The Paul Hamlyn Foundation Awards for Artists are a rare beacon of generosity and good practice—each recipient receives £50,000 over three years with no strings attached—but last night’s (12 November) ceremony, at the Hamlyn Foundation HQ in Kings Cross, was particularly fine and cheery. The visual arts contingent—Emma Hart, Will Holder, Tina Keane, Patrick Staff, Karen Mirza and Brad Butler—demonstrated both a satisfactorily wide age range, as well as an impressive span of important and innovative work. And this year’s keynote speaker, the novelist Jeanette Winterson, delivered a barnstorming speech that managed to be both hard-hitting and inspirational, in one high octane package.
Ms Winterson kicked off by flagging up two key—if radically contrasting—art world events of this week: the Christie’s sale of Modigliani’s Reclining Nude to a Chinese collector for $170 million, and Southwark Council’s rejection of the application, by Rohan Silva and Hannah Barry, to create 800 artist’s spaces in the Peckham multistory car park in favour of a scheme by Mayfair developers, Pop Community Ltd, which offers only 50 studio spaces. Not only did this make the novelist “thank every god you can think of for the Paul Hamlyn Foundation” but also made her wish that there was a 1% art sales tax on every seller, buyer and intermediary to fund the purchase of working spaces for artists.
What then ensued was an impassioned clarion call to realign values and place “the strangeness that is the experience of art” at the centre of everyone’s lives. Winterson declared that “art is energy sometimes posing as mass […] always and everywhere about the human condition […] and always about the essential creativity of human beings.” The novelist then asked the audience to “remember that Paul Hamlyn, the German Jew, came to Britain, built a business and he is why we are here tonight.” She concluded with an entreaty to the gathered throng to honour Hamlyn’s legacy “by doing what he wanted you to do—make things, create things, be bold in your vision. And if you make any money—give some back!”