Museums are not the answer for Confederate monuments

Confederate monuments celebrate a failed war to defend slavery. Most were erected long after the Civil War as a deliberate assertion of white supremacy, alongside Jim Crow laws and a resurgent Ku Klux Klan. Other historical figures have flaws against the standards of our times, but statues of Washington and Jefferson celebrate their enlightened nation-building, not their slave ownership. I understand why so many think the statues must go. I'm still not persuaded. People really are worried about a slippery slope that will carry away all historic statues. They're not racists, and they're not fools. Radicals really are targeting Columbus now.

But this debate isn't really about the merits of Confederate monuments, and I don't think the statue smashers' primary concern is racism. In a recent poll a plurality of African Americans want the statues to remain. That's especially awkward for protesters who believe we should defer to minority experience, so they've mostly ignored it. The inflamed passions are really a manifestation of the culture wars. The most angry voices and most sanctimonious arguments are from the people who most strongly identify with one or other tribe in the culture wars. They're animated by hatred for the other side in the here and now, not racism. It's telling that the debate over symbols has been so much more gripping and more inspiring than policy debates about issues like gerrymandering or civil forfeiture or policing that have much more real-world impact here and now.

Any solution that doesn't recognise that will fail. The task isn't deciding what to do with statues, it's working out how to pacify culture warriors. And that's why I think some of the 'middle ground' solutions are the worst of all worlds.

Putting the statues in museums assumes that museums will give the 'right' interpretation, so that the oiks who won't 'get it' in the public square can be made to understand. It co-opts museums for a particular side in the culture war. Sorting institutions into 'ours' and 'theirs' is a catastrophic strategy. Museums already tend to lean liberal. Many were founded as patriotic projects, but today they're more likely to indulge the cringing political correctness of Fred Wilson. Putting the sculptures in museums won't calm the passions. It will shift the focus to museums, further politicising them and alienating a large section of the public.

Adding new statues of heroes that today's critics approve is also a problem. They are bound to be a focus of bitter debate when the symbolism is raised to such importance. Maybe they could raise statues of Frederick Douglass holding a rifle, to show his support for gun rights? And it feels condescending to require a statue of a black hero directly opposite a Confederate criminal to provide 'balance'. A non-trivial problem is that a lot of public sculpture is quite awful, and bad monuments have proliferated in the UK and sullied our towns and cities.

I don't have any better ideas. I think it's tragic that iconoclasm has become a radical strategy, and also tragic that so many conservatives struggle to concede the awfulness of the Confederacy. But anything that reinforces destructive tribal loyalties in the culture wars will make things worse.

On Art Galleries and Swimming Pools

This summer I learned to swim, and it prompted reflection on the similarities between swimming pools and art galleries. No, really ... bear with me. In both spheres, officials fret about declining public interest and propose more and more official interventions to curb decline. Swimming participation has fallen sharply, and officialdom thinks it's because we can't use our smartphones in the pool (I'm not making this up). Museums are in a constant panic about becoming 'irrelevant', so they enthuse about technology. Government cuts mean both swimming pools and museums are being outsourced and privatised. And a fetish for 'engaging new audiences' is offputting to serious swimmers and serious art enthusiasts alike. 

Drastic cuts to local government funding mean that councils can't afford to maintain opening hours or facilities at either swimming pools or museums. In museums we're just starting to see the effect, with outsourcing of security and reduced hours to facilitate private hire. Swimming pool operations have been outsourced for some time, with bad results. Private operators demand a monopoly on learning to swim sessions, which are pricey and profitable. That means not only that swimming clubs and other operators can't provide lessons, but also that fewer lanes are available for actual swimming. As a learner myself, I can say that it did me no favours. I only had a couple of unofficial lessons. Learning to swim is about practice, and that is curtailed when lanes are closed (especially when the slow lane at the end is closed - I needed the security of the edge when I started). At one swimming pool I use, there is sometimes just one lane of eight available for lane swimming. 

The contractual relationship between councils and outsourced operators means there's no one to hold accountable or to complain to. The operator says they're following the contract, and the council is unable to change agreed terms. We will see more of this in museums; some already close early for private events. Don't be surprised when you find your local museum closed for the day because they've got a wedding on. But it's not just a lack of money that's at fault; it's also how the money is spent.

The London Aquatic Centre is the pool used for the 2012 Olympics. It's one of only two 50m indoor pools in London, and it is brilliant. But the main competition pool is given over to something called 'extreme aqua splash' every Sunday afternoon. There is actually a separate training pool that could be used. But instead the main pool is turned into a play area for half the weekend. In the brief window before aqua splash the pool is chronically crowded with lane swimmers who are squeezed out for most of the day. Fun for kids has been prioritised at museums and swimming pools, partly because 'kids are the future', so we must 'engage' them. Trouble is, it doesn't work.

When I was a child our local swimming pool had a water slide and a wave machine, and it was fun to splash about. But there was no pressure actually to learn to swim. So I didn't, and it was a quarter of a century before I got back in a swimming pool. As with swimming pools, so with museums. Engaging kids has become a messianic project, to the exclusion of adult enjoyment. And when they grow up, they will look at museums as places only for kids. Why would they think museums are places for grown ups, when they know them only as places where they went to play? 

