Strikes at the National Gallery

Picture: BBC

The National Gallery's guards are striking against plans to outsource their jobs. People are understandably annoyed at disrupted visits, and my first instinct is to back the NG on this one. The guards' case has not been well made. The boorish fool trolling Bendor Grosvenor's blog does their side no favours, and Polly Toynbee's support almost guarantees that I'll take the other side (an unworthy prejudice, but I find it an effective heuristic). Hackneyed arguments against evil outsourcing are often a plea for special treatment rather than a principled case for a public service ethos. Sometimes outsourcing is just a cheaper and more efficient way of delivering a service, and I'm all for that. 

 

But this time I'm with the union. Their fight for the best terms for their members coincides with the public interest, and they're doing a better job of safeguarding the gallery than the trustees and managers. The NG is pursuing outsourcing for the wrong reasons and it won't work. 

 

First some background. Outsourcing requires an explicit contract defining the services to be delivered and how delivery will be monitored and assessed. Contractors need to bid on a level playing field, so they need precise definition. Contracts are then won primarily on price - the cheapest tender generally wins. So the contractors are acting predictably and rationally when they seek to provide the barest minimum service consistent with the service level agreement. That's not a problem when services can be defined precisely. If the job is patrolling a goods yard, outsourcing might make sense. You want people on the ground as a deterrent, with an easily defined and easily assessed role. The contractor needs to hire a rota of staff, give them a defined patrol route, then monitor with GPS and CCTV. Contractors' cost cutting benefits consumers and taxpayers, but only if they continue to provide an appropriate level of service - which has to be definable in a service level agreement.

 

The National Gallery's guards don't just patrol the galleries. Theirs is a more complex and more important job, which in my experience they do very well. They have to balance an enforcement function with a public service function. They must be courteous, professional and helpful, and also sometimes assertive in protecting pictures from visitors who may be quite inadvertently putting them at risk. How do you write that down in a contract? Guards are always in the public eye, and I've seen laziness and incompetence from time to time. But I'm mostly struck by their professionalism and efficiency and helpfulness, enlivened by occasional quirkiness, humour and passion. Assessing guards' performance involves a degree of subjective judgment, as does hiring the right people in the first place. That kind of assessment can't be contracted out.

 

I suspect outsourced guards will be less knowledgeable, less helpful and more boring, which is a great shame. But the thing that worries me most is that they will resolve the balancing act between protecting pictures and keeping visitors happy by ignoring protection entirely and ducking any potential conflict. They will have no incentive to intervene if people poke at the pictures (happens more often than you'd think), because there's unlikely to be immediately visible damage, and if there is it's unlikely to be traced back to a guard failing in their duty. But every time somebody complains that a guard has told them to step back, it will reflect badly on the contractor. The guards' incentive will be to sit back and smile and the visitors. 

 

As former trustee Jon Snow tweeted, protecting the art is the gallery's key duty. It's not a cost-effective way of securing a service. It's a devious way of evading responsibility. If something goes wrong, they can blame the contractor. The NG's own story is that they need a more flexible workforce to cope with private evening events. I wonder if part of the issue is that they need more supine guards for private hire. The great irony is that they're criticising the union for causing closures, but museums that host private evening events are notorious for closing early and arbitrarily to set up for paid functions; it happens all the time at the V&A, especially. Paying guests take priority. And for all the pious criticism of the effect of strikes on visitors, I've more often been inconvenienced by rooms that are closed because they haven't had enough staff - which is a management and budget problem. The Poussin and Claude rooms seem to be closed half the times I go, and sometimes entire enfilades of the Sainsbury Wing are out of bounds.  

It's all a sad reflection on the new corporate National Gallery. Once the contract is signed they will lose control of the must fundamental function of any gallery. They're putting the collection at risk and harming the visitor experience. And they are evading their own direct and primary responsibility to protect their pictures. Good luck the strikers, I say.

 

Visitor numbers and Faustian bargains

Picture: Trip Advisor

England's top museums had nearly two million more visits this year, according to the latest 'performance indicators', with nearly seven million visits to the British Museum and almost six million to the National Gallery. 

