Seen Report: false columns and fake friends

Summer’s over, back to work. Hope you’re ready for those emails. You know the ones, they’re all the same: we’re excited to announce… and we’re delighted to be working with… followed by some unconvincing and uninspiring quote from a c-suite exec or a prestigious patron or suspicious sponsor you’ve never heard of. Every time I read one of those lines I want to walk into traffic. The art world is, unfortunately, full of these clichés. As a writer, I take each one as a personal offence. As a cynic, I always wonder how excited and delighted are they, really?

Every now and then the veneer cracks and we find out what they really think. This happened the other day when it was revealed that a letter hidden in a concrete column in the National Gallery’s Sainsbury Wing was recovered during renovation work. The letter was written 33 years ago by John Sainsbury, the Right Honourable Lord Sainsbury of Preston Candover, one of the three Sainsbury brothers who helped to fund the wing. It was typed on Sainsbury’s headed paper, signed, wrapped in a plastic bag (Sainsbury’s, presumably) and dropped into the wet cement of the column while it was being constructed. It’s worth reading the letter in full:

“If you have found this note you must be engaged in demolishing one of the false columns that have been placed in the foyer of the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery. I believe that the false columns are a mistake of the architect and that we would live to regret our accepting of this detail of his design. Let it be known that one of the donors of this building is absolutely delighted that your generation has decided to dispense with the unnecessary columns.”

That architect, actually those architects, were Robert Venturi and his wife and collaborator Denise Scott Brown. You might remember those names from their 1968 book, Learning from Las Vegas. Venturi and Scott Brown were working at a time of Mies’ high modernism and buildings were steel and glass machines for living in. Venturi and Scott Brown saw things differently, they brought playfulness into architecture and put the post- into post-modernism with ideas like false arches, false windows and false columns. You can see these on the outside of the Sainsbury Wing, the Corinthian columns overlap like they’re stuttering and some don’t even reach the floor: it’s an architectural joke, the kind that you only get once you’ve melted your brain spending seven years becoming chartered.

Their architecture was popular within the industry but was difficult to sell to the wider public. When in January 1986, they were announced as the architects of the Nat Gal’s extension, they faced criticism. This increased as the project continued. Lord Sainsbury was pissed off with the false columns inside the wing’s entrance lobby. As Venturi & Scott Brown intended, they weren’t structural, their only purpose was to make the ground floor feel like an enclosed crypt. It worked, the entrance was cramped, inconvenient, and unwelcoming. Sainsbury argued with Venturi and with Neil MacGregor, the National Gallery’s director at the time, but was overruled. This letter was his own private protest, “a compromise” according to Sainsbury’s son. Sainsbury died in 2022, before seeing the columns demolished, but after having the plans approved – he must have died happy.

But why couldn’t he just come out and say it? What did he, Lord Sainsbury of Preston Candover, have to lose? I’d respect it more if he came out and said what he wanted to say. Plenty of other people did.

Recently I spoke to art dealer Michael Findlay about his experience at the centre of the nascent art world of 1960s New York. The world he described was amateur; It simply wasn’t as slick and professional as it is today. Many collectors, writers and artists were part-time. Things were personal and they cared about art and intent, not just its investment value. There were disagreements and arguments. Sometimes these spilled over into fights. But people spoke their minds.

Why can’t the art world today be honest with itself? What’s with all the simping? All too often criticism and disagreements are saved for the group chats and the close friends’ stories. You’re lucky if you get to see a screenshot. Meanwhile on the surface, everyone’s on board and on brand. I think we’d be in a better place if criticism and controversy was out in the open. We might get less done, but we might all learn something. Over the next month, as you open your inbox to another exciting announcement. Write back to them, and ask them what they really think.