DAMIEN HIRST may be ready for the launch of an interplanetary reputation. He is preparing to dispatch a little spot painting to Mars. But less stellar artists are more interested in another sort of space: museum space. To move from the commercial arena into a major public gallery is to stake out one’s cultural territory on pretty solid ground. Who wouldn’t want the Tate label attached to their talent, for instance? The museum turns the contemporary art piece into a marketable commodity.
So it’s boom time for British art. As cultural projects continue to appropriate sites left derelict by the decline of hard industry, there has never been so much museum space available.
It was Tate Modern, of course, the great powerhouse of the contemporary, which set the turbines of taste churning. It invented a new audience for art. And this is the audience upon which the New Art Gallery, Walsall, for instance, is capitalising as, opening almost three years ago in a brand new £21 million building, it brought culture to the Black Country. It is the audience upon which the Baltic, Gateshead’s impressive new £46 million centre for the contemporary arts, relies.
It is just the most recent of the many new or expanded spaces which are cropping up all over the country. In the coming year the completion of the £26 million Playfair project will provide Edinburgh with a world-class new arts complex. Liverpool, already host to an arts biennale and a plethora of galleries, including the impressive northern outpost of the Tate, plans a further new museum as part of its Pierhead project. The British Museum, Tate Britain and the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge have all developed old courtyards. The Sir John Soane’s Museum is celebrating its 250th anniversary with a major restoration. The Hayward and the National Gallery are about to embark upon substantial improvements. The V&A, having recently inaugurated new British galleries, is readying further rooms for painting and photography displays. The Manchester City Art Gallery and the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford have recently reopened, but bigger and better than before. The Whitechapel plans to take over an adjacent building and double in size, and the Barbican will be shut for the first half of the coming year as it tries to claw back 140 sq m of potential show space.
All this reflects a significant change in attitude towards museums. The buildings that were once seen as simply respositories for valuable objects are now considered more as environments, as places that inspire thought-provoking experiences. Tate Modern is almost a theme park. It appeals to parents with pushchairs, teachers with children, smooching couples and teenagers on the pull.
When the Baltic opened this year, most of the visitors were probably less interested in the art works than by the thought of in some way participating in the authentic “art experience”. The museum’s traditional aims of scholarship, of the preservation of objects, are gradually being displaced by an emphasis on spectacle, on a sense of entertainment.
Other museum expansions and improvements currently under way are to improve visitor facilities. But should these improvements be at the expense of a collection? The British Museum’s magnificent Great Court Project has created a spacious new clearing of clean light-washed stone. But the world’s greatest repository of scholarly artefacts is in decline. Last summer, for instance, the museum added a unique collection of Afghan textiles to what is among the very finest ethnographic textile collections in the world. And yet even visiting experts can have no access to it and plans for a future display and study centre have collapsed because of the museum’s deficit of more than £6 million.
Edinburgh’s Playfair project may improve vastly the scale and quality of exhibitions now possible in the city. It has already allowed it to stage a blockbuster Monet exhibition next year and more are promised: Degas in 2004, Gauguin in 2005 and Van Gogh in 2006. And blockbusting shows do have an obvious importance — not least a financial one. The Royal Academy’s Monet exhibition took almost twice what it cost to stage in ticket sales.
But too much hype isn’t necessarily helpful to art as galleries compete to pull in the A-list artistic celebs. Blockbusters can breed an insatiable appetite. Inevitably, disappointment then looms. After Matisse/Picasso, a show of spectacular calibre, and Warhol, whose work tapped directly into contemporary interests, Tate Modern has to make do with Max Beckmann in 2003. Beckmann is a dramatic and complex painter, but in the aftermath of past spectaculars will his work feel rather flat?
This expectation of cultural excitement is in part the result of a contemporary art scene which has depended heavily upon sensationalism. The shock of the new and the strange has awakened huge interest. But a forum such as the Baltic cannot hope to sustain this. With no permanent collection and a programme which, promising next an important Norwegian painter, begins to look resolutely non-populist, will the public bother to keep coming back?
In competing to present the next big experience, to be more impressive, to offer greater entertainment, galleries risk losing touch with an essential element of art appreciation. It takes patience to understand a piece of work. It is only through a slow process of perceptual discovery, through the gradual sifting of personal responses, that the meanings and emotions and creative processes that went into the production of an art work will start to communicate. If we grow accustomed to treating art as entertainment, we will start flicking through our culture in search of more immediate stimulation.
There may be more public show spaces than ever before. But to win a place in one of them may no longer mean as much as it should. Artists need time and attention to develop, and not simply space. Culture does not belong to the pile ’em high, sell ’em cheap market ethos.
Galleries cannot simply expand like some fast-food chain. Museums have created a new and sophisticated audience. They now need to cater for a developing and maturing taste. Art galleries are great institutes of education and debate. Directors must approach their programmes with rigour and intelligence. Curators must choose art works that can sustain a high level of exposure. Otherwise museums will end up not nurturing cultural appreciation but teaching the public how to appreciate art less.
