me in mind of the kind of effective conservatism to which he was adjunct. This will be defined in the context of the following few paragraphs.

We’ve perhaps overdosed on repeated watchings of ‘The Crown’ on Netflix and think we know all there is to know about the royal family, and consider them sticks in the mud wearing clothing styles of several decades ago, personally stifled and forced to live lives of equal part structure and stricture, yielding thereby existences of unusual torment. Think of the bird in a gilded cage as the old song has it.

For TV watching non-royals like you and me, it may all seem that way, but one has to bear in mind that the British royal family is an enduring institution that- save the disastrous republican experience of the Commonwealth for a few years in the middle of the 17th century- has existed for over a thousand years. In a time when we think nothing of upgrading our home based on a change in family circumstance- or trying to cash in on newly acquired equity resulting from an overheated housing market- Windsor Castle has been the home of the royal family since it was built in the 11th century. If one were to think of Windsor Castle as an expression of monarchy within the built environment, ‘enduring’ would be something of an understatement- ‘eternal’ might be nearer the mark.

But of course, individual monarchs, or their consorts, long lived they might be, do not live for 10 centuries, but it is a tenure of which they’re aware- or should I say never not aware. Recent history extends not just to Prince Harry and his mother’s attempts to kick over the traces, but also to that of the undoubted black sheep of the family, Edward VIII that was, whose romantic modernity, while looked upon with some degree of public favor, was considered a near disaster by the larger family and its courtiers. And the why of this? The last time a monarch exhibited popular, man of the people behavior was a century prior, in the person of the Prince Regent, George IV that was, whose exploits, initially popular, eventually brought himself and the institution of the monarchy into such disrepute with his subjects it took the long reign of his niece Victoria to repair the damage.

I’d be on safe ground to assert that the reign of George IV, the bicentenary of whose accession we celebrated last year, is considered recent history by the house of Windsor. I don’t think I’d be going out too far on a limb to suggest that the reign of Charles I two centuries even earlier might also be considered of recent advent, with that king’s excesses resulting in civil war and his ultimate beheading hard lessons to ignore. And easy lessons to remember.

Well, let’s downplay regicide, and acknowledge that after the experiment with the Commonwealth and accession of Charles II there was a shift in power that resulted in a constitutional monarchy that has existed in structure and monarchical function pretty much unchanged until the present day. I’d call 380 years and counting a pretty good run and evidence of lessons well learned.

And it is at this point we should then have a notion of what I called effective conservatism, an understanding- call it in the contemporary phrase an institutional memory, and a memory of centuries’

old standing, of what works in the conjoined roles of head of state and a symbol of nationality. And, conversely, what it is those who are the monarch’s subjects want. Not what the subjects will tolerate- because the lessons of Charles I told the monarchy absolutism would not be tolerated, and the lesson of Edward VIII said emphatically that the monarch’s private life can never be paramount to public responsibility.

As long as I’ve been aware of Prince Philip, as often as I’ve seen him in the company of Queen Elizabeth II, I’ve never seen him not walk several paces behind her, I’ve never seen him try in any endeavor to upstage her. On his own, he did indeed have shall we say a rebarbative personality, and although it would be fun to, I’ll refrain from repeating the numerous times his public comments were, shall we say, not in the best taste. Perhaps, though, his comments that might have best been left unsaid were not that numerous, as I suspect that, in only a few minutes, we could all repeat basically the same anecdotes. In comparing to myself, whose foot has from time to time had to be extracted from my own mouth, in a public career that lasted nearly threequarters of a century, one might say Prince Philip didn’t do too bad. However, very many of his off the cuff remarks were truly egregious and often profoundly racist. They do harken to an earlier day, reminiscent and of a piece with Kipling’s notion of a white man’s burden. All of this is hard to hear now, but not so hard for very many people of Prince Philip’s generation, now very few in number, who fail to realize that the British Empire is long gone, but replaced with an inclusive Commonwealth of Nations appropriate for the modern age.

The generation has changed, and this change could in the history books of the future be marked by the death of Prince Philip. But I do think those same books will note Queen Elizabeth as head of state, and Prince Philip as her consort as fulfilling their roles in a way that brought comfort to their subjects not just in the UK but throughout the Commonwealth of Nations. If I can draw an inexact and sort of clumsy parallel drawn from the history of my own life, my parents, though they might, and did, battle the two of them and have profound disagreements, come the morning, they were both still there. This then begs the question about what effect divorce has on the royal family, and I suspect on larger reflection, the answer would generally be, played out on a national stage the answer would be it could hardly be better than it is when played out within a traditional nuclear family. Thank goodness the royal family has the upcoming and very stable example of Prince William to overshadow the mistakes made on the domestic front by his father Prince Charles. But returning to his own father the imperfect consort- that Prince Philip’s offensive gaffes may have betrayed an allegiance to an earlier age from which the world has, thankfully, moved away, it is perversely this glimpse of flawed humanity that at least partly functions in the present age to bind the monarchy to its subjects, both in the United Kingdom and throughout the commonwealth. Flawed, but flaws that contribute just enough humanity to temper an otherwise remote symbol- and sufficiently human to be endearing.

