Southampton City Council has confirmed its intention to sell key works of art from the collection of Southampton City Art Gallery.
The council believes that the sale of a sculpture by August Rodin and a painting by Alfred Munnings will help pay for a new £15 museum about the Titanic due to open in 2012.
The two Rodins, Eve and Crouching Woman, and After the Race by Munnings, are valued together at £5m. The entire collection, which includes works by Turner, Lowry, Picasso and Monet, is valued at £180m.
Southampton’s culture boss, John Hannides, chairman of the city’s culture committee, said: “The Munnings has not been seen in Southampton for quite some time and that also goes for the other items too. While they have been on display on occasions they are not central to the collection”. The Rodins have been kept in store.
“We have looked at all potential options for funding, and we have not yet taken a decision to sell them, but without this it would be very difficult to see how we might otherwise be able to fund the heritage museum” he said.
But Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones wrote this week that the collection has a long standing reputation with works of art from the Renaissance. “But it also has a policy of buying modern art, including paintings by Bridget Riley and Chris Ofili. It displays its collection of about 3,500 works in rotation, and uses it to create imaginative exhibitions that mingle past and present.
“It seems to be the collection’s very liveliness that has opened it to attack. First the Riley acquisition was pilloried in the city newspaper; now the council has decided the collection is fair game.”
The Visual Arts and Galleries Association said the sale would be seen as “a test case for cash-strapped councils using one part of their collections to support another. This could have a fundamental effect on museum collections across the country”.
Buckingham Palace have opened a summer exhibition marking the 60th anniversary of the Commonwealth, with a display of the stuff she and HRH have been handed over the years, the clothes she wore. As to th e latter, the couture doesn’t seem to have changed since 1953 when she became head of the Commonwealth, if the waistline has, but the gifts… ‘Oh darling, do look. It’s… