Mount Jupiter Reports

A whole vibe tbh

Mount Jupiter Reports #8: Centre for Constant Agonies

Before it became the Centre for Contemporary Arts or even the Third Eye Centre, 350 Sauchiehall Street was home to a wallpaper warehouse, where rolls of patterned frippery lay in waiting to disguise cracked plaster and other deformities across the city of Glasgow. Its late years as the CCA might also be imagined as a site full of surface treatments, of thinning membranes struggling to hold back certain collapse.

As the story goes, the more destructive second Mackintosh Building fire—which claimed casualties in the much-cherised ABC venue and the much-feared Jumpin Jaks nightclub—forced the neighbouring CCA into a months-long closure in 2018. Speculation remains on whether a clandestine wax-melting soirée hosted by self-promoter and womanboss Muriel Gray on the premises (think Eyes Wide Shut) was really to blame. Before they’d really recovered, COVID-19 lockdowns hit and socio-financial issues compounded through the following trauma-brained miasma in which everyone was quite horrid to one another for some years. By then, many of the cultural tenants who paid rent to the organisation had vanished.

In 2023, hospitality workers mounted a wildcat strike against Saramago—the independent tenant of CCA’s café and bar, named unironically after communist writer José Saramago. The ensuing dispute forced a severance of contract, leaving the art centre with diminished amenities and a dwindling footfall. At the end of that year, director of nearly two decades Francis McKee left and the post was never permanently filled—following a much longer trend in non-filling and redistributing executive and curatorial capacity which had already ground the centralised programme to near standstill.

Returning to the scene of the crime?

In an attempt to stem outgoings, the entire centre closed in December 2024, securing £3.4 million in Multi-Year Funding from Creative Scotland the following month and reopening in April 2025. It would shutter again not two months later following the board and interim director’s catastrophic mishandling of Art Workers for Palestine protestors who called upon the organisation to join the cultural boycott of Israel. On its last legs, the CCA entered liquidation in January 2026. All its staff were made redundant. The plants are dead, the archive is arrested.

In the public autopsy, it has become easiest to shift blame to certain unstoppable forces majeure or the ill-defined boogeymen of management and power. A far less popular take would also recognise the interrelated apathy, overwork and underexperience which characterised the CCA’s last years, pulling it ever-further away from the considerations of would-be collaborators (and hirers), let alone the heady dreams of internationalism and experimentation that once defined the Third Eye Centre. Its gift was once a centralising energy, depleted steadily by events named here alongside more diffuse injuries not limited to the post-pandemic evacuation of the city centre. Though few dare admit, the quality of its cultural offer stands firmly amongst those.

So dilapidated is the tradition of critique in Glasgow that a commentary on ‘quality’ might seem like violence. In the role of CCA’s collapse, some have indeed pointed to the external pressure of criticism—of the so-felt noxious discourses of activists and… online trolls—but disenchantment is rarely welcome by those under the spell. Latent controversies, willfully ignored, are not the creation of those who recognise them. Criticism is not harm, conflict is not abuse.

In fragility, we see backdoors opening to purported solutions which smuggle bad or unqualified actors (MJR#1) and dangerous structures (MJR#5) into a panicked system. This is a microcosm of what Naomi Klein named the shock doctrine two decades ago, wherein crises of existential consequence effect a relaxation of regulations and long-held standards, providing cover for the migration of power from public to private hands. In the perilous hour, consultants, charlatans and commercial landlords pose solutions that easily seduce.

That, unfortunately, leads us to the events now unfolding. Whisper quiet, building owners Creative Scotland have contracted property consultants to manage a call for interest in the letting or sale of 350 Sauchiehall Street, published on 23 July 2026, leaving parties with an insult of just three weeks’ notice to assemble proposals through the August period traditionally reserved for summer closures. With a cultural future being protected by little more than ‘client’s preference’, this disingenuous and shrunken process ensures that no public input will be solicited, nor can any serious coalition form to develop an adequate, costed business case. A fire sale in waiting, this decision disgraces fifty years of public investment in the ownership, maintenance, renovation, and life-affirming alchemy of the site.

Pre-emptive propositions for reuse have already been publicised in appeal to both the general public and Creative Scotland to indulge a popularity competition with no clear rules. A group of well-meaning theatre-makers headed by Vanishing Point first pitched to co-habitate in the building, reviving it as a public centre for theatrical production. Largely overlooking the myriad existing facilities for theatre-makers, including… the largest performing arts festival in the world being located 45 minutes away, the cohort seem to have vanquished the visual arts and film from their utopia of annoying peoples.

Early onset dementia? Boomers fail to learn from the closure of Sheffield’s National Centre for Popular Music after seventeen months.

Much much worse is the mausoleum to boomer nostalgia being imagineered by ScotsRock, a well-financed and media-ready organisation with no history whatsoever (registered with OSCR on 26 June 2026), who have found willing patronage in national cringe-inducers not limited to Midge Ure and Lulu. Privatisation backed exclusively by credulous expats in the guise of public good, the Jock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame promises little more than the fossilisation of the living culture—£22.50 for adults, over 65s go free—until inevitable mismanagement and collapse 18 months later when the largest unit amongst Alexander ‘Greek’ Thomson’s Grecian Chambers might be scooped up by a commercial landlord and repurposed as Scotland’s emptiest vape superstore and aspiring insurance claim. Relight my fire!

With the fate of our Sauchiehall Street agora hanging in the balance, we need the scrutiny of pedants and protestors more than ever. The professed remit of Creative Scotland is to support ‘the arts, screen and creative industries across all parts of Scotland on behalf of everyone who lives, works or visits here.’ Anything other than an about turn on this offensive call for interest and a commitment to employing a transparent, democratic and visionary process in the name of restitution will represent a failure of this fundamental duty and should, MoJu believes, result in the dismissal of the entire board. Remember that vampires—consultants, charlatans, and Lulu inclusive—need only need a willing invite to cross the threshold.

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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.