This is where I get to, then, when considering effective conservatism, with the British royal family as the exemplar. Endurance and comfortability, a comforting realization in an age lacking in certainty that, come what may, they’ll still be there. Conservative, indeed, in the sense of slow to change, but always mindful of change and the need to, but at a pace well-considered that might seem as gradual as the exfoliation of the stonework of Windsor Castle. But then, that’s perhaps as it should be, as Windsor Castle remains of a piece with the Windsor royal dynasty.

For those handful of my gentle readers, you’ve noticed I’ve lately cited Russel Belk and Susan Pearce and their books of several decades ago about the nature of collecting. Dr Pearce’s On Collecting is particularly cogent and amply repays a number of rereads. In the course of doing this just now I’ve found something about which I take exception, that a person’s collecting, if what’s gathered truly is a collection and not just an accumulation, must in the fulness of time come ‘naturally’ (her word) to an end.

Really? Perhaps I am more acquisitive than the normal run of collector, but I must say, now approaching my 7th decade, there is no end in sight. What do Japanese woodblock prints, Hawaiiana, and Bloomsbury Group artists have in common? If you can answer that, then you’ll also know that, during my mortal span, collecting will be lifelong. The answer, as you will have divined, is that these are my collecting interests, and if I broke these down respectively into ukiyo-e depictions of the Chushingura, ‘umeke, and the paintings of Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell, it’s apparent that there’s some focus and my interests are not just acquisitive. A sidebar, I could break these down by several additional degrees of specificity, but I sense even at this remove that my readers’ eyes have begun to give hints of a sleepy heaviness.

While of course, anyone’s collecting interest starts out as an enthusiasm, and is for many people and most objects short-lived, the sustaining passion lies in what I have so often written about, a connoisseurship that lies in a general rubric consisting of a deep understanding of the object and its placement within the history of material culture. Indeed, collecting is basic to material culture, and connoisseurship is an integral component, dressed up, if you will, with the application of a number of methodologies. When was it made? How was it made? Who made it? And what motivated the maker? Is it a good example, or a bad example of its kind and why? Any method, whether just an analysis of form or a more complex consideration of cultural context, can be a sustaining driver for a collector, and in my case as in that of most others, this leads into some fascinating byways. My partner Keith McCullar and I began collecting ukiyo-e forty years ago based on not just their aesthetic appeal but also because they fit into our budget. A pretty good impression by the prolific early 19th century artist Kunisada could be had, then as now, for a couple of hundred dollars. What we both found, though, was that these so-called images of the floating world were so often bound up with the popular kabuki theatre, this then sparked an interest in kabuki, and, in particular the Chushingura, the tale of the 47 samurai who sought revenge at the cost of their own lives, following the suicide of their master shamefully forced by his own overlord. This becomes a long story of Japanese culture that amongst other things led me to read a yearlong course on the subject at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London the many aspects of which, although dovetailing into my interest in ukiyo-e-e would itself take a year in the retelling- interesting to me, but even at this point sense an ever-increasing heaviness of the eyelids amongst my own patient readers.

Although absent the sense of honor that was the driving force of the 47 leaderless samurai, or ronin, our own collecting activity, and this accords with Pearce’s own explanation, does also accord with the ronin in that it allows for order and control of at least a portion of one’s life. Collections are one’s own, and provide a safe space from which one can escape the vicissitudes of the world outside one’s collecting ambit. It is ironic, now I think about it, that the long Eurocentric tradition of capitalism and concomitant

stresses associated with it can be relieved in a musing associated with a pleasurable aspect of capitalist acquisition.

Still and all, collecting and an understanding of the nature of the pieces we’ve acquired remains sustaining, particularly in this time of COVID forced isolation. Indeed, it is the introspection wrought by isolation that has caused me more deeply to consider the nature of collecting, and brought me to the works of Belk and Pearce. And, I must say, the coincidence of an academic consideration has considerably enhanced the enjoyment of my own collecting activity.

