 | ||||||
 | ||||||
 | ||||||
 | | | | | | |
 | |||||||
 | |||||||
Leaders | |||||||
 | |||||||
| |||||||
Reviews | |||||||
| |||||||
| |||||||
| |||||||
| |||||||
Populism: The death of museums Blockbusters like that currently dedicated to early Raphael at the National Gallery are not staged for the art-loving public. They are put on because they are lucrative and enable galleries to demonstrate to their government paymasters that they are popular and represent good value for money. All governments claim they believe in art as an “essential ingredient in a healthy society” – we’re all familiar by now with the sort of guff they spew – but none is prepared to put its money where its mouth is. The gulf, therefore, between what it costs to run a pile like the National Gallery and the miserly sum the Exchequer is prepared to vouchsafe to pay for it has to be bridged by, among other earners, big box office extravaganzas. These blockbusters are damaging to almost everything they touch, excepting the hosting institution’s balance sheet. They ensure, for example, that the oldest and most vulnerable and valuable art is almost permanently in transit and susceptible to damage or total loss – and all so that those who purport to be devoted to art don’t actually have to make the effort to travel to see it but can instead have it fetched to their own door. The rambling surveys that constitute most blockbusters are for tourists and the culture junkies of the chattering classes. They are certainly not staged with genuine students and lovers of art in mind. Indeed, as many recent experiences of my own demonstrate, museums in general are no longer organised with a view to satisfying those who ought to be their core, treasured audience. In my lifetime the function of museums has changed from being places devoted to the education of the interested into civic facilities of mass entertainment in order to meet the requirements of the tourist market and the crass urgings of philistine governments to appeal, by being ‘socially inclusive’, to those who are happily uninterested in art. It is the government, mark, that is committed to the ‘social inclusion’ of the uninterested not the uninterested themselves, most of whom couldn’t give a toss because they have other important pastimes to pursue. I have developed a strong suspicion that the cultural policy determined by insisting that certain people are ‘excluded’ and need to be ‘included’ is a figment of a liberal, do-gooding tendency now verging on mania. This policy has been imposed only in order to apply the measuring criteria of the marketplace to an area of life to which it is singularly inappropriate. The whole of our cultural agenda in art and education is now driven by this misapprehension. I would feel less concerned by this development if I had even a slight suspicion that those who promote this policy from Westminster were themselves passionate amateurs of history and art. Unfortunately, they give no impression of having been smitten by the very thing they consider important enough to inflict on others at all costs. An art lover will see nothing in the Raphael exhibition in the conditions necessary to justify having had these works freighted so expensively and perilously from no fewer than 38 countries. I had the misfortune to miss the day on which the press are given a preferential view of what everyone else will be unable to see properly. Fortunately, when I attended a fortnight after the show opened, I still got in free but would have been angry and felt cheated to have paid £9 for so unsatisfactory an experience. Although attendants made a show of controlling the flow, the already unprepossessing catacombs of the National Gallery were overcrowded. There was noisy jostling in order to see and another jostling whilst one actually looked. It was impossible to feel comfortable studying small works in detail because of pressure from those waiting, but especially from those importunate, irresistible terriers who, eager to the point of rudeness, just have to look right now at what the commentator speaking in their ear is telling them to notice. An equal disadvantage in such congested galleries is the impossibility of standing back and comparing thoughtfully one work with another. This is essential in an exhibition whose principal interest lies in weighing autograph paintings against maybes, so-sos and curatorial want-to-bes. Thus does overcrowding kill one of the real pleasures of looking at art, namely the ability to divine and savour from scanning a spread of works the developing peculiarities of an artist’s style. This is prevented when amblers are two-deep along the wall and any space is being criss-crossed by those who, because they are fully absorbed in their headsets, saunter about oblivious of everyone else’s eyelines and concentration. As with everything in cultural policies dominated by the mantras of ‘access’ and ‘inclusiveness’, being there is all that matters. Numbers only count because they can be matched to targets. Quality of experience is never discussed by headcounters for this implies quality of response, curiosity and concentration, and – god forbid – perhaps even foreknowledge and a predisposition to learning. Quality of experience is, therefore, elitist, old-fashioned and decidedly undesirable in an age where what is demanding is without qualm dumbed down to a level where no effort is required