The BBC frets that the rise is driven by foreign visitors; UK visits are down significantly (a fifth since 2008/9 at the NG and Tate). I think the decline in domestic visits is partly a corollary of increased absolute numbers. As museums get more overcrowded, the experience gets worse. Major museums are no longer places to return again and again for pleasure; they are places where you must push through a scrum to get a quick glance at the obligatory '20 masterpieces' so you can tick it off the list of sights and move on. It's become a pretty miserable experience, so I can see why people put off visiting and return less often. I used to go the NG every couple of weeks, but I've only been twice in the months since photography has been permitted. 

As the world's population grows and gets richer, the problem is getting worse. Dozens of the greatest masterpieces are now almost impossible to see. But visitor numbers are an easily quantified 'performance indicator',  and everyone pays obeisance to the gods of access and inclusion, so no one wants to talk about it. The global population is about seven billion. If we assume seventy sentient years and one visit per person per lifetime, that implies visits to the world's greatest museums will rise to a hundred million (about a fifteen fold increase for the busiest English museums). However you play with the numbers, a bigger and richer population with increased leisure time and disposable income will mean increased museum visits. And it will be simply impossible for everyone to enjoy equal access. 

No one wants to confront the problem directly, because none of the solutions are palatable. But solutions are being developed by default, and without debate, and they are often the least palatable. In Italy many attractions are now time-limited. You can have just fifteen minutes in the Brancacci Chapel, one of the greatest masterpieces that inaugurated Renaissance painting. Close and careful study will be prohibited; you can only have a quick glance.  

In the UK and the US the solution is that only those who can afford to pay can see the art. In the UK it looks like the opposite - admission remains free. But museums are bifurcating visits between a mass-market 'experience' where visitor numbers are pursued above all else, and a luxury experience for the elite. We can see it most clearly at the National Gallery. They have worsened the mass experience, permitting photography and promoting selfies. The model is a once-only box ticking experience, quick snap in front of Sunflowers and move along for the next person. But at the same time, they have made the gallery available for evening hire for the first time. Precisely because the mass experience is getting worse, the elite private views become a more valuable commodity, and only the very rich get to see anything. There was rightly an outcry when Sistine Chapel was rented out for a private porsche tour, but the NG's change has gone largely unremarked and even welcomed in some quarters.

I don't have a good answer to the problem of overcrowding, but if we continue to ignore it and hope it goes away we will be letting great art become the exclusive property of the very rich. Fewer people will develop a serious interest in art because it will be harder and harder to see it, and the experience will be worse and worse - as we're seeing at the NG and Tate. Answers on a postcard please. 

On Blogging

Apologies for the break in service. I'd planned to take a few days off to catch up on reading, but reading is moreish. And the art world has been more than usually frustrating recently. 

I try to avoid introspective posts like this, because they're a bit self-indulgent. But my blogging is almost pure self-indulgence, so why hold back. I find blogging cathartic, a chance to express frustration - and sometimes delight. I'm inordinately flattered that others read my posts, and I've relished responses received and connections made, but I try not to think too much about who I'm writing for or how to boost pageviews. What I hope I can do is give voice to a particular species that I think is neglected: the 'serious amateur'. There are lots of us out there, and we're a diverse bunch. We can be found staring at pictures or poring over books in the library. Some of us will be growling at the barbarians rustling crisp packets and playing with their phones, but we're not all grumpy. Some of us might even take selfies. 

'Serious amateur' is an ugly term, but I think you know who I mean. We're not professionals or experts, but we have more than a casual interest. We read academic books on subjects we neither teach nor formally study. We're the people who keep academic publishers afloat, and we're the tenacious museum-goers who return again and again to see the same things, the determined few who support the more arcane exhibitions that aren't about impressionism or Leonardo da Vinci.  

There are plenty of people who claim to speak for the 'average' visitor or reader, and everyone wants to reach out to the 'socially excluded'. It's relatively easy to assess success in the mass market. Just look at sales and attendance levels. And at the other extreme, professionals by definition are engaged in a process of mutual assessment and validation. There are fewer independent scholars today, and professional networks are more institutionalised with special privileges like private views, opening up a bigger gap between scholars and their readers, curators and museum goers. 