The ideology of inclusion means that neophytes are led to expect facilities to be organised around them. This blog post expresses frustration at the demand that faster swimmers give way to slower people. And here is another swimmer frustrated with the prejudice against supposedly-elitist competitive swimmers. As a new and slow swimmer, I agree with them both. The reluctance to enforce rules in case it puts anyone off is actually offputting. You have to have an induction session before you can use the gym, but you can just turn up at the pool. It's hard for pools to work effectively without shared norms, and it's hard for new swimmers to know how to behave when the rules aren't explained. I found this indispensable guide online; I wish I'd known sooner.

We've seen this before. Librarians were among the first to fret about their coming irrelevance. Local authorities turned libraries into 'ideas centres', and ditched the books for computers and community centres. It just accelerated the decline. When they became places to hang out rather than, um, libraries, the case for maintaining them became weaker. Local authorities are slashing hours and closing branches. Swimming pools and museums seem set on the same trajectory. I suspect the answer is really simple. Do less. Less extreme aqua splash, fewer lane closures. Keep the doors open, the pool clean and prices low. But what group of interested professionals will conclude that they need to step back? Instead they think it's about innovation, technology and consumer expectations.

Museums! Stop engaging youth, start engaging middle aged men!

'Ritratto di nonno con nipote' by Domenico Ghirlandaio Picture: Web Gallery of Art

Data prove that museums are letting me down. Fewer over-educated middle-aged white men are visiting museums and galleries. Something must be done.

 

According to the National Endowment for the Arts, only 18.7% of men visited a museum or art gallery in 2012, sharply down from the 21.4% that visited in 2008 and well below the 23.1% of women who've visited museums (down only marginally from 24.0% in 2008). It's not only my sex that's being squeezed out of museums, but my age cohort too. The 35-44 age group saw a whopping fall from 25.7% to 21.2%. There was also a statistically significant decline in visits by white people, and even a small decline in visits by people with post-graduate degrees too.

 

What are museums going to do about this? I would be happy to share my expertise in what grumpy middle aged white blokes with PhDs want from museums (regular readers can probably guess). My consultancy fees are very reasonable.

 

Of course I jest. It would be absurd for museums to try to orient themselves more to male visitors, as if we'd want something different from women (masculine colour schemes? Top Gear exhibitions?). It's revealing of our prejudices that it seems so daft to ask the question, because it's taken as given that middle aged white men have diverse interests, whereas 'experts' are always poised to speak up on behalf of children or youth or minorities and tell us what they need as groups. 

Museums should do absolutely nothing to address the 'man gap' in museum visiting. Make great exhibits and we will come. Or not, if we have better things to do. But please don't patronise us with schemes designed around whatever you think middle aged men are into. I don't think it's a problem that men are a little less likely to visit museums, or that older people are a little more likely to visit.

 

Declining attendance by men rightly passes without comment, but a decline in visits by young people is taken as a sign of crisis and used to justify all kinds of madcap schemes to engage 'millennials'. They're mostly based on superficial and banal observations about young people today, and fail to distinguish genuine generational change from perennial differences between different age groups. Night clubs attract younger crowds than bingo halls. There's no reason to expect museums to appeal especially to the young, who have lots of other enticing options vying for their attention.   

 

The NEA data show that concern about young people in museums isn't driven by evidence. It's constructed by a professional coterie with its own agenda. I found the NEA study from a link in an article by Matt Heller about how museums should engage millennials. It particularly riled me because it repeats ideas that have been conventional wisdom in the museum studies world for a generation, yet its author claims to be an 'expert' in millennnials (attempting humility, he actually tells us that other people think he's an expert and seek his advice). Heller's pomposity irks me, but more disturbing is that his superficial and weakly supported observations reflect popular current prejudices that are rarely scrutinised but probably wrong.

 

He starts by telling us that millennials seek new experiences. His source is a marketing piece by a business that sells, um, experiences to millennials. It takes a special kind of historical myopia to imagine that seeking new experiences is unique to young people today, as if kids in the 1960s were all buttoned-up fogies.  

 

Then he says that millennials are more likely to say that cultural organisations 'encourage self-discovery and reflection', based on this study (p.3). But let's track back to the source. The striking thing about responses is how little they vary between cohorts. Responses change with age in only a few cases, and some responses reflect perennial aspects of youth, such as their (slightly) greater unwillingness to visit a museum if they have no one to go with. But for any of these to be a meaningful findings about this generation you need to compare the responses of 'boomers' and 'gen-Xers' when they were young. Otherwise you have no way of distinguishing genuine differences between generations from more prosaic differences between younger people and older people. 

 

Finally Heller thinks museums need to be more interactive. Actually, he says that's what millennials want, based on a focus group conducted by the Center for the Future of Museums. It obviously has its own agenda, which is conveniently echoed by the participants. Trendy museum professionals have pushed greater interactivity since at least the 1970s. If museum exhibits don't sell themselves, offering social interaction is an obvious alternative. And it's such a conventional idea that it's not surprising that people repeat it back in focus groups. But it's a losing battle, because even if interactivity is what people want, it's not clear that museums are best placed to offer it. If we want to interact, we can go to the pub. 

 

Heller's article is a particularly weak target, but it's revealing of how easy it is to get away with writing drivel when it coincides with the mood of the times. He tells people what they expect - and want - to hear, so people don't enquire too closely. This kind of guff proliferates without challenge. It should be refuted robustly so the real experts - the people who know about the stuff that museums collect - can get on with their job of displaying it, instead of worrying about whichever audience has captured the imagination of the marketing team.

