Mount Jupiter Reports

Dear Mount Jupiter, I’m starting to realise that all of my friends are English and I don’t know how to talk about it without sounding like a raving nat—any advice?

Blow-ins, sassenachs, dilettantes, or escapees from the M25-shaped circle of hell, how do we talk about the visible shifts in who is making art and noise in Glasgow…

Let’s start with an audit of the situation. Glasgow really became a home for waifs and strays in the mid-1990s, after the events of the City of Culture had leveraged the arts to rehabilitate the city’s overblown reputation for knife violence and destitution. In the early days of the EU, new people, ideas and networks poured into the once-homogenous soup, often through the freshly formed MFA at the Glasgow School of Art which was buoyed by the commercial and critical successes of those often herded by that Glasgow Miracle myth.

After the raising of the tuition fee cap down south in 2012 and the autocannibalism of Brexit, EU students left and the proportion of English and, more importantly, privately educated artists in the city began to rise at pace. With quotas determined by limited state subsidy and the prerogatives of income generation made possible by English and international students, Scots became a distinct minority at the Glasgow School of Art.

Hoisted by its own petard, the art school offers a microcosm of the apathies which ensure a deleterious downward spiral for all citizens as the city’s parts are forfeited in exchange for short-term solvency: the buses, the libraries, the museums, the after-school portfolio prep classes. It used to be the case that there were more Richards than women running the artworld. Now that battle is behind us, the time of Millies, Tillies and Hetties brings forth new answers to the operative question of just who could be arsed to swim upstream? What confidences, privileges and energy need offset the decrepitude of the Glasgow art scene?

Animating a new and different homogeneity, the preponderance of private school alums hastened post-2020 when broadsheets started to declare Glasgow the new haven for post-educated London creatives, house prices in G41 and G42 were bloated by those who could afford 20% over valuation, and, with few controls, rents following suit. Second hand, we hear that someone can’t walk down Victoria Road without seeing someone else from their Goldsmiths BA, someone else is secretly an absentee landlord, and someone else bought their Pollokshields 3-bed with cash.

The late Alasdair Gray wrote in 2012, to much controversy, that ‘arts administrators were invited to Scotland by the Scots, stayed longer but were still colonists, not because they eventually retired to England or were promoted to other jobs there, but because their work for institutions originally created to encourage art in Scotland actually depressed it.’ We wouldn’t give all the credit to the English here, as we’re very good at engineering the pensions scandals into which public money is thusly poured from the coffers of arts and leisure.

There are a couple of arts organisations in Glasgow with ‘Scotland’ or ‘Scottish’ plonked in their name. Nominative determinism would hold these to be somehow encouraging of art in Scotland (though we suppose The Common Guild is hardly a league of the people and Transmission are hardly transmitting). Semantics notwithstanding, these orgs are neither in themselves representative of their namesake geographies, nor particularly catalytic in their actions. Inflated with each micro-generation of the curatorial class, the social reproduction of managerial nothingness never fails to bore.

Where were we? Yes, so, when your friends are next sipping a cider in the Queens Park sunshine, instead of breaching the difficult topic, consider abandoning them altogether and retraining for a recession-proof industry, like mortuary science or espionage.

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Mount Jupiter Reports is a new monthly bad faith stream-of-consciousness and agony aunt service. Do you have artworld troubles? Write to mount.jupiter.conspiracy@gmail.com with your symptoms and an exorcism may be provided.