Taking Liberties

I spy

Spooks are currently hitting the big and small screens. The Coen brothers' latest black comedy Burn After Reading threw an ex-CIA analyst, a retired Secret Service officer, and gym workers into a Potomac of confusion. Sir Harry and co return this evening in Spooks and in the latest James Bond film premieres on Wednesday in Leicester Square (which clashes with the Eccles Centre debate on the US Presidential elections).

The careers section of the website of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), Bond's purported employers, suggests that life is not all DB5s and baccarat: on offer is a 'virtual administrator', which allows hopeful Moneypennies the chance to "find out more about being an Administrator in SIS and test [their] skills". The mundane side of spying - the collating, processing and assessing of data - is ever more important. Eavesdropping activities, such as those that take place via GCHQ can hoover up a vast amount of electronic chatter, placing huge demands on the technical ability to separate the intelligence wheat from the coincidental chaff. And, currently, there is a debate about the safeguards, such as the European Convention on Human Rights, that can be placed on such activities and how they may be expanded in the light of encryption, secure email, online chatrooms, pay-as-you go phones, and internet telephony. The interactive in the Taking Liberties exhibition touches on these issues.

All this may make one wish for a bygone age of espionage. However, things weren't always simple then, either. A snippet of this is on display in the exhibition's section on 'Freedom of speech and belief'. In 1932 Sir Compton Mackenzie, warmly remembered not least for Whisky Galore, revealed the existence of the SIS for the first time. This was done in his memoirs of his time in the Aegean intelligence service, Greek Memories, at the start of the Great War. Although Mackenzie was correcting another account, and most of the people named were either retired or deceased, he was found guilty under the Official Secrets Act. The book was withdrawn until 1940. Mackenzie was a keen Scottish nationalist, and there is an interesting link with the writer John Saunders Lewis, who authored one of the early Welsh nationalist pamphlets on display in the 'United Kingdom?' section: in 1919, he served under Mackenzie at Athens. Someone should make a film about it all...

It's crunchy. But is it Art?

The American writer Jonathan Franzen was on the radio this morning getting excited about the end of the credit boom. He was pleased at this particular correction, not only because it meant that the market was reflecting reality, but also because money-worries are a powerful source of human stories: pain, Franzen suggested, equals art.

I was also lucky enough to be invited to a private view of the current National Gallery exhibition, Renaissance Faces: Van Eyck to Titian, which was notable not just for reuniting a series of works (including portraits of van Eyck and his wife) but also a fantastic trio of two paintings and a sculpture of Philip II of Spain – stunning examples of patronage. (I was also trying to pick up some tips on how to conduct a gallery tour.)

These two things – the Renaissance and the connections between money and art – were the subject of two good presentations during the seminar at Birkbeck on Tuesday. Did the wealth created by bankers in 15th century Florence lead to the leap in creativity in sculpture, illumination, painting and fresco; or, as some art historians suggest, had art become a safer ‘asset class’ during a recession?

Perhaps there's a similarly complicated equation linking rights and the economy. This is particularly true in the 'Freedom from Want' section of Taking Liberties, which looks at how social rights have developed from the vagaries of the Poor Laws to the creation of the Welfare State. But the connection is also apparent in the 'Right to Vote' section: as the cities grew and more people had a financial stake in society, so did demands for the right to elect representatives to parliament. And in 'Liberty and the Rule of Law', the suspension of Habeas Corpus in 1817 takes place against the backdrop of economic dislocation and the demands for pay rises.

There may also be patterns in terms of art and its responses to the political and social situation, especially art that reflects individual’s struggles and hopes and fears for society. Ernest Jones (1819–1869), a Chartist (and acquaintance of Karl Marx) was imprisoned after the great demonstration of 1848. He drew a series of sketches, including an idealised Grecian landscape. In the image shown here, the home of democracy is contrasted with a bleak vision of 'the English Town', with dark factories called 'Bone Grinder & Co', menaced by 'the Army'. Three generations later, Olive Wharry’s scrapbook records, in a cartoon style that doesn’t avoid the horror of incarceration and force-feeding, her experiences as a suffragette in Holloway prison. And, from the generation preceding Jones, William Blake's notebook responds imaginatively to the landscape of London during the repression that followed the French Revolution.