Another spuriousDLWP excercise

This time, a questionnaire comprising four A4 pages listing 14 questions (some compound) was sent to each selected address.

Additionally, the council commissioned the services of a market research company to assist with the project.

This excessively elaborate and costly exercise of questionable necessity is typical of the action taken by those in authority when expending taxpayers, and not their own money.

Is the council alone in being unaware of the long standing and widespread disapproval felt within the Rother community at what the DLWP provides under its present management?

The expressions of disappointment, disgust and anger repeatedly voiced in the letters continually appearing in the local press serving Bexhill and Battle is irrefutable evidence of what a great many Rother residents feel on this subject.

When the present management took over it was decided, not by Rother residents but by the coterie in charge, that the DWP would be “a modernist icon for contemporary arts” in the South East.

In consequence, much of what is presented at the DLWP is entirely unsuitable to the majority of local people.

The Rother constituency comprises a high percentage of those in the upper age group and of those whose lifestyle is essentially conservative (small c).

It is therefore hardly surprising that they reject, as popular entertainment, the eccentricities of music and dance from the Third World.

Nor do they wish to view meaningless displays with no artistic fidelity of aesthetic appeal, the purpose of which is to project the personal prejudices, political or otherwise, of the authors of those works and their supporters.

The trivial, empty and absurd do not become “art” by the expedient of labelling them “modern” art. Dr Peter Abbs was spot on when he wrote “When visual art becomes anything and everything it becomes...nothing at all.”

Popular opinion demands that the DLWP returns to its pre-Trust direction when Rother residents enjoyed a range of activities including interesting lectures and a variety of entertainment which, crucially, was relevant to their taste.

So long as this is denied to them and they are compelled to pay a massive annual subsidy to the DLWP, their animosity is justified.

P R BELCHAMBER

Whatlington Road

Battle