 

'Donations' in lieu of tax: a stupid way to fund the arts

Picture: University of Cambridge

Margaret Thatcher's archives were recently transferred to the nation in lieu of tax, under a scheme that's seen many important artworks and historic documents transferred to public ownership. We even got her handbag (above). The Thatcher archives have been controversial, but for the wrong reasons. There's no question of their importance, whatever you think of Margaret Thatcher. But the scheme itself is absurd. I've done an interview with The One Show on BBC about the acceptance in lieu scheme, which should be broadcast on Friday. Acceptance in lieu almost universally popular because it seems to give free pictures to museums. The official website explains its advangages:  "The primary benefit for a host/acquiring museum, gallery or library is that it receives an important object at no cost".

 

But this is nonsense. These are not free objects. They are objects bought out of foregone taxes. If the tax were paid to the Treasury and then given to the museum, it could spend the money on any picture it liked. What are the chances that of all the pictures available in the world, they'd want the very one handed over in lieu of tax?

 

The beneficiaries are not museums, but the wealthy people with important pictures on their walls and archives in their attics. I don't for a moment blame them for using the scheme - I would in their shoes. They aren't cheating the system; they're using it exactly as it was intended. Our ire should be directed at the Treasury. This is just one of many examples of misleading policies that benefit a tiny number at the expense of the majority. They are pretending that it isn't really arts funding, because the transfer takes place instead of gathering tax and distributing it.

 

The iniquity stings twice. First, it stings that the very wealthy can enjoy such a splendid privilege. Can you imagine the reaction if you offered to pay your council tax by spending a few hours doing some gardening in the local park, and offering your labour at £50 an hour? I'm going to hazard a guess that they won't convene an expert panel to assess the quality of your work and value of your labour. But if you have an important picture you not only get to save on transaction fees from selling it on the open market, you get a tax rebate too - you save a quarter of the tax that would have been due on the object. The other side, of course, is that taxpayers are paying extra for the privilege of acquiring something via the acceptance in lieu scheme. It's actually a more expensive way to buy stuff. And the people transferring objects are often treated as philanthropists, and credited by the museums as donors. They are not donors; they are simply taxpayers. And they're using a loophole that means they are paying relatively less tax than the rest of us. We are paying more than they are.

 

But the scheme also stings because we keep getting more of the kind of pictures that happen to have been popular with British collectors - unsurprisingly, they're the pictures that are usually quite well represented in our national collections, too. We've just got a cache of 44 Frank Auerbachs, which are fine pictures, but do we need so very many of them? We have a total of 54 Auberbach oils alone in British public collections, but not a single picture by the American abstract artist Richard Diebenkorn. And where are the early German pictures, the Scandinavian art, seventeenth and eighteenth century French paintings, nineteenth century German art, and American art, all poorly represented in both public and private collections in the UK? We're missing out on so much because our acquisitions are skewed towards 'saving' more of the same.

 

The cultural sector is extravagantly grateful for acceptance in lieu. But it's a bit like getting a pay rise, but then being told that it will be paid in the form of a monthly delivery of groceries chosen by your employer. Getting a free grocery delivery is better than not getting one. But if the cost is the same to my employer, I'd rather have the cash thanks all the same. And can you image a public company choosing to pay in groceries, but then deciding to pay the supermarket a bit more than their retail prices? That's what the government is doing when it buys pictures under the acceptance in lieu scheme. Shareholders would demand the board be sacked if it were a public company; as taxpayers we should be holding the Treasury to account. To be clear, I'm not making a partisan point here. Acceptance in lieu enjoys cross-party support, and no party has a monopoly on distorting tax schemes. But they should still be held accountable for this stupidity.

It's even more stupid in the context of funding cuts that mean we can't get to see the stuff we're acquiring because museums can't afford to keep the doors open. Money is available for acquisitions, but not for running costs. The British Museum has acquired some wonderful drawings under the acceptance in lieu scheme. But it's just slashed the opening hours at the print room, so it's now harder to see them. And we're acquiring archives, but shutting libraries. It's perverse to keep buying things when we can't afford to display them. 

 

Of course the risk for the cultural sector is that the acceptance in lieu scheme gets scrapped without any compensating payment. But we are citizen as well as art enthusiasts, and we have a duty to play fair. We should seek to win the argument for funding on its own terms, not on the basis of secret subventions. And those secret subventions impose a real cost. It is more expensive to acquire via acceptance in lieu, because of the extra tax rebate. And too often it means we acquire the wrong things; museums need to get more creative with their acquisitions, and the Treasury should be a little less creative in its accounting. 

The stupid fetish of free admission, and the end of the British Museum

Picture: Wikipedia

Free admission to museums is quite nice, but it's not so terrible in places like, er, the whole of the rest of Europe, where you have to pay. And decades of free admission plus forced admonition hasn't done much to change visitor demographics. The main recent change is that foreign visitors make up a greater proportion of visitors to the UK's main attractions. So free admission is a subsidy to wealthy foreigners. Don't get me wrong; I don't begrudge it. Free admission is a fine thing. But the British government is now simultaneously cutting funding and mandating free admission. Something has to give. And the British Museum has just been broken.

