IN 1972, the Tate Gallery purchased (for an undisclosed sum) from the John Weber Gallery, New York, an untitled work by Carl Andre (b.1935). Dating from 1966, it is an example of 'Minimal Sculpture' and consists of 120 fire­ bricks arranged in a rectangle, two bricks deep, and when assembled measuring 5 by go by 27¼ inches. The piece is fully catalogued in the Biennial Report, The Tate Gallery 1972-4, pp.73-74 (with reproduction). It has not been regularly on view and would no doubt have continued to lead a quiet life in store had not the 'Business News' section of The Sunday Times run a somewhat facetious article on I 5th February entitled 'The Tate drops a Costly Brick'. The story was bound to have repercussions because it raised two issues that never fail with the public, the possibility that experts were being made fools of and that public money was being misspent.

The response was immediate. The subject was taken up by other papers and by television. The humour was of the ponderous kind. 'Gallery stonewalls on bricks buy', ran a front-page headline in The Evening Standard on 16th February. More seriously, Edward Lucie-Smith wrote a shrewd, in many ways sympathetic but cautionary article on the Tate's policy, in the same paper on the 17th. Bernard Levin, going further in his Times column on the 18th, was inclined to feel that 'art may come and art may go but a brick is a brick for ever'.

And so it went on. The jokes got worse, tempers rose, letters proliferated in the correspondence columns of The Times. Hugh Jenkins, Minister responsible for the Arts, was said 'to be enquiring into the purchase' and discussing the matter with senior officials in his Department. As the Tate's acquisitions are decided by the Trustees, and have nothing whatever to do with the Government, Mr Jenkins's possible intervention was perhaps the only issue about which every­ one was united - in condemnation. In the Observer for 22nd February, Michael Davie's 'Notebook' claimed  that  the Sunday Times story had been engineered by a gleeful Douglas Cooper, who had lambasted the Tate and the bricks  six  weeks before in one of the regular articles that he writes for Books and Bookmen. More recently Mr Andre's work has had dye thrown over it, and been withdrawn for restoration.

The wide publicity given to the 'Bricks Affair' has been deplored by many people as just another example of the 'media' launching a philistine attack on an easy  target,  and by subtler souls anxious not to rock the boat of avant garde art. This was certainly the line taken by the Tate. If  the papers expected Sir Norman Reid to come out fighting, they were disappointed. His remarks were correct and, in the mildest possible way, apologetic. 'The Tate's Trustees', he was reported by the Evening Standard (16th February) as saying, 'have followed a more adventurous  policy in  trying to discharge their responsibility of making available to the British public examples of work which is being  made now.  It is certain that some of their purchases will appear in­ comprehensible or even offensive to some visitors - in the same way that Constable's work was widely attacked in his own day.' Elsewhere he was quoted as saying that recently the Tate may have been 'skating on rather thin ice'.

Evidently stung, however, by Levin's characteristically forthright piece in The Times, Sir Norman felt obliged to assure readers of the paper on 19th February that 'anything which the Tate Trustees buy for the collection they buy because, in the first place, they believe it to be a work of art and, secondly, because they are convinced  that  it is worthy to be included in the collection now'. Although Sir Norman then went on to quote Wordsworth on the primrose, as an analogy to what Carl Andre was doing, neither he nor any­ one else in recent weeks has succeeded in defending T 1534 as a work of art in its own right. There may be a good reason for this. As lain McGilchrist remarked in  a  Times  letter (21st February), 'the idea that the pleasure deriving from a work of art rests in the object itself, has given way to the situation where the whole raison d'etre of the work, indeed its entire meaning, rests in being criticized'.

And everyone was certainly prepared to talk about  the issue in principle. But may this not be all that anyone can do when confronted by something that exists as a work of art only in principle? Theoretical discussions about aesthetics can be stimulating; and yet to go on talking about  prin­ciples, without constantly  relating them  to actual examples, is a sure way of encouraging a form of academic art that is full of a corresponding amount of high and rather vague ideals unmatched in practice.

The case of Carl Andre's sculpture will surely be of interest to future historians of taste. Right now, it raises a number of important issues and points that are worth briefly discussing. The first is just how far a public Gallery, which must impose its own kind of order on what it acquires, can go to accommodate changing attitudes towards art. At what point, if any, does it have to draw the line? A  German artist recently covered Piazza S. Marco, Venice, before dawn with a ton of wastepaper, claiming the gesture as his work of art. The Comune of Venice did not so regard it, and cleared up the mess. How would the Tate react to that? In the case of minimal and conceptual art, might it not make sense for the Tate to collect only full documentation rather than the examples themselves, so that they could be recon­structed whenever the need arose? But what of the 'purity' of the original idea, conceived in terms of particular blankets, or rods or lightbulbs? Well, even T1534 is not the original brick sculpture that Carl Andre made in 1966: since no one wanted to buy it, the bricks were sent back to the works, and were not available when the Tate, six years later, wished to buy a replica. Andre had to make do with firebricks.

The idea that the Tate Gallery is a kind of 'Isherwood reflector' of what is going on in contemporary art is simply not true. For if they really intended to show what is being created in the 197o's, in all its variety, the Tate should be looking just as hard at painters working in a more academic tradition, like Seago or Cuneo, whose work is very popular, as at  the latest avant garde productions.  But then  the Tatehas never had the slightest intention of doing full justice, in an almost sociological way, to the variety and  range of 'art' in our time.

The Tate believe that they should be up to the minute in what they buy. And here they do have a point although they failed to make it. Instead of invoking the incomprehensi­bility of Constable - and surely the  analogy  Constable/ Andre was a little far-fetched? - they would have received a more sympathetic hearing from a well-educated  audience, had they cited the case of the Museum of  Modern  Art in New York, which over decades courageously  acquired  all the latest confections, with the result  that,  although  no doubt saddled with much junk, they have achieved two valuable objectives: first, they have documented the imagi­ native productions of our century, in a  way  that will prove  of inestimable value to historians, whatever our grand­ children may come to think of some of their acquisitions qua art, more effectively than any other institution; secondly,  as a result they now have in their possession some considerable works of art, acquired as it were by chance along with the rest, and at a time when prices were relatively low.

But having conceded the Tate a point  they  never  made, we may still question whether it is their job to be up to the minute with their purchases. They show no desire to docu­ment our time, so they have not this excuse for blankets and bricks. The situation has radically changed since the 193o's. Now that the avant-garde has become respectable, there are plenty of places where the latest thing can be seen, at Arts Council Exhibitions, at the  ICA, in dealers'  galleries. There is no longer the same need nowadays to risk freezing in a permanent, public collection a mass of effective and showy work which may well be regarded in a few decades as trash. More potent still is the view that, in the management  of public collecting in England in 1976, the old criteria of personal conviction and taste, based on the interaction of sensibility and experience, have no substitute. Even if this may mean that we shall allow some prize to slip through our fingers, surely this is to be preferred to  the spectacle  of a 'Rip van With-it' who views every turn in the whirligig of style with a wild surmise?