Who framed Ekow Eschun?

Ekow Eshun extends his hand. Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown; he is the executive and artistic director of the ICA, the Institute of Contemporary Art, on The Mall, leaving in March 2011 after six years on the job. His departure seems a pity, for he is patently an extremely nice fellow. He is also quite possibly an honourable and decent man carrying the can for the mistakes and failures of others.

The alleged misdemeanours include extravagance and a total cock-up of the ICA's finances. Ekow (pronounced Echo) occupies, I note, modestly for a big spender, a rather small room among many magnificent Beau Nash salons he could have chosen for his office. His desktop is clear.

The ICA, as not everyone rushing towards nearby Buckingham Palace is aware, is a society founded 64 years ago to persuade us all to love contemporary art. It lives off public and private money – the Arts Council gives £1.3 million a year. In the financial year 2009-10, it plunged £700,000 into the red, which sum is an alarming 20 per cent of its annual revenues. It was put on an Arts Council life-support machine and a consultant came in. The crisis is over, but earlier this year staff went into turmoil and attempted a vote of no confidence in Ekow (an attempted coup organised by email – a 21st-century London first). This vote came after the director of exhibitions, Mark Sladen, told the ICA chairman, Alan Yentob, that either Ekow left or he did, to which Yentob responded, 'You do.' Sladen, self-important, ex-Barbican, is not alone in departing. The managing director since 2006, the banker Guy Perricone, vanished over the horizon. The director of marketing and the director of development have also gone, despatched by Ekow this summer. Yentob, creative director of the BBC and reputedly Britain's most belligerent man, has gone as chairman. He, though, is still in the building, staying on the ICA Council and denying that anything has been done wrong. Ekow is still in the building, too, as executive director, until they find a new one, until March 2011.

I decide, after five minutes' conversation with him, that there is something very curious about this financial crisis – not the first at the ICA but certainly its most sudden and dramatic: no one seems responsible for it; and of those whose job titles announce seniority, no one takes any responsibility. 'I do not think it right to blame anyone,' Yentob tells me. 'I do not acknowledge that the problem has been a failure to manage. I do not think we can ask who was responsible for what you are calling a financial mess. It's not a blame game. [The deficit] came about because of the financial situation at that time' – the recession which began after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in New York in the autumn of 2008. 'It came about through bad luck, bad foresight and a bad gamble. The ICA has made its case to the Arts Council that it was not negligent. It ran into trouble.'

Nonetheless, Ekow Eshun has attracted overwhelming, virulent, personal criticism. The Guardian described him as 'beset on all sides by financial crises, resignations and critical ire'. While an editor of ArtReview accused him of being 'glib', 'blithe' and 'fascinated with the temporary'. He has handed in his resignation because, he tells me, 'I want in part to do new things like a book and a TV series, but I am leaving also because the ICA is at peace again, the problems have been solved. It's been a difficult year and I get a bit fed up with being blamed.'

However, if he's not to blame, he does not point a finger at who is. I ask for his version of what went wrong in 2008-9. Like Yentob's, it is a no-blame account: the ICA, he says, in a metaphor he's used before and which has got him into a lot of trouble, hit 'a perfect storm'.

The perfect storm consists, apparently, of the unexpected length of the 2008-10 recession and the bad timing of a 60th anniversary fundraising auction in October 2008, which was created to raise more than £1.2 million from selling works gifted by Hirst, Emin, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Blake, Tuymans and more. It made only £673,000. Then came a collapse in demand for renting out the ICA's beautiful Regency rooms (these raise £300,000 in a good year) and after that a loss at the bookshop, which rarely does more than break even. Ekow's critics have claimed that if it was a perfect storm, 'someone was sailing the ship towards it,' but at the ICA this criticism is seen as rhetorical; the attitude at the top is that the deficit, like the recession, was an unforeseeable act of God. This is the line taken by Yentob and Perricone. The latest chairman of the finance committee, accountant Alan Taylor, similarly assures me that the ICA's recent misfortunes are exceptional and one-off and no cause for alarm. 'At no point have I had cause to worry that our numbers are wrong we have processes which are clunky, perhaps, but they work.'

Other allegations out there from The Guardian and from Mute magazine are that Eshun and his board let the ICA become dangerously dependent in 2005-7 on fly-by-night, in-and-out sponsors such as SpinVox (voice recognition software) and Guestinvite (a buy-to-let hotel property) – Eshun replies that these weren't sponsors, they were companies engaged on ICA special projects – and that the staff became dangerously swollen in these years to an astonishing 110, full-time and part-time. Eshun responds that there were fewer than that but does not give a specific figure. The ICA wage bill rose 50 per cent from 2005 to 2008, its accounts reveal. These matters are of definite interest to the Arts Council, which has subtracted £1.2 million from a reserve fund in a one-off rescue payment to ensure the ICA stays alive.

I am meeting Ekow in this beautiful Crown Estate building on The Mall, given to the ICA on a peppercorn rent in 1968, to talk about the state of contemporary art in 2010. Who now matters in London in the post-Damien Hirst YBA ferment? Which new 21st-century art subjects matter after death, decay and mortality in the 1990s? Who do Ekow and the ICA see as the new Hirsts, Quinns, Gormleys, Emins and Chapmans? Or is the party over, the great days gone for art in London? He, I and other concerned figures are debating all this at Crunch 2010, the art and music festival in Hay-on-Wye this weekend, a promisingly anarchic exchange on The Meaning of Art (if any).

The artist, he declares, is at a point of confusion unknown in the 1990s. Irony, detachment and any certainty that was left died on 9/11, 'a rupture point'. Artists, far from pointing beyond the horizon at what ordinary people cannot see, are listening. That was the point, says Ekow, of Antony Gormley's 3,000 performers on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square. 'Artists, like everyone, are struggling to understand where we are now; at the end of a decade of global war and terror, Abu Ghraib, economic meltdown, God lost in the distances of space. You cannot know, after this crisis, that capitalism will last forever, that Western values will be tops. Artists, like the public, are seeking to make sense. They are, right now, less interested in physical objects than in open-ended experience. And they are
participating with each other.' Which means that visual art, theatre, music and dance are fusing at the ICA in a way not seen before.

As to who matters then, in the 21st century, post-Hirst, Ekow points at ICA favourites Jeremy Deller, Mark Wallinger, Ai Weiwei in Beijing and Antony Gormley; and he adds the Punchdrunk theatre company and games company Hide & Seek to the list.

I also want to know what the ICA is 'for' in 2010. It came into being in the late 1940s in an age of outspoken hatred in the British art establishment for the Modern Movement. 'What would you do, Sir Alfred, if you met Picasso on Piccadilly?' Churchill is supposed to have asked Munnings, the president of the Royal Academy, in 1948. 'Kick him in the arse, Sir Winston.' 'Quite right, Alfred,' Churchill replied. That is the attitude the ICA was born to change; it was created by the beleaguered champions in Britain of the Modern Movement, Roland Penrose and
Sir Herbert Read, in an atmosphere of deep public hostility to art and music since 1900. Britain was decidedly uninterested as the ICA staged major shows of Britart (Hamilton, Blake, Paolozzi) and works by Jackson Pollock in the 1950s, Conceptual Art in Europe (Beuys, Naumann, LeWitt, 1969), and Robert Mapplethorpe (1979), whose photographs had to be smuggled in from the US via the Canadian diplomatic bag to avoid seizure at UK Customs. Cries of 'sadistic, obscene, evil' arose from Sir Nicholas Fairbairn MP at these or indeed all of the above.