Mount Jupiter Reports

Another AGM at the Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation

There’s something irksome when organisations assume titles that over-reach, you know what we mean? A constituency has to be earned somehow. Glasgow Art Map gets to be Glasgow’s art map by dint of it fulfilling that relatively modest claim. Glasgow International? Kinda. Edinburgh Art Festival? Close enough.

A few years ago one ‘Scottish Short Film Festival’ appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, having undergone a rebrand from the rather less officious sounding Raptor Filmz Short Scottish Film Festival, based in West Lothian. There are plenty of pay-to-play film festivals that exist primarily to distribute awards and scaffold an otherwise perilously wasteful activity with the image of an audience and critical integrity. Indeed, this is the very model of every award for hairdressing, beauty, PR, social media marketers, amateur sports clubs, and, of course, the RA Summer Exhibition. We don’t begrudge self-congratulatory fluff when it’s so naked, but there’s something about the guise of officialdom that rubs us the wrong way. Wait, this is the Scottish Short Film Festival? Wow! You mean to say it is representative, transparent, and somehow endowed with the significant responsibility its title implies…

Anyway, having made some enemies through recent jibes (MJR#6), this month we’re picking the scab to ask: Scottish Art News? What is it? Where did it come from? Is it a psy-op? The title has been publishing quite a lot of verbiage online since 2019, but to our great surprise has been alive and kicking in-print since 2008. We can assume most critics haven’t much explored who is commissioning them in that time, so we thought we’d take that liberty. Scottish Art News is published by the Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation, a charity registered in England with the ‘aim to promote the exploration, understanding and enjoyment of Scottish art and creativity alongside the maintenance and public display from a collection of art.’ Thanks daddy!

That sizable collection once adorned the international offices of investment bank Robert Fleming & Co, founded by the eponymous Dundonian in the nineteenth century. In 2000, the bank was sold to Chase Manhattan for $7.7bn and the charity was formed to care for its art collection. That year, Dundee Boab’s descents set up Fleming Family & Partners, a new asset management firm—known since 2014 as Stonehage Fleming following a merger with a South African firm originally established in 1976 to facilitate the outbound migration of wealthy families in the years of a collapsing minority rule in southern Africa. Stonehage Fleming are now headquartered in Jersey, with offices in other very normal places like Switzerland, Israel and Luxembourg. As Private Air—the magazine for the ‘world’s most discerning’ but apparently not very literate travellers—reported in 2010, some of the collection still ‘gives pleasure to those who work in [sic] Fleming family’s offices and boardroom nearby.’

Honestly? Looks kinda lit. RIP.

The Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation operated a physical premises in London’s Mayfair until 2015, after which it embraced a rather convenient ‘museum without walls’ strategy, i.e. loaning out touring shows. Very ‘big society’ coded tbqh. It runs on the fumes of a truly massive endowment, exceeding funds of £13m at year ending March 2025, and is governed by five trustees:

• Rory David Fleming, distant relative to old queenie herself and nephew of Ian Fleming of James Bond notoriety.
• John Philip Henry Schomberg Scott, peer and the 13th Laird of Gala
• Katrina Jane Sparrow née Fleming, peer and socialite 
• James Essex Holloway CBE, Westminster-born, Courtauld-educated retired director of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery
• Richard Schuster, Eton-educated peer, grandson to Roland Herman Hermon-Hodge, 2nd Baron Wyfold, and Dorothy Fleming.

Excuse the wacky names jumpscare (thanks thepeerage.com!).

Though it’s very much a family affair, you’d be right to guess that none reside in Scotland, making their service all the more magnanimous and not at all about cultivating favourable markets. The charities register identifies one employee earning £60–70k, who we deign to presume is young American director Theodore Albano, also London-based and whose qualifications are elusive, but who certainly can’t pronounce Edinburgh. The enterprise acquires works in physical media, including contemporary art, and that’s fine, actually. Rich folk can splurge however they like—though we’d rather it weren’t tax deductible. These works and their bedraggled artists (dead and alive) invariably become fodder to the canon-building work of Scottish Art News.

You might say we are petty and professionally jealous, but that’s not fair. We are petty, professionally challenged and fiscally jealous. You see, the thing is, we just are not so sure that the only continuously funded publication on art in Scotland should be a self-annointed glossy mag and delirious blog run from West London central command for the purposes of legitimising a century-long vanity project of hereditary aristocrats, but maybe it’s just us.

Complaints regarding ~the state of arts criticism~ are deeply wearisome… we know. We’re quite resigned to the post-critical fugue where our remaining column inches are seized by invertebrate press-release-munching or feckless poesie on rocks, time, mud, and so on. With our last glimmer of hope, we’re placing inordinate pressure on sprightly newcomers Bumper Magazine, PAMphlet and Material, whose emergence promises some ~discourse~ unfettered by the imaginary of an orotund bourgeoisie. Time will tell if they too elude the trappings of hack whimsy. We dearly hope so.

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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.