And, indeed, there is no end to it in sight. Something not particularly specific to my own interests but worthwhile considering, is the prolific output of those artists whose work Keith McCullar and I collect. Whether it is the unknown Hawaiian artisans who crafted ‘umeke from countless kou trees, or Kunisada whose prints naturally were reproduced in their multiples, or the long lived Duncan Grant who painted anything and everything during his 80 year career, we’ve ample opportunity to acquire objects and then, in the fulness of time, achieve a level of understanding which I would prefer to consider connoisseurship, allowing us to discriminate between the better and the lesser productions of the artist. At the risk of becoming immodest, I can say that my own vocation as a dealer in art and antiques helps me in my collecting avocation, giving me a better ability than I might have otherwise to make these distinctions. In our own time where art and artists are so often lionized, it should be borne in mind that not every artistic production is a masterwork- a plain fact with is often- and very often by the artists themselves- occluded.

For all this, though, my musing on collecting is entirely that and shouldn’t serve as a guide for anyone else. In the chapter in her book entitled ‘The Poetics of Collecting’, Dr Pearce identifies five basic collecting strategies, including completing a set or series of objects, which makes it clear that this strategy is self-limiting. Perhaps realizing that what she’s identified is not a catchall, she concludes by writing ‘It is the collector who decides upon the rules of the game.’ And in this we are in complete agreement- my game has no end in sight.

What do the names Warhol, Pollock, Still, Wyeth, and Rockwell have in common? Besides instantly recognizable as firmly established within the canon of American art, their works have also recently graced the New York salerooms, offloaded not by Wall Street types who have to fund a costly divorce, or rogue investors who got caught on the wrong side of GameStop, but by accredited art museums who felt some significant financial pinch.

As my gentle readers will doubtless remember, I have argued that keeping the doors open is of paramount concern to cultural institutions. With doors closed and in the case of fine art, storage rooms hermetically sealed with controlled atmosphere, public museums and other cultural institutions serve no purpose. If in the case of the Everson Museum, this requires the sale of an early drip painting by Jackson Pollock, or as with Covent Garden the sale of the Hockney portrait of a former director, so be it.

The problem as pointed out in an article by Andrew Russeth in yesterday’s Art News is that what were the occasional deaccessions have gathered speed, and there seems to be a flood, with museum after museum parting company with some of their key holdings. That this has been decried generally by the Association of Art Museum Directors hasn’t made much difference, but then, the AAMD doesn’t have to pay to keep the lights on.

What has made de-accessioning acceptable, and something museums have readily bought into, is the notion that sales of canonical art for high prices will allow the acquisition of other works not as well established within the canon by those of diverse background. Indeed, this has fed into a move generally toward racial equity in the arts that is ostensibly a good thing, acknowledging finally that institutions of high culture in the western world are inherently white, Eurocentrically oriented, with a strong bias toward work favoured by if not royalty then certainly by those in the highest economic strata. Indeed, patterns of patronage of the arts are still highly functional in the 21st century in a manner even the Esterhazy’s would recognize.

A move toward racial equity does just at this time beg the question, that it is basically window dressing in a time of stress for the arts. In Russeth’s article, pictured are the facades of the Baltimore, Brooklyn and New Orleans Museums of Art, with their grand Greek revival architecture clearly derived from the mother ship of the museum world, the British Museum. This visibly betokens what’s at work- a short-term acknowledgement of diversity in the modern world, but without change to established cultural structure. Moreover, ‘diversity’ often means the inclusion of works by people of colour who have already moved into the established canon. Russeth quotes museum studies scholar fari nzinga, who questions the sincerity of cultural outreach when she asks ‘If it is going to be the same high-profile handful of black and people of color artists that get all the museums show, are they really even helping anybody out?’

Indeed. In her 1995 book On Collecting: an Investigation into Collecting in the European Tradition, Susan Pearce points to the establishment of patterns of collecting that go back into European prehistory, with modern museums as the outgrowth of patterns ingrained over millennia. As part of that, it is museums that enshrine objects- be they wall art or medieval reliquaries- that for those who

display them and those who see the display, have become fetishized. ‘Enshrine’ then becomes the operative word- the modern artwork certainly within the museum environment serves the same function as the reliquary of a thousand years ago.

As a retail vendor in art and antiques, with everything in my ambit just merchandise, I am perforce resistant to the mystical element that rarefies and canonizes museum holdings. It is then a bit easier for me to understand the commercial imperative that then yields to deaccessioning. And, too, I realize that everything in my stock has been owned by someone prior to me, likely many generations of someone prior and that, inevitably, museums will fail and pass away- as will their contents- as surely as did Hypatia and the library of Alexandria.

For all high culture, though, this seems to be an inflection point, with the Eurocentric structures tottering, but will they be saved by expressions of diversity? Does this signal both a path forward and a sea change- or is it tokenism serving as an expeditious stop gap? As it always does, time alone will tell. Bear in mind, though, that those Greek revival buildings still contain within their walls objects and traditions that in form, content, and most importantly, ethos and worldview strongly match and are consonant with their Eurocentric exterior.