The Art Newspaper has announced that the British Museum is renting 500 key object to Abu Dhabi for five years. That they're hawking some of the most important works isn't surprising; the customer wants the best. It's harder to explain why they're splitting up integral displays (sending off random Assyrian reliefs) and including particularly fragile objects. Is it pure spite at the BM's visitors? Do the borrowers want to show off that they can buy anything, no matter how unfit for transport? This should exercise pundits far more than the Parthenon Marbles, and it makes a mockery of the BM's claim that they can show the marbles best in a global context. Context means nothing when sections of a relief can be prised off their own walls to rent out abroad. Now the best they can say of their own custody is that they're the best rental agents.

This trend has crept up on the museum world, albeit making rather a splash when the Louvre struck its own deal with Abu Dhabi. I think its impact has been greatly underestimated. As more museums get in on it, rental fees will fall. More worrisome, so will standards. Rented exhibitions rarely have much pretense of scholarly or artistic value, being rarely more than a few 'highlights' brought together under a marketing slogan (my favourite: 'Tutakhamon, Caravaggio, Van Gogh'). Worse is that costs will be cut as competition intensifies. A recent show at the Pinacoteque de Paris had two guards covering dozens of spaces, one of whom protected the merchandise in the shop. Next they'll be sending exhibits by FedEx. 

Potential demand from newly-wealthy cities is immense. Once museums start, they can't stop. The National Galleries of Scotland have sent the best of their collection on two long money-making tours in recent years; now Glasgow is in on the act, too. The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston has its best things perpetually on the road. The greatest museums are destined to become lending libraries. But whereas Haskell and Penny envisaged them engaged in reciprocal altruism, each mounting their own special exhibitions, the reality today is more sordid. Works are rented out for drearily repetitious 'highlights' tours in the same cash-rich/art-poor cities, with the cash going to pay running costs for the owners.

To be fair, it's not altogether the fault of government funding. Museums are utterly complicit. They absolutely love this. They get attention. They get to negotiate big sexy deals like corporate titans pursuing M&A. Instead of simply looking after their treasures and showing them to the public, they get to broker them for cash and favours. Neil MacGregor should be taken out and shot. The trustees should be sued down to their last penny for dereliction of duty (indemnity insurance be damned!). Museums have spoken out against cuts and made the case for certain of their activities, but they haven't openly spoken out against paid loans. Nicholas Penny made representations behind closed doors against Glasgow's loan of the Burrell Collection; otherwise, nada. They do not present rentals as an unfortunate necessity; they try to spin it as a positive virtue.

The lying liars at the BM say they know they must 'strike a balance' between 'displaying objects around the world and having them available to study in Bloomsbury'. The snivelling scumbags don't propose to make half the collection available in, say, Africa. No, they will be available 'around the world' only if you happen to have a few gazillion quid to pay for the privilege. They're not being shown to the world; they're being hawked to one of the smallest and richest countries in the world. And what a snide choice of words, contrasting 'display' elsewhere with 'study' here, as if what takes place in Bloomsbury is arid and intellectual, whereas what takes place abroad is cool and populist. I really think they have nothing but contempt for their visitors.

The spin is so obvious and so thin that they can't even be trying. I don't think they imagine us to be idiots. I think they simply don't care what we think. They will imperiously go ahead and transform the BM from a museum to a hub of commercial activity and international diplomacy, to the greater glory of their director and trustees, and to the everlasting harm to their collections and loss to their visitors. 

Campaigning for Good Curatorship

I like curators, especially good ones. So I should be delighted to discover that there's a Campaign for Good Curatorship. The campaign wants to put knowledge of collections back at the heart of museums, and I'm all for that too. And they want 'good' rather than 'great' or 'excellent' curatorship, which is a victory for language and common sense.  But I recoil from its manifesto, which seems to be trying to appropriate all the anti-curatorial guff that's infected the museum sector. 

They say that museums "have a vital role to play in a healthy, tolerant and inclusive society". Fine sentiments, but they don't survive scrutiny. What can curators do to fulfill their 'vital' role in promoting health? Do they mean 'vital' in the sense of central to what curators do, or vital in the sense that museums must lead the charge on behalf of society? Neither claim is credible. And that weasel-word 'inclusion'. No one explicitly argues for an 'exclusive' society, but the meaning of inclusive is hotly contested. The term is either politically contentious or else vacuous. 

They want to reach a 'balance' between community engagement and expertise in objects. Maybe this is just a problem of hasty drafting, but I think treating engagement and expertise as opposite poles that require balancing is a disastrous strategy. Museums will engage communities on the basis of their collections. Curatorship has been undermined because museums have tried to convince politicians that they should be funded because they can play all kinds of instrumental roles like promoting social inclusion and public health. Convincing them of the value of museums in their own terms seemed to much like hard work. But the other approach has backfired, because it has put museums in direct competition with specialists. In a contest over the health budget, health professionals will beat museum professionals. 

The manifesto concludes with some specific demands, but they are as wishy-washy as something from the student union. They want the Department for Culture, Media and Sport to 'recognise' the role of good curatorship, whatever 'recognition' means. Worse still they want the Arts and Humanities Research Council to sponsor research into the public benefit of curatorship. Can nothing happen without a government grant these days? Given that the campaign's whole premise is that there is public benefit to curatorship, this isn't really research - it's marketing. Just because it's marketing a cause I happen to espouse doesn't mean it needs or deserves a government grant.  

