A Grand Tour

I've been on a little tour of the North East, taking advantage of out of season hotel rates. In search of reminders of industrial heritage, this is now nearly all contained in museums, such as the marvellous Locomotion railway sheds in Shildon. Looking at old photos one sees how much the landscape has been cleaned up. There's little physical stuff left to remind you of the industries of the past. After the Industrial Revolution we now have the nostalgia revolution, even though few today would consider working a lifetime underground digging in narrow dark tunnels in filth and grime particularly nostalgic. Eeee, them were t'days! 
 
 Gone with the jobs for life and the communities these created and supported (brilliantly portrayed in the work of miner turned artist Norman Cornish) are the institutions of community, be they pubs or trades unions or queues at the fish and chip wagon. The centre of Bishop Auckland has been tweedified, and a similar story plays out in Spennymoor, where the public space seems neutralized and where one detects the hand of 'regeneration.' Have consultants been at work here?
 
 In place of community comes individualism and whilst it may have taken some time for Thatcherism to fully penetrate these parts it has done so now with a vengeance, first with the ejection of Labour in so many 'red wall' seats, but now with the rise of Reform, which Electoral Calculus suggests will transform the political map of the North. These mainly Brexit supporting areas will have found nothing to reassure them that the 'benefits' of the UK's departure from the EU have left them feeling any better off. The Brexit failure has left a vacuum which Farage, irony upon irony is seeking to fill (and now it turns out Trump is no respecter of Brexit).
 
 But happily there is resistance, and some of it comes from the art world. I am cheered by editorials in the freebie art publications which circulate in these parts. Listings mag The Crack says: 'Elon Musk. What a strange man, but I'ma guessing you could say that about anyone from the extreme right. Go on, choose some of the usual suspects. How about this lot: Hitler, Mosley, Webster, Franco, Hoover, Bannon, Yaxley-Lennon, Farage, Trump - you have to admit there's not a lot of 'normal' amongst this fairly broad selection.' Mixing up Farage with Hitler and Franco? Radical stuff! Then we get a slightly less vitriolic take in Artwork, 'The North's Original Free Arts Newspaper' which says [Big Tech's] 'specious claim to be defending 'free speech' has proved sufficient cover for them to hide behind and escape any responsibility for what has turned out all too often to be very damaging.' Separately, it says 'It remains to be seen whether the election of a rabid climate change denier to the White House will bring any further signs of policy moderation.'
 
 This sort of talk from a sector which has more than most adopted the full 'Wokest' Monty, or as we should now possibly call it, Deism (after DEI - Diversity, Equality, Inclusion) makes one hark back to the days of Nazi 'degenerate' art exhibitions (which proved extremely popular with the public). The new resistance to the New Rightists will perhaps take shape in the form of a new degenerate art (God knows what that may look like). I am used to reading editorials in Art Monthly magazine excoriating the Philistine Rightists taking over the planet, but perhaps such condemnations can be expected in a metropolitan art journal whose speciality is obscure PhD level artist interviews.
 
 Here in the North there could be a rawer sense of injustice at being taken for fools by the ‘levelling up’ con. Behind Spennymoor’s rather depressed looking town centre sits a large Lidl supermarket and not a flat cap to be seen (apart from my own that is – which I bought in France which allows me to share these random thoughts).