Glasgow Art Map Newsletter | Mount Jupiter Reports
A love letter to our ancestors, a primer for some trouble (#1)
Merry Christmas, dear reader! We have a special festive treat for you from everyone’s favourite “aspiring private art foundation for the expropriation of public funds”, in anticipation of their new monthly column/”bad faith stream-of-consciousness and agony aunt service” on the GAM journal… enjoy!
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Mount Jupiter Reports:
A love letter to our ancestors, a primer for some trouble (#1)
A hundred years ago, art and its social structures served as a necessary corruptive for a more-or-less exclusively bourgeois class, providing an on-ramp to political imagination cultivated by a lazy, romantic and intoxicating cafe culture. For buoyant decades, the pipeline of sensitive kids who were good with acrylic paint to political zealots brought forth a bounty of utopian notions, communes, free love, and a handful of somewhat less magnanimous tin-pot religious sects.
Today, the sober-curious middle-classes who occupy a silent majority of the artworld are condemned, coy and repentant. The anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist project has been disassembled in the name of identity politics and in these oppression olympics class shame twists anew, with one’s upbringing being cause for deferent ‘listening and learning’ behaviours (what exactly did your parents do for work when you were fourteen?!). This new decadence is why self-sabotaging organisations like CCA Glasgow have just appointed an American AI/cybersecurity grifter and self-described ‘business technology guru’ as chairperson. Her purported focus has ‘always been on championing creativity, community, and equitable cultural ecosystems.’ As far as Mount Jupiter can tell, this lifetime’s work extends to around four months as maternity cover director of Be United, an Edinburgh-based advocacy group for POC film and theatre professionals. Viva les industries créatives!
Whether or not you bought your tenement flat with cash at 25% over valuation, Mount Jupiter now calls upon all artpeoples of the world, even dungarees-wearers and Sassenachs, to rise as comrades! Down with philistines, charlatans and neoliberal sleeper cells! Is a reformed bourgeoisie not preferable to that same generation conceding to the matrices of investment banking, civil servitude, and dentistry, and its accompanying politics of fiscal-conservatism-cum-social-liberalism? In such intellectually impoverished times, we must go further still to un-lumpen the arts (n.b. radicalisation ≠ progress). Remember that prissy Italian Futurists underwrote the project of Mediterranean fascism with zany word art. Then again, Italiano have always had a cop energy borne of that psychosexual mammismo culture in which boys are lovingly reared as petit caesars; enforcers in horny little uniforms. See also: gallerists.
To arrive at some point to this introduction, however, we must face the apex crimes of the landed gentry themselves. Those who perch upon mind-blowing wealth, whose politics are not yours (still, Reform would be too gauche), and occupy seats of power not limited to the chair of Creative Scotland: ‘philanthropist’ Robert Nelson Wilson, co-founder of our namesake Jupiter Artland, the 120-acre sculpture park on the Wilsons’ Lothian estate quite perversely framed as a public good; highlights include a private swimming pool by Joana Vasconcelos and dining room by Nicolas Party. An old-fashioned paternalist, Wilson is director of woowoo companies including—deep breath—Bach, whose snake-oil homeopathic products including the famous Rescue Remedy; Spatone, iron-rich water shots lol; Lumity Life, supplements, of course; naturalscience.com; and several more pharmaceutical manufacturing and retail enterprises. Strangest of all is Zoence®, a trademarked geocosmology cult ‘science’ which ‘presents the fundamental truths with new discoveries and insights for the world of today and tomorrow’ through ‘initiations’ and ‘mystery schools.’ It sounds like an alternative art school but more sinister. The company was officially dissolved in 2011, but as of 2025, still hosts retreats at where else but Jupiter Artland, of course. Good stuff, very normal.
For the uninitiated, our forename is an homage to the equally eccentric Mount Stuart, the Gothic Revival pile of the Marquessate of Bute, home to Crichton-Stuart dynasty who have maintained genetic peerage in the House of Lords since the eighteenth century. Some folk just have better blood, we guess. They used to have extra castles in Cardiff, Tongwynlais and East Ayrshire. Most of their money comes from coal extraction in South Wales, rent extortion around the Cardiff docklands, and royalties from a rail infrastructure built to siphon off this mineral wealth. The benevolent industrialists now oversee an arts programme with public funding of £175,234 (2025–2028)—yes, that’s right, you pay them. Also, they have some extra slosh to curate the Scotland + Venice presentation in 2026 of Bugarin + Castle, ‘driven by queer and decolonial research,’ just don’t look too closely. Most of you won’t have heard of these artists but that’s okay, you’re not on the guestlist and the event is a glorified brand activation for best pal Wilson’s X MUSE VODKA anyway. The only barley vodka brand owned by the chair of Creative Scotland, X MUSE’s last pop-up played host to Scotland + Venice’s private vernissage, just outside the officialdom of the Arsenale and featuring five signature cocktails including ‘Strangers in Scotland’ and ‘X MUSE Occultist’ (bit on the nose, eh?). Residents of Govanhill and Leith should stay home and eat their own tails. The petit caesars will be manning the door.
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Mount Jupiter Reports is a new monthly bad faith stream-of-consciousness and agony aunt service. Do you have artworld troubles? Write to mount.jupiter.conspiracy@gmail.com with your symptoms and an exorcism may be provided.
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GAM xoxo