and none is rewarded. To be there is everything but to show a developed interest is dangerously snobbish. I sometimes wonder how many visits to a museum Department of Culture mandarins think are permissible before the ‘access’ miracle of ‘social inclusion’ becomes that gravest of all slurs, an unhealthy intellectual fascination? The reason I’d missed seeing the Raphael exhibition in the comparative comfort of a press-only viewing was because, courtesy of a cruise company who asked me to give lectures, I was in Italy looking at, among other works, the Raphaels in the Vatican. The boat’s passengers were ‘doing’ Rome by express coach in a short day. Having visited the city on many occasions before my time was to be spent with the Pope’s collection of Roman sculpture, of which the befuddled old apostle has easily the choicest collection. Because most decorative Roman sculptures are copies of what were considered in the Imperial period to be the most important works of Greek sculpture, it is here possible not only to understand better the most renowned works of the greatest sculptors of the Classical and Hellenistic periods but also to compare Roman copies of the same missing originals. From what was a comfortable museum 25 years ago, the Vatican has been transformed into an experience even worse than the Raphael ruck in Trafalgar Square. Galleries in which formerly one could become lost, so scarce were the viewers, are now thronged with crowds. Myriads now spate along a pre-arranged route whose ultimate focus is the Sistine Ceiling – for everyone who is in Rome for a day must visit the scene of Charlton Heston’s backache. The entire museum was organised, it seemed to me, in order to maximise the speed with which many thousands might tick Michelangelo off their shopping list before haring off to score the Colosseum. In order to prevent logjam, hundreds of badged tour groups are directed around what is only a part of the palace. The Laocoön (which you can’t approach closely or go behind), the Belvedere Torso, the Apollo Belvedere, these are halts along the way in which obligatory pictures are shot before moving on. One sniggering group, British alas, took it in turns to have their photos snapped while pretending to sniff the exposed armpit of a ‘Praxiteles’. For here was the reality of ‘social inclusion’. It was just about possible to see the sculpture although, disappointingly, so much of what I expected to see was inexplicably either not on show or not open. Long galleries of antique sculpture, those containing some of the more important objects as far as my interest was concerned, were roped off. This couldn’t be a result of financial stringency for the Vatican has to be among the most profitable businesses in Italy. The educational potential of the series of museums making up the Vatican has plainly been dumped for the purpose of entertaining the mob: Juvenal’s ‘bread and circuses’ has become Thomas Cook’s ‘pizza and Michelangelo’. I calculate that on the day I visited only one third of the sculpture that was on display was open to be seen. The thinking, presumably, is that as far as classical sculpture is concerned a little goes a long way and for most visitors this little is more than sufficient to give them a rough idea. If not, tough. In order to ensure that those in the Sistine Chapel don’t have to spend too long craning their necks, Michelangelo’s scenes from Genesis are explained to them at shrinelets all over the building and in the courtyard before they actually arrive in the temple itself. The real thing is there only to confirm what visitors have already been told and, space being limited, the real thing must be rationed in order to avoid a Hillsborough. The exhausting crush and shuffle through what is the high point in Raphael’s oeuvre, the Stanze, is intolerable and demeaning to everyone who participates in it. Guides shout in a cacophony of tongues and stab the air with patterned umbrellas and phoney legionary standards to attract their flock. Narrow doorways become funnels and are blocked making it impossible to backtrack. As at the National Gallery, Raphael was all but invisible in this insulting parody of art appreciation, and comparative looking was, needless to say, once again a mere dream. No one there seemed to know or care that a recent cleaning has succeeded in reducing The School of Athens to a ghostly vapour of what it was. The Sistine Chapel was packed and rowdy and there was nowhere to sit to take stock and dwell. Every minute a guard bellowed and clapped from a podium to encourage silence interspersed with an ear-grating, recorded tannoy message issuing a string of instructions in a basket of languages. Braindead with this painful assault on our senses we shuffled dutifully out. If ever proof were needed that populist policies in relation to art serve only to ruin what they are supposed to celebrate then the Vatican is the objectification of this most grotesque failure. Back on the boat the overwhelming opinion was summed up by one passenger who said to me: “I’m glad I’ve seen it I suppose, but I wouldn’t go again.” I knew what he meant: neither will I. As was the case for so many the work had not been allowed to touch him. Circumstances had conspired against that seductive serenity which may descend so memorably only when art is quietly contemplated: he had been there but he felt he hadn’t been allowed to see