This gets to the nub of my beef. The problem isn't that curatorship is 'under-researched' or that the DCMS hasn't 'recognised' its value. The problem is that the case for curatorship hasn't been made robustly. In fact let's put it in simpler terms: the case for knowledge hasn't been made robustly. For a generation museums have been capitulating to an agenda that devalues objects and disdains cultural knowledge in favour of the instrumental pursuit of political objectives.

We don't need government grants or campaign bullet points. We need to make a more forceful case for the value of culture. Lots of people are doing that already. I often disagree with many of them; it doesn't have to be a unitary case, and we don't all need to be friends. There are lots of ways to value and engage with culture. But lily-livered appeasement of the access and social justice agenda is fatal. Good curators don't promote public health or an inclusive society. They understand quality and context. The select and preserve and display and interpret objects, and in doing those things they play a role in defining a society (heck, let's use an old-fashioned term: civilization) that's worth being included in. The historical and artistic legacy preserved in museums is valuable in its own right, and is degraded when it's deployed as a tool in the latest public health initiative. Let no one be in doubt about the vital role of curators, and let's not let this campaign get away with underselling it.

What ails Italy?

I love Italy, really I do. Great food, great art, great landscape. Transport is fantastic; well-maintained roads (well, better than UK or US), cheap, regular and reliable trains. But the experience of trying to see art in Italy is so needlessly fraught. I look forward to writing some upbeat blog posts about the wonderful things I saw on a recent trip to the Adriatic coast, but first I must vent. 

At Ancona the museum greeted me with this permanent-looking sign. The wonderful collection of Crivelli, Lotto and Titian is closed; who knows where the pictures are during the 'work in progress'. Websites are almost non-existent and usually useless; you can never check these things in advance. But closure is common - short term or long term, vicarious or strategic, partial or complete. In Bologna an entire wing of the museum was closed. A preposterous local exhibition of art 'from Cimabue to Morandi' had claimed the museum's greatest masterpiece, a Raphael altarpiece that ought never to be lent, but this is at least its third trip in the past two years alone. 

The Adriatic coast is a place of artistic pilgrimage for Lorenzo Lotto. Many of his works are in small and remote hill towns, and he was a major reason for my own visit. The biggest concentration is in Loreto, where he died. They have nine, usually on display in this room. Only one was on display when I visited.

The other artist I wanted to see was Piero della Francesca. I'd been planning for years to do the next leg of the Piero Trail, which I'd previously had to postpone at the last minute when I discovered a key picture was on loan in America. I was especially delighted to see two great masterpieces in Urbino, in a beautiful place in gorgeous hill town set in stunning countryside. What could possibly go wrong? Well, this:

The picture is unframed, behind an ugly glass panel under a harsh spotlight. Alas, this is common practice in Italian museums. Pictures are lit up like displays in a department store. And the lack of frames is lamentable. One of the most wonderful things about Italy is context - you get to works of art in historic settings, often part of collections of local art that give a much greater feel for regional genius than you get in a 'highlights' display in the great universal museums. But it seems they almost purposely rebel against that, seeking to show pictures shorn of context, presented as icons against a bare wall. 

Many museums are open only a few hours a day, sometimes just a morning, often with a break of two or three hours at lunchtime. Sometimes they will let you stay after closing time, which is wonderful. But it makes the logistics of visiting quite a challenge. The obvious response is that more funding is needed. But I'm not sure that's true; one are is grossly over-funded. There is never a lack of funding for major restoration projects, many of which are dreadful. 

In Rimini they are systematically wrecking their art collection. Conservators (I use the word loosely) are stripping down anything they think is repaint. Most museums have long since moved away from such drastic and irreversible action, which risks removing original paint in error. Instead of recreating what's lost, the Rimini restorers are replacing lost paint with hatching, to ensure we can tell what is original and what is restored. In some cases it works, particularly where large losses would require significant recreation. But the point is to avoid visual distraction. In Rimini it's done dreadfully and it's hugely visually distracting. Look at this detail from a Crucifixion attributed to Giovanni da Bologna, restored in 2013. An original fragment looks like it's been stuck on a piece of cheap furniture. The remaining paint seems to float on ugly and intrusively coloured background.  

They are so proud of their work on an altarpiece by Guiliano da Rimini of the Coronation of the Virgin with Saints that there's a 'before' photo shown next to it. Trouble is, it looked better before. Now the picture is ambiguous; is the hatching in the picture below covering an area of lost gilding or lost landscape? From a distance you can't tell; the contours are ambiguous. Originally the gold ground established a clear delineation between painted scene and background; now it's a blur. Instead of seeing a damaged but coherent work of art, we are invited to contemplate little isolated souvenirs of original paint. 

The saddest part of my trip was seeing the amazing frescoes by Salimbeni in Urbino. They are currently being restored, and I watched as a plasterer arrived with a big trowel and started throwing on plaster. As he worked it into the edges, original plaster sprinkled off onto the floor, and his big trowel bashed against the original paint. We think of restoration as a careful, clinical process. This was more like butchery. And in a few decades, the work will be re-done, the new plaster hacked out again, and a bit more of the original will be lost.

