Walsall redux.

In the September 2000 New Criterion, I published an article about the town of Walsall and its fantastically bad new art gallery ("Crudity Beyond Belief"). I passed what I thought was an uncontroversial aesthetic judgment upon that unfortunate town, namely that it was very ugly.

Had I suggested that Akron, Ohio, was not the Paris of the Midwest, I doubt that it would have caused much stir even in Columbus, Ohio, let alone in the nation as a whole, but such is the unutterable small-mindedness of England, and such the inward-looking, trivial, and contemptible nature of its media of mass communication, that when the unimportant news that I had described Walsall as being "like Ceausescu's Romania with fast food outlets" finally spread via a wire service, I was for a day or two the object of public vituperation and personal abuse that was both absurd and mildly sinister. In the space of a few hours, I was contacted by about twenty radio stations, a number of television stations, and several national and local newspapers.

An outraged luminary of the Walsall town council told me over the airwaves to "bugger off"--a phrase with which he was so extremely pleased that he repeated it, apparently, many times in my absence. This is what nowadays passes in England as both wit and debate.

The outraged defender of his town's honor said that Walsall was full of hardworking people who paid their taxes: as if this fact were in contradiction to the town's ugliness or as if those who did not live in Walsall did not pay their taxes. It seemed to me to be a double burden of misfortune: to pay taxes and yet live in Walsall.

He also informed the public that the Walsall Art Gallery had won several prizes, as if the kind of people who awarded such distinctions were not the very people who have progressively mined the English townscape with their hideous designs, and whose motive when making awards is to cover up their own past aesthetic crimes. Asking British architects, town planners, or art critics to award prizes for architecture is like asking Himmler to award prizes for humanitarianism.

The level of commentary on my remarks in The New Criterion was not high. Both the BBC and a large regional newspaper reflected upon the absurdity of the name Theodore (too upper class), as if this were a refutation of my specific criticism of the art gallery: that its size was grossly out of proportion to the scale of its contents.

A BBC interviewer accused me very aggressively of being a publicity seeker. When I pointed out that The New Criterion, while an excellent publication, was not a very efficient vehicle of self-advertisement, he said that I had known that what I wrote would provoke a storm (in England's teacup). I had known no such thing, of course, and when I also pointed out that it was his radio station that had called me, not I who had called it, and begged me to appear, he simply moved on without apology. Several radio stations informed their listeners of the area in which I lived and of the precise address of my place of employment, a distinctly menacing thing to do in the circumstances and one which hardly added to the quality of the debate.