The people in the middle are left out. We have no direct voice and few advocates.We are the group that no one knows what to do with, taken for granted because we'll keep coming back whatever indignities the force upon us. Ironically people perceive that museums are designed solely for serious amateurs like me, and they must be dumbed down and popularised by force. In reality they're already speeding ahead of their supposed 'critics'. Wall text is often dumbed down so far as to be meaningless and museums' 'public engagement' departments find it odd that anyone would want to look art art rather than play interactive games and take selfies. Mark Greif has written a perceptive essay addressing parallel concerns in academic writing, noting how academics today struggle as public intellectuals not because they are obscure, but because when they're addressing a wider audience they feel the need to dumb it down too much. It's a brilliant essay that addresses many points that concern me too; do read it.

I hope my modest little blog is a window on the world of one of 'us'. I don't claim to speak for all, but I suspect some of my gripes and frustrations are common to many who don't have professional privileges but want a deeper engagement than is often on offer. My views are likely more trenchant, my expression more forthright and my outlook  more grumpy than others'. But in this, my modest little blog, let me give voice to a little squeak of protest from one of the maligned middling minds. 

Ideas have been backing up and I have some rants to get off my chest, so I should be able to resume more frequent service. It was good to take a break and indulge in some more sustained thinking, which I hope will be fodder for future posts.

New Year Reading

Brian Sewell's annual 'books of the year' list is reliably excellent. I agree with most of his judgments about the year's major publications, but he's spotted some lesser gems too. He's quite right to praise Ashgate, publisher of expensive hardbacks for the academic library market. They have an undeserved reputation as publisher of last resort when you can't find a university press, but in recent years they've published a lot of the most interesting art books, at a time when some of the great university presses are dumbing down. Brian no longer writes regularly for the Evening Standard, which isn't the paper it once was. But how wonderful that a local newspaper can still publish a list like that, heavy on academic books and full of insight and surprise. 

Brian's aside, I've found the plethora of 'books of the year' lists disappointing. Many seem to be complied by people who don't read much, populated by the predictable and the mediocre. Even its critics make obeisance to Thomas Piketty's Capital, which I found superficial. It's well written and the use of historic and literary evidence is interesting, but it's more instructive to read the critical debate than the book itself. I doubt it will become a classic. Francis Fukuyama's Political Order and Political Decay seemed to make fewer 'best of' lists, but it's a far superior book and perhaps the book from 2014 that will have most staying power. It's too wide ranging easily to review. It analyses the dialectical processes that give shape to particular forms of political order and how they come under pressure and fail. Fukuyama manages at once to be both sophisticated and colloquial, advancing his argument by vignette and case study. A great read and by far the best take on America's political ills. The other great book of the year is Jürgen Osterhammel's masterful The Transformation of the World: A Global history of the nineteenth century, which avoid the European bias of most global histories. Osterhammel is particularly strong on Asian history, but he gives a lively sense of the forces that were reshaping the world. Those are some of the books I failed to review last year; here's some more detail on some that I read over the holidays.

Picture: Amazon

Ruth Guilding Owning the Past: Why the English collected antique sculpture, 1640-1840 Yale University Press 2014 £55

Historical scholarship in all disciplines tends to focus on what's important or valued today, so our understanding of the history of collecting and connoisseurship is skewed by our contemporary concerns. Far more is written about paintings than sculptures. Britain's country house picture collections have been celebrated for centuries, commemorated in catalogues and guidebooks, studied by connoisseurs and picked over by dealers and collectors. But ancient sculpture was also collected ardently. Today it's too often regarded as mere bric-à-brac. 

Recently two major ancient sculptures have been sold that are not only important as works of art, but were integral to two of the greatest Robert Adam interiors in England - the Jenkins Venus from Newby Hall's great sculpture gallery, sold in 2002 for £8m, and a Roman Aphrodite from Syon House sold for £9.5m in 2014 and currently export stopped though with little hope of retaining it. Future generation will look back in horror that we let these go, denuding incomparable and irreplaceable rooms of great works of art essential to their unity, whilst saving mere scraps and daubs by British artists already too well represented in national collections and which would be better appreciated abroad. The disinterest in their loss reflects the subservient status of sculpture today.

Ruth Guilding's magnificent book redresses the balance and shows us how sculptures were appreciated in England. It is erudite and wide-ranging, considering collecting, dealing, connoisseurship and reception of ancient sculpture in England. The illustrations are especially praiseworthy; well chosen and well reproduced. We see historic interiors (often wonderful vintage photographs) as well as details of sculptures, together with paintings, prints and books that interpreted and reproduced them. 