Italian museums seem too often to be run for the benefit of their conservators who get to play around with pictures to their heart's content. There is no money for basic things like keeping the doors open, providing guards, adequate lighting, decent display or a website. But they will fund an endless cycle of drastic restoration.

Rather than address existing problems, Italy is adding new ones. It seems keen to introduce the worst elements of modern museum practice. An ominous new sign hung at the entrance to the Museo Civici in Pesaro:

THE NEW CIVIC MUSEUMS AT PALAZZO MOSCA ARE PROPOSING TO BE THE STRONG DYNAMIC DRIVING FORCE BEHIND THE CULTURAL LIFE OF PESARO IN ADDITION TO FULFILLING THEIR INITIAL FUNCTION OF CONSERVING, VALUING AND EXHIBITING WORKS, THE MUSEUMS ARE PROMOTERS AND PRODUCERS OF NEW INITIATIVES LINKED BOTH TO LOCAL MUSEUMS AS WELL AS OTHER AREAS AND CONTEXTS.

MUCH SPACE IS DEDICATED TO CONTEMPORARY ART, NEW TECHNIQUES AND ARTISTIC EXPRESSIONS. THE AIM OF THIS SIGNIFICANT PROJECT OF RENEWAL IS TO ENCOURAGE MEMBERS OF THE PUBLIC TO GET INVOLVED WITH THE LIFE OF THE MUSEUM, ESPECIALLY THE YOUNG GENERATIONS, AND TO PROVIDE THE WHOLE COMMUNITY WITH LONGTERM STIMULI AND MANY REASONS TO VISIT THE GALLERIES.

THIS CHANGE IS THE RESULT OF A HAPPY COLLABORATION BETWEEN PUBLIC AND PRIVATE INDIVIDUALS AND HAS BENEFITTED (sic) FROM  THE HELP OF PEOPLE WHO HAVE CONTRIBUTED THEIR PARTICULAR EXPERTISE.

THE MUNICIPAL ADMINISTRATION, WHOSE DUTY IT IS TO LOOK AFTER THE MUSEUM'S LEGACY AND VALUE THE COLLECTION IS COLLABORATING WITH SYSTEMA MUSEO, A LEADING FORCE IN THE PLANNING OF NEW FUNCTIONS FOR MUSEUMS. WHAT EMERGES THEREFORE IS A NEW MANAGEMENT MODEL CAPABLE OF CIRCULATING RESOURCES IN WHAT CONTINUES TO BE THE HEART OF EVERY MUSEUM, ITS ARTISTIC HERITAGE. (sic, passim!)

Everything about this is ominous. The meaningless guff, the self-promotion by the consultants ('Systema Museo'), and the commonplace belief that to be relevant art must be contemporary. In Bologna one room was closed. You couldn't get in to see the detached frescoes. But you could peer through a doorway at this trite scene of 'Tahir Square':

Relevant and worthy, no doubt. But also obvious, trivial, artless. It's horrible that Italian museums are following common practice elsewhere and using old masters as mere foil for contemporary trivia.

Next week, I'll write about the good things I saw. But sadly there was much to lament.

'Pose Day': a new angle on museum selfies

Picture: National Gallery

Sunday was 'pose day'. It's part of museum week, a Twitter initiative that encourages people to pose for selfies in front of works of art, striking a pose that imitates or reflects the art. Some people think it encourages new audiences, and others think it's harmless fun. But I think it's degrading to all concerned, reducing works of art to props and reducing museums to foils for people to brand themselves. I discussed it with CBC this week, but here are some more elaborated reflections.

There is something deadening about seeing crowds lining up to take their pictures in the same pose in front of the same work of art, rarely pausing to look at the backdrop. A picture that might embody the highest religious ideals or the profoundest philosophical thought, or simply the apogee of artistic technique, is cheapened when treated as an opportunity for a cheap visual joke. The National Gallery even took pictures of mannequins in front of pictures from its collection (above). It's a daft stunt that trivialises the art. And the visitors themselves are missing out. If they slow down and look they could start to understand why some works of art are appreciated as masterpieces. 

Some works of art reward close study of technique. Others - the greatest - are transcendent and inspirational. It's thrilling to stand before a late Rembrandt or a great Poussin; they represent the highest level of individual human achievement. Unlike modern medicine and science, technology and industry, great works of art embody the creative spirit of a single person, however much they rely on learned technique or reflect their times. Going to art galleries is a chance to step outside our own humdrum concerns and be inspired, to seek to understand ideas that are sometimes alien and to engage with the mind of the creator. For some that inspiration is technical - how was this painted, and by whom? For others it might be more historical, or spiritual. Appreciation isn't automatic; rewards are proportionate to effort, and often requires guidance. But instead of guidance, museums offer cheap gimmicks like selfies and 'pose day'. 

The impetus for all this nonsense doesn't come from patrons. It's being pushed by museums themselves, which now frown on lofty sentiments about art. They seek to make it as much as possible about us, and to bring it down to the must mundane level. They are absolving themselves of the responsibility to explain, offering instead cheap commoditised fun. The curators themselves have devoted their lives to studying art; they must surely think it's worthwhile. They understand what makes a picture great. But the highlights are now flaunted as nothing more than photo opportunities, tokens of high culture that flatter the selfie-taker. 