it, least of all to feel it. It delivered anything but the promised magical experience. That poor, cheated passenger’s experience was a loud cautionary warning that the patronising policies of ‘social inclusiveness’ promoted by, among others, our own arts ministry, are entirely destructive. To the fools of New Labour this miserable type of participation is its own justification. Being there for its own sake is all that matters, although nothing other than platitudes are ever offered concerning the precise quality of this experience and its long-term benefits. Mass art tourism and Government policies based on ‘access’ and ‘social inclusion’ are ill-thought madness. They patronise, insult and degrade all who are touched by them. No one benefits. The senselessness by which culture is sold by the yard discriminates cruelly against the sizeable minority of people, such as many readers of this paper, who actually enjoy art and think about it most days. We are the victims too of this manipulative interference which supposes that art can be piled high and sold cheaply like any other commodity. Our boat moved on to Naples, which means either Pompeii or shopping, or ideally a tilt at both. Nearly all of the sculpture and other artefacts excavated from the buried towns of Vesuvian Campania have been deposited at the Archaeological Museum in Naples, which has an encyclopedic account of early Imperial sculpture. Factories at Pozzuoli, just around the Bay of Naples, and possibly in Pompeii itself were hacking out statues for the urban industrial rich and the hundreds of villa owners hereabouts who treated the environs of Neapolis as the summer playground of Rome. Only the more discerning get to the Archaeological Museum and as a result near perfect conditions exist in its spacious, stately galleries. But where is the sculpture? Hardly anything is on show. Rooms are empty or closed and in the galleries which are open a voguish sparseness in display ensures that only a small fraction of what one knows to be in their custody is on show. Under such circumstances a State policy in which excavated material must remain in Italy surely can’t be justified. The Jackdaw has ranted before about these absurdly restrictive practices born of childish nationalisms. As more and more is excavated proportionally less and less of what exists is exhibited. Where is the sense in this? Writing as one with an amateur interest in classical sculpture I would have preferred to have seen some of Naples’s empty galleries densely forested with statues instead of the spartan arrangement focusing on a few, though by no means all, of the collection’s highlights. The museum’s celebrated cabinet of antique erotica, however, comprising assorted tuberous cocks and mosaics illustrating athletic copulation, which is what most of the few visitors arrive to see, is open and signposted... Before arriving in Naples I’d experienced precisely the same disappointment in Pisa where a desultory scattering of sculpture was housed in a museum comfortably capable of displaying ten times the number of items. If you visit the Camposanto in Pisa and you’re interest is for anything other than one modestly famous fresco, its remarkable collection of Roman sarcophagi for example, my advice is stay at home. Neither is the British Museum blameless in this respect. The bulk of the Elgin Marbles is on display because it is on the itinerary of every tour, but if you want to study the less well-known items which Elgin collected the galleries housing them are frequently shut. It would seem that the main job now of all museums is to keep their most famous exhibits on display in order that a maddening mob of tours can tick them off, while the rest, the genuinely and passionately curious, can either make do or be disappointed. Museums are under pressure from governments to encourage tourism for all the wrong reasons. It is about time museums stood up to the ridiculous demands of ignorant politicians and insisted on being allowed to do their jobs properly and unimpeded by daft directives. The guided tour is one of the the ghastly realities of these mad policies. Tours thwart art appreciation and are the blunt instrument by which culture is rationed not celebrated. They are a scourge and should be banned from all serious museums. They prevent any seed of interest from germinating in their participants. Looking at art is a solitary and time-consuming pursuit not a group activity whose motivation is haste. Neither is appreciation enhanced by listening to headsets whose soundtracks encourage rapid progress to the souvenir shop. Tours – or indeed any other expedient designed only to increase attendance numbers – should not be allowed to dictate the policies of educational institutions. It is my view that museums should be motivated only by scholarship and a desire to educate and inspire those prepared to make the effort to benefit from what they have to offer. Increasingly, however, one suspects that it is the one-off, casual grazer requiring momentary diversion between meals on whom museums’ energies and enterprise are increasingly focused. When places of learning and the highest ideals are turned into venues for mass entertainment the result does nobody any favours. It ruins the experience of art and history for everyone. David Lee | |||||||
| |||||||
| |||||||
| |||||||
Take me to All of this site is | |||||||
| | | | | | | |