The danger in reviewing a book like this is the halo effect. Its considerable merits dazzle us, and make it hard to find fault. But finding fault is a vital duty, because this is a groundbreaking book that one hopes will open up new avenues of research and debate. Most of my criticisms are of areas that Guilding only touched on, but which demand more scholarly attention. For example, I thought her discussion of the connoisseurship of ancient sculpture insufficiently linked to wider eighteenth century debates on connoisseurship, when connoisseurs were figures of fun as well as pillars of respectability. And I can't agree with her that taste is the outward expression of connoisseurship. I think they are quite different things that deserve separate consideration; one can have taste without being a connoisseur, surely. The question of taste takes us towards questions of the wider reception of ancient sculpture by the widening museum-going public. Guilding mentions 'debased mass-produced reproductions' (p. 148), but it is regrettably little more than a mention. Her book focuses on elite reception rather than wider diffusion of taste. 

Guilding's discussion of the market can be rather superficial, taking at face value the idea that connoisseurship is dirtied by the market: "[the] commodification of antique sculpture threatened to destabliize the way in which 'virtu' was understood". Trendy terms like 'commodification' (usually means 'selling') and 'destabilize' (doesn't mean much at all) always raise my hackles. Ancient sculpture was not 'commodified' in the eighteenth century; it had always been traded, as she makes clear in her own book. Guilding refers specifically to collectors who dealt on the side, muddying the connoisseur/dealer distinction. But I'm not convinced that distinction was ever as strong as she implies; in an earlier period Sir Dudley Carleton traded ancient marbles with Rubens, getting some of his paintings in return.  

Guilding is often critical of collectors and their motives, but in the concluding section on contemporary collecting the book descends into the kind of hagiography too common in studies of collecting. It's an ignominious conclusion to such a fine study.

Picture: Amazon

John C. Rule and Ben S. Trotter A World of Paper: Louis XIV, Colbert de Torcy, and the Rise of the Information State McGill-Queen's University Press 2014 £35

As an omnivorous but amateur reader I'm especially drawn to specialist books that introduce a corner of a bigger picture. They're often more illuminating than general books written for a popular audience. This meaty study looks at Louis XIV's foreign policy bureaucracy and I found it utterly fascinating. 

In this period diplomacy was becoming more professional and diplomats were more highly trained. They were also more likely to be drawn from the aristocracy rather than selected from a wider population. We might think that paradoxical, because we are accustomed to seeing merit separately from position. But both reflect the higher status that was being accorded diplomacy, and the authors explain the difficulty of appointing on merit in the absence of universal education or reliable sorting mechanisms. Appointing relatives to the administration and giving them an apprenticeship was the most reliable way of ensuring competence.

This book is full of oblique insights into absolutism, Louis XIV's France and early modern administration and diplomacy. The Sun King himself appears ain this study as a monarch more of the conference chamber than the bedchamber, contra popular perception. And the bureaucratic apparatus struck me rather more modern than I'd imagined (though depending on your prior views, you might draw the opposite conclusion). It's an excellent study, historically sensitive and also attuned to bureaucratic practicalities. 

Picture: Amazon

William Boyd Solo Jonathan Cape 2013 £7.99

The Bond novels are dreadful literature, but wholly redeemed by their glamour and pace. It's a measure of Fleming's rare talent that no one else - even good writers - has been able to capture the élan of the originals. Boyd comes close, and Solo was fun to read. The punchy prose is better than the original, but true to its style. The luxuriant descriptions of cars and guns and girls and breakfasts comes close to caricature, but so frankly does Fleming's. But the plot was too convoluted for my taste, and the explanation via a dialogue with Felix Leiter at the end was clunky and unsatisfactory.

The mission was too grubby - securing oil resources rather than defeating cartoonish villains or wicked communists. And Bond himself was rather flatter than the original, less witty, less ironic, less  glamourous.  

Anachronisms are not always mistakes; a degree of self-conscious updating is necessary for the movies and the books. Overt and unthinking racism and sexism were rightly jettisoned, not for political correctness but because it would make it hard to identify with Bond's character. Scenes of sadistic violence were common in Fleming's novel, but in this one it is perpetrated by Bond himself. I hope the decision was conscious; I thought it worked in context, though it reworks Bond's character.

