These retro times. No sooner had I finished stowing the candles I’d bought on the advice of the deputy prime minister, Oliver Dowden, who believes we should all prepare for darkness, than the latest winner of the Turner prize, Jesse Darling, was complaining in his acceptance speech of Margaret Thatcher, who had, he said, removed art from schools on the grounds it was not “economically viable”. Crikey. This was truly dizzying. Had I gone too early on the Warninks, or, like season nine of Dallas, had the last three decades merely been an extended dream?
Leaving aside the fact that when Thatcher resigned in 1990, Darling was nine, such talk, received so rapturously (and so unquestioningly) by the art world, seems very odd to me. There are plenty of people, elected and non-elected, who are far more deserving of our ire when it comes to the arts right now. Unlike Thatcher, they’re alive and kicking, and mostly went themselves to expensive schools where words like impasto and Velázquez doubtless flowed freely from the mouths of teachers, and flashy walk-in kilns were standard.
But Darling’s pronouncement wasn’t even accurate. In the 1980s, art and design were compulsory for children up to 14; my mother is still in possession of several unusual objects, I like to call them installations, to prove it. In the run-up to the imposition of the national curriculum in 1988, moreover, Thatcher’s education secretary, Kenneth Baker, initially argued for the subject to be studied to 16. Try to imagine anyone, whether Labour or Tory, so much as suggesting such a thing now.
Missing but germane
Women in Revolt!, an exhibition at Tate Britain about art and feminism between 1970 and 1990, is so invigorating. Gazing at billboards that had once been “improved” (ie graffitied) by droll second wavers, I feel better – tougher, livelier – than I have in months. “Renew his interest in carpentry,” instructs an ad for Nice’n Easy hair dye starring a tree trunk and a flirty-looking woman with an intensely brown feather cut. To this, someone had added, in spray paint, the sardonic rejoinder: “Cut his head off.” As Saturday morning outings go, it’s pretty perfect.
But outside, where the curators have set up a reading area, things get weird. Browsing the shelves, I’m struck by the fact that, while there are two volumes about trans rights among the selection of books, I can see none of the key texts of 70s feminism: no Germaine Greer and no Kate Millet, no Andrea Dworkin and no Shulamith Firestone. Is this down to ignorance, or is it, as I suspect, a form of soft censorship?
Either way, the Tate is welcome to borrow a few paperbacks from me. Who knows? At this point, my frantic underlinings and embarrassing marginalia may even mean they constitute a fully-formed collection of found objects. Possible title: A Portrait of the Young Woman in Dungarees (1988-1991).
Pass the panettone
I’ve written before of the Christmas game, Pass the Panettone, in which the Italian cake-thing is processed from house to house, no one really wanting it, until at last someone gives up and turns it into bread-and-butter pudding (or not). Yes, I know the news last week was that sales of it are up hugely (40% at Waitrose, 120% at Selfridges). But hey, this doesn’t mean anyone eats the stuff.
The point of panettone is the box, the ribbon, the portability, the flexible use-by date. In the cupboard under our stairs, several are already waiting expectantly – my diminutive but plucky Christmas sentinels in their scarlet uniforms – for their long journeys across the capital to begin.
• Rachel Cooke is an Observer columnist