At one level it ceases to matter whether a picture is even authentic if it's just to be used as background. But at another level I think it does matter to patrons; they do go to museums hoping to participate in a cultural experience. It matters that the backdrop has been identified as a masterpiece, even if they don't know why it has been designated great. The promoters of 'pose day' are cheating them. They are offering a pretend shortcut that requires no effort, but which equally offers no real reward. Promoting pose day shows contempt for visitors, substituting a simulacrum for the actual experience of engaging with art. The visitors leave with a cute photo, but no new knowledge or insight.

The icon of all that's worst about the modern museum is the image of photo-wielding crowds in front of the Mona Lisa. But now even this is turned around and presented as virtue. These pictures were tweeted by the Louvre itself, celebrating the idea that a picture can be like a celebrity. Rather than see this impoverished experience for what it is, we are told to enjoy it as if we are taking the role of the paparazzi. Playing at being a celebrity photographer is elevated as the highest ideal of the modern commodified museum visit. 

Plus ça change

James Millingen Some Remarks on the state of learning and the fine-arts in Great Britain J. Rodwell 1831

London is still blessed with a handful of outstanding second hand bookshops where you can find all manner of things you'd never have thought to look for on Amazon. At the  wonderful Any Amount of Books I found this battered pamphlet from 1831 that advances strikingly modern arguments about state support for the arts. It's rapidly disintegrating, but pages were still uncut. It nearly died unread, which is especially sad given the disproportionate attention paid to some of our contemporary reports on the arts, which ought to die unread. It's sometimes unsophisticated and sometimes crudely elitist, but its flamboyant disdain for the plebs shines oblique light on the more politely expressed snobbish sentiments of today's faux-egalitarians. 

Millingham shares the modern belief that the arts are a good investment, but he has an honourable reticence about making a merely economic argument. He quotes French director-general of finances Necker: "Learning and science repay the State with usury the assistance which the State affords to those who profess and cultivate them", and then calculates the French government's income from the estimated 5,000 (!) tourists in Paris at any given time. He hopes this will "prove a satisfactory answer to the Utilitarian and the Sordid, and shew them, that what is honorable, is generally profitable at the same time". Utilitarian and sordid. I like that.

A better argument is that state funding produces better art, though he regrettably has the modern vice of seeing 'better' in instrumental terms: "The relative decorum and piety observed on their stage, and which contrasts so much with the licentiousness and coarseness of our theatres, may be reckoned among the causes which have contributed to improve the manners of the middle and lower orders". Isn't this close to the attitude of many today, who want the lower orders herded into museums and theatres, but have a horror that they might watch Jeremy Clarkson or read the Daily Mail? Of course today they use terms like 'socially excluded' rather than 'lower orders', but the content echoes. 

In 1831, as today, luvvies were bemoaning the 'new' idea that state funding should be cut because the market will provide: "An opinion has, of late, been gradually gaining ground in this country, that it is neither a duty nor good policy, on the part of the State, to grant encouragements to the Sciences and Arts which should be left, like any other commodity, to find their natural price at the market, according to the degree of demand which may exist for them". So much for the idea that it's a novel conspiracy by neoliberals.

There's lots more in this short pamphlet. He complains that England's two universities have 'grown corrupted': "At one period, they were of easy access to young men of slender fortunes, but within the last century they have been rendered expensive, in order to become select and respectable. In other words, that they should produce men of fashion rather than men of learning" (p. 8). Today's universities are expected to churn  out credentialed employees rather than 'men of fashion', but they continue to grow corrupted. I bet people today would recoil at the term 'learned' lest it imply that others are 'less learned'.

I like Millingen's directness; none of the respectful networking of today's half-hearted critics. He tells us that learned societies contain a few learned men, but most "can no more be called men of learning than subscribers to a concert can be called musicians". Today we are more deferential, but many of the trustees of our great cultural institutions are still unqualified buffoons.

Cultural Capital by Robert Hewison

Picture: Amazon

Robert Hewison Cultural Capital: The rise and fall of creative Britain Verso 2014 £14.99

This narrative history of British cultural policy from 1997 to 2012 ruthlessly skewers the comic ineptitude of successive government attempts to corral the arts sector towards instrumental ends. The purveyors of managerial efficiency squandered money on white elephant projects and hamstrung arts professionals with meaningless targets and constant monitoring. The managers couldn't manage. Even widely-lauded policies had unintended consequences; free admission was intended to increase access, but visits by lower socio-economic groups actually fell. This book is a compelling and damning account of years of ineptitude, but the critique is one-sided. Hewison focuses on government policy, but he neglects the role of the cultural sector itself in the trends he describes. He is too ready to attribute all ills to 'neoliberal' ideology, which cannot bear the weight of his argument.

Neoliberalism is usually understood as a doctrine seeking extension of the free market - free trade, less government intervention, using markets to set prices and allocate resources. Hewison describes the opposite: removing the market mechanism with free museum entry and increased bureaucratic management by central government. Neoliberals would heartily endorse much of Hewison's criticism of government policy. Hewison doesn't explain the links to neoliberal thinkers; the term is derogatory rather than analytic. It's used in the same way that less thoughtful conservatives call anything egalitarian or liberal 'socialist', as if it's all on a continuum with show trials and gulags. Criticising neoliberalism is more like picking a team than analysing a problem.

