Dave Lee Outs Serpentine Directors' Greed

Dave Lee Outs Serpentine Directors' Greed

Postby CAP » Thu Dec 19, 2013 6:36 am

If you don't subscribe to The Jackdaw (my subscription has lapsed I confess) the bones of the article are cloned across Fleet Street. Here's The Independent's pickings. The Times' is behind a paywall - predictably. :(
The figures were revealed by leading arts commentator David Lee, prompting him to launch a devastating attack on the gallery. Mr Lee said that Ms Peyton-Jones is only running “a small gallery in a former tearoom” in Hyde Park, which does not even have its own collection.

Ms Peyton-Jones’s package exceeds the £140,000 paid to National Gallery director Nicholas Penny, who presides over a world class collection and international scholarly exhibitions and approaches that of the Tate’s director, Nicholas Serota, who manages a vast collection on a salary and benefits deal of around £160,000. He declined a 2012 bonus “in view of the pay freeze” at the institution.

The Serpentine’s co-director Hans-Ulrich Obrist, although not listed as a company director in the accounts, also saw his package increase from at least £80,000 to within the range of £120,000 to £130,000 in 2012.

Mr Lee also criticised the Arts Council, which he said had “screamed hourly” in 2011 that it was losing over 30 per cent of its taxpayer subsidy and warning of “hard choices” ahead. Its choice was to abolish grants to some 200 organisations, making many redundant. The Serpentine, however, was awarded special status as a “regularly funded organisation”. The Serpentine gets around £1.2m from the Arts Council, about a fifth of the gallery’s costs.

Mr Lee added that the increases came during a period of austerity “when fat cats in the City were being excoriated daily”. He is calling for the Charity Commission to “investigate this profligacy” urgently, and for the Serpentine’s subsidy to be suspended “immediately”. His criticisms will be published on Thursday in The Jackdaw, the satirical art magazine.

Mr Lee writes that the directors “do not deserve anywhere near” what they receive from an institution which has also “enjoyed” 12 National Lottery awards totalling £6.8m.

Mr Lee also questions why Jake and Dinos Chapman “need another [current] exhibition at the subsidised Serpentine” when they have exhibited extensively at public galleries and their dealer has two available big London premises. He claims that the Serpentine shows too much art that is already available at major dealers’ commercial premises.


Well charity begins at home, they say. And clearly Peyton-Jones and the creepy Obrist have made themselves right at home. Well done Dave!

:D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D
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