David Cameron Kills Art

The Campaign to Protect Rural England's recent fundraising campaign involved asking sixty of Britain's artists and noted figures to commit to a postcard a creative effort that expressed "their love, hopes and fears for England’s countryside." The results will be auctioned this week at Bonham's, and can be viewed here.The collection is a mixture of the image and the written word (as all best postcards are) and contains some interesting stuff, such as Timothy West's Old Great Western Rialway, and some quite striking landscapes, such as John Emanuel's Cumbrian Fells.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, media attention has homed in on the efforts of David Cameron, the bright-eyed, bushy-tailed Tory pretender to Downing Street.



Rather than offer an original sketch, compose a few lines, or promote a specific issue, Dave has simply cut out a copy of his Party's logo and pasted it onto the postcard. In one way, this does rather sum up Cameron's hopes for the English Countryside - that its inhabitants will vote Conservative at the next general election.

This is the latest shot in Cameron's media blitz to promote his clumsy rebranding of the Tory party as something fresh, modern and conceptually bite-size. Like the rest of his efforts, it will no doubt enthrall, embarrass and enrage his base in equal measures. Artistically, this is only "modern" in the most superficial sense; the French have been doing this sort of stuff for a nearly a century, and nowadays only the most perversely "traditional" see the abstract or conceptual as outside the norm. What it is is a bland and bleak response to the richness of rural England. The logo itself is only a year or so old, designed to emphasise the newness, greenness and oak-tree-ness of Cameron's party. It carries no weighty symbolism, and brings to mind not the ancient patterns of the English landscape, but the stark and airy, skyscraping London office in which (I presume) it was designed - by (I presume again) young city-bred graphic designers who had never seen an oak tree until they checked google image. Surrounded by a blank margin, the image offers no detail, no thought, and all the charm of a rubber stamp.

England's landscape is vital to its identity and culture, something which the CPRE clearly depends upon, has grown out of, and seeks to promote. Images of the landscape can contain a tapestry of emotive ideas. Looking at a Constable, for example, the viewer can find in it the brilliance and dynamism of a cutting-edge artistic style, the comfort of pastoral tradition and the picturesque, or a social concern for depleted rural industry. In his vague gesture, Cameron has avoided all this potential in favour of a probably lazy, possibly jokey attempt at self-promotion. Ann Widdecombe's is much nicer:



I believe I have just out-Toried the Tory leader. Alarm bells should be ringing for at least one of us.