Rebecca Gordon Nesbitt : here are a few words from within Glasgow’s visual arts community, leaving recrimination and conspiracy aside : Friday 18th October

Dear Rupert Christiansen,

In response to your article about the moves afoot at Tramway, here are a few words from within Glasgow’s visual arts community, leaving recrimination and conspiracy aside. Rather than the Muslim ghetto you like to portray, the local population around Tramway is happily multi-cultural, with a thriving Asian community, the estates of the Gorbals a stone’s throw away and a swelling middle class. (I’m quite sure the effect of culture on gentrifying an area don’t need to be rehearsed here, suffice it to say that the newly developed flats bracketing Tramway apparently went up in price overnight when the Hidden Garden opened). But, sadly little has been done in the way of marketing and education to encourage this potential local audience to cross the imposing threshold. Despite the £1 million of public money you cite as being poured into Tramway annually, in a city that has become synonymous with the visual above all the other art forms, only £88,000 finds its way into the visual art programme.

When you take this into account, it is something of a self-fulfilling prophecy that people aren’t flocking to visit exhibitions. Which is a shame really because the projects have, quite remarkably in the face of such adversity, retained their pioneering spirit. Established as a testing ground for emerging artists, playing host to the first solo exhibition of Turner prize winner Douglas Gordon and many of his generation, Tramway has continued to encourage local and international talent, in the hands of the exceptionally conscientious Alexia Holt. Recent landmark exhibitions by several of the excellent artists based in Glasgow such as Martin Boyce, Tatham & O’Sullivan and the collaborative group Henry VIII’s Wives have taken place alongside those by artists better known in Europe such as Salla Tykkä and Monica Bonvicini, all of whom have admirably risen to the challenge of filling a space half the size of a regulation football pitch. It is this scale, combined with the risk of working with artists at an early stage in their careers rather than waiting until they are firmly established, that makes Tramway unique in Britain and beyond and it is hard to imagine how making this legendary public exhibition space into a private workshop to build sets for touring ballets will ‘open up possibilities of engagement with local communities’. A wiser move might be to draw on the success of the artist-led Hidden Garden project and attract visitors inside the building to continue their visual art experience.

Rather than interest in the arts having waned as you suggest, culture has just been placed firmly at the heart of the New Labour agenda by the Scottish Executive. In his St Andrew’s Day speech, First Minister Jack McConnell made a compelling case for access to excellence, saying ‘I fundamentally believe that access is only meaningful, if it is access to quality’. In spite of its challenges, Tramway upholds a reputation as a centre of excellence within the visual arts that is renowned and envied around the world, as countless recent messages of support (www.sostramway.org.uk) have shown. It is now time to start thinking about access to that excellence.

Yours sincerely,

Rebecca Gordon Nesbitt