I think the reason Hewison doesn't probe too deeply is that he doesn't want to address the complicity of the cultural sector itself in the trends he describes. Far from an alien imposition, the instrumental pursuit of goals like social inclusion and economic growth were being ardently promoted from within the cultural sector well before the Blair government adopted them. Radical museologists and critical theorists and multiculturalists have become increasingly influential. And the cultural sector's clamour for money has long been supported by claims that it's a good investment. The cultural sector didn't reluctantly sell out in return for increased funding; they were actively marketing themselves to policymakers by asserting that they could meet targets and deliver government objectives.

It's sometimes hard to discern whether Hewison is criticising a policy's effectiveness or its objective. He discusses generally some of the dilemmas of multiculturalism and diversity, but seems mainly critical of the ineffectiveness of the policies pursued rather than their aim. He is downright patronising when he writes that, "Unsurprisingly, minorities are interested in art that reflects their own experience" (p. 82). Can you imagine turning that around and saying "white middle class people are interested in art that reflects their own experience"? High culture gets to be high culture because it speaks to universal experience.

Despite his fondness for writing about neoliberalism, the discussion of economics is the weakest part of the book. He repeats the old saw that art is ideal for money laundering, but he thinks it's because, except for old masters, it's easily moved and can be traded in any currency. How many commodities does that not apply to? Surely unique works of art are especially traceable. There are reasons why the art market might be targeted for money laundering, but that's not it.

Then he says there's an "imbalance between an excessive accumulation of surplus capital and a lack of consumption to sustain growth. The solution was to stimulate production by offering 'fictitious capital' in the form of credit - hence the development of the sub-prime mortgage market in America that engendered the global crisis [...] although it is logical to borrow to invest, there is a strong temptation not to invest in production, but in assets such as stocks and bonds, futures, derivatives and property, where value is generated by competitive demand and governed by sentiment. Profits come out of thin air" (p, 157-8). Wowsers. I'm not even sure what that means, but I take comfort from confidence that Hewison doesn't know either. Companies issue bonds and shares to raise money to invest in production. But somehow bonds and shares are not investment in production. 

He thinks art is emblematic because it has 'almost no' material value and is worth what people might pay for it in the future. A financial asset is worth the present value of future cashflows. But actually that's not true of art. If it's really about future value then the art market is just a ponzi scheme, everyone buying on the basis of what the next person will pay, on the basis of their assumption of what the next person will pay. Obviously the expectation of future value is a consideration when buying art, but it is a consumption good before it's an investment good. 

This book tells people what they want to hear. Neoliberalism is the big ideological villain. Government should shower the cultural sector with money, but otherwise leave it alone. Hewison's account of government policy is important and damning, but it's only half the story. There are other ideas that are more subtle than neoliberalism, but more concretely damaging to culture. 

Will no one stand up for the selfie stick?

Picture: Hyperallergic

Museums are banning 'selfie sticks', the extendable poles that attach to your phone to take Bigger Better Selfies. It's a no-brainer, really. Long metal poles and distracted visitors focused on their selfies are a recipe for disaster in museums brimming with fragile and precious treasures. And it's an intrusion on other visitors' space, imposing a cordon around the selfie-taker. I don't blame people with selfie sticks; museums themselves are giving out the message that art exists so that it can be a backdrop for selfies. But oddly even people who have argued that people should be able to behave exactly as the please in 'their' museums have endorsed a selfie stick ban. It's an intrusion too far, though I do wonder how the decide where to draw the line (and who gets to draw the line).

What has surprised me is the way the story has taken off. Why has it captured the imagination? I think it epitomises the tensions of the museum experience today. The 'official' message is that museums must become more accessible and relevant: fewer rules, more fun, more technology. But a lot of people are actually uneasy with that proposition. Just read the comment threads, here at the Guardian for example, to see many people railing against the behaviour of selfie-taking visitors. In my experience it's not just crusty old art lovers who are objecting. People don't want their museums to be simply an extension of the street; they actually want a differentiated experience, they want to engage with art and they want to learn more.

I've led a cloistered life, and I'm uncomfortable in all kinds of social situations. I'm still not quite sure which cutlery I should be using in nice restaurants, and no matter how much I try I still can't get a tie to sit right. But for many people the ritual is part of the point of a nice restaurant - dressing up and using the right tools is part of their pleasure. How daft would it be to insist that restaurants become more accessible by letting everyone eat with their fingers (and, incidentally, taking photos of meals is frowned on in nice restaurants too). It's not just high-end restaurants; pop concerts and sports have their rituals too, and people actively seek to become part of them, learning and adopting shared forms of behaviour. There's nothing elitist about it, provided anyone in principle can partake. 

People - even young people and even people who like to share selfies on social media - appreciate differentiated experiences. There are places to dress up, and places to dress down, venues for raucous behaviour and others demanding reverence. We all instinctively get this. We don't need to be told to behave differently at a wedding or a funeral, a football match or a night at the opera. But museums struggle with the concept. They pay half-hearted lip service to the idea that some people go to look at art and might be distracted by selfie-taking mobs, suggesting they might spare an hour a week when the museum would prohibit selfies. But the mainly emphasise their openness, their willingness to let people behave exactly as they please. Their obsession with relevance and access is actually ruining the experience for everyone, because if museums are nothing special there's no good reason for people to go in the first place.

Banning selfie sticks is a good start, but it's only a start. Bring back the photo ban, National Gallery!