Other anachronisms were less deft, or else were mistakes ("Don't go there" is a phrase so much of our time). The acquisition of a fake passport is carefully described, but he has no problem changing a 'brick of notes' despite currency restrictions. And his writing about smoking was too conspicuous. It can't be handled unselfconsciously today; it's like high Victorians trying to write about sex. Like the TV show Mad Men, we are able vicariously to enjoy smoking and drinking innocently, without the healthist moralising that spoils so much of life today.

I've come late to Richard House's widely-praised The Kills (Picador 2013 £7.99), a big quartet of related novels set around the Iraq war, and supplemented with online video and audio. I found the supplementary material contrived and unhelpful, but the book is compelling. The characterisation and quality of writing is far above the norm for thrillers, and its diffuse focus on characters at the periphery is suspenseful and brings the narrative to life. Recommended. 

I followed up a recent biography of Queen Victoria with Jane Ridley's Bertie: A life of Edward VII, which was widely praised at the time. It's superb. Ridley has a rare combination of penetrating intellect and narrative gift, dealing equally deftly with the gossip and intrigue surrounding the playboy prince and the great affairs of state and dynastic politics of fin-de-siècle Europe. 

From my book pile

Picture: Amazon

Nicholas A. Eckstein Painted Glories: The Brancacci Chapel in Renaissance Florence Yale University Press 2014 £40

This is an excellent study of the context for one of the supreme masterpieces of the Renaissance, the great fresco cycle begun by Masaccio and Masolino and completed by Filippino Lippi. Here is where I disagree: "the Brancacci Chapel and its stupendous, incomparably beautiful decorative programme add up to something less than the sum of their parts unless both are treated as the property of everyone who had a stake in their fortunes or belonged in some way to the Carmelit culture responsible for their existence" (p. 207). Of course to understand context we need to understand it in the round; that much is truism. But I think something stronger is implied about our ability to appreciate the frescoes, and there I'm less sure. I think they stand as stupendous works of art even if you don't know their context. I was fascinated to learn more about the circumstances of the Chapel's creation and use, but I'm not sure it has much shifted my appreciation of it as a work of art. Looking at it another way, this study could have been written about an utterly forgettable and minor fresco cycle without looking very different. There isn't much here about the artistry of the chapel. 

I don't mean to criticise attention to context; this book takes a different approach, and I think it's a profitable one. But for a book length study to neglect so much the artistic aspects of the fresco cycle is to lose something. The one part that I thought unforgivable was his failure to address the consequences of an aggressively thorough cleaning that many, including myself, think enormously damaging to the frescoes. Eckstein mentions it only in passing, and always uncritically. 

It also strikes me that despite its bent towards the historical rather than the art historical, this book remains rather speculative. "Understanding how they may have spoken to ordinary Florentines ... requires something more than another look at these sensationally beautiful images. It requires sustained analysis of a range of factors influencing the ways contemporary men and women approached, regarded and used the Chapel, and of impressions and associations it may have triggered in their minds at different times", Eckstein tells us (p. 19). "Associations it may have triggered" in fifteenth century minds must remain speculative, and I thought more consideration of methodology would have been profitable in that context. And as Eckstein himself mentions, they were a rich source for later artists (famously including Michelangelo), whose reaction is more likely to have been admiration for sensationally beautiful images before appreciation of their Carmelite context. 

I've accentuated my critical thoughts about this book, because Grumpy. But despite my frustrations, I enjoyed and profited from it, and I do commend it. Eckstein discusses the pictorial programme in relation to the Carmelite order, and has a particularly interesting chapter on 'the Miracle of Anghiari' as a context for the Brancacci Chapel, when Saints Peter and Paul intervened to save the Florentines. I find the contextual and historical stuff fascinating, and I learned a lot from this thoroughly researched and well written study.

Picture: Amazon

T.G. Otte The Foreign Office Mind: The Making of British Foreign Policy, 1865-1914 Cambridge University Press 2011 £22.99

Brilliant diplomatic history told through the eyes of the foreign office. Otte's narrative of British foreign policy is interspersed with an account of the office politics within the tiny and often seriously underfunded foreign office. I found it illuminating, particularly as the establishment grappled with new challenges on continental Europe and Britain's post-Napoleonic hegemony was revealed as increasingly tenuous. The narrative structure downplays theories and ideas and focuses on process rather than structure, but it would be impossible to address every dimension in a single study. 

Otte concludes that diplomats "were not the Wooster-ish types that stride along the corridors of power in the pages of popular fiction or in certain forms of popular history", referencing "most egregiously" Niall Ferguson's The Pity of War (p. 394). I enjoyed the disparaging reference to that flimsy celebrity. And I appreciated the nuanced picture of British diplomacy that emerges from this masterful study. 

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Dominic A. Pacyga Chicago: A biography University of Chicago Press 2009 £16

I found this book too unspecific and sometimes banal: "the use of machinery to cut costs would provide a key element of the Industrial Revolution" (p. 41), and "The nature of the continuing Industrial Revolution and the world market system shifted regional, national, and even international relationships" (p. 82). Its strategy is to give some macro-level background in broad strokes, and then illustrate in the context of Chicago.

It's good on class and ethnic tension, but again it was too much a journalistic account of local manifestations of regional, national and even international phenomena. I'd particularly like to have seen more on planning issues, which are touched on but not analysed effectively. The book reads well and has some interesting material, but lacks analytic heft.

Picture: Amazon

Joanna Merwood-Salisbury Chicago: The skyscraper and the modern city University of Chicago Press 2009 £35

This is much better; a book that takes a more specific theme but draws out wider implications. Merwood-Salisbury quotes from Landau and Conduit's history of the skyscraper: "The skyscraper building type owes its existence and much of its character more to the desire for money and prestige, to advances in technology, and to adventures in real estate speculation than to abstract ideals or theories of style or aesthetics" (quoted p. 4). This gets to the nub of the problem, but doesn't answer it well. The quotation sets out to refute a view that no one holds (has anyone really claimed that skyscrapers exist due to abstract aesthetic theories?). The common view is that they are build for exclusively financial reasons, but interestingly the quotation undermines that view by lumping together two things that must be separated - money and prestige. The two are not natural bedfellows. The most profitable building might not be the most prestigious. The question that struck me on visiting Chicago is why their skyscrapers are stunning - why have developers there chosen to spend extra money on beautiful rather than merely functional buildings? In London few skyscrapers are beautiful. The overwhelmingly dominant form is the ugly boxy glass stump.

The book takes history and historical ideas seriously, but doesn't neglect the micro-level technical factors that shaped the Chicago skyscraper, such as the use of terra cotta tiles to clad the steel-framed buildings, giving opportunity for decoration, and the use of white glazed tiles in interior courtyards to improve the quality of light in interiors. I found the small details like this fascinating. 

Merwood-Salisbury's deadpan style is not always appropriate to her material. I laughed at this unintentionally funny passage: "The desire for a worldwide uprising of workers was antithetical to the local architects' belief in the development of a harmonious western society out of the acclimatization of different races. For the anarchists, a new society would arrive not through evolution but through revolution" (p. 31). At a time when anarchists were bombing and assassinating and assorted socialists and communists were credibly agitating for social transformation, calling them 'antithetical' to architects seems somewhat insufficient, even if it is a relevant observation in context.

Later she writes of Louis Sullivan: "His principal task was to create an architecture that expressed the triumph of business and technology over forces that threatened to destabilize the city. His design for the tall office building was a political manifesto about the fractious relationship between art and labor, and ultimately about the future of industrial society and its governance" (p. 38). She goes to to compare his clad steel-framed buildings as akin to political banners on parade. No doubt there was a political aspect to Sullivan's buildings, but returning to her own opening quotation that is not the primary purpose of the skyscraper, and Merwood-Salisbury sometimes indulges in a degree of rhetorical excess, trying too hard to link the sykscraper to its social and political context in 1890s Chicago. But despite the excesses, this is a first rate study that I found one of the most illuminating books on Chicago.

Picture: Amazon

I greatly enjoyed Kate Summerscale's Mrs Robinson's Disgrace: The private diary of a Victorian Lady (Bloomsbury 2013 £7.99), a micro history of a sensational Victorian divorce trial, rich with soap-operaesque material"the idea that certain kinds of writing were dangerous - especially to young women - was commonplace (p. 116-7) finds uncomfortably close parallel in the 'trigger warnings' that proliferate on university campuses today. The contrast of social mores then and now is compelling, although I thought  The Idle Woman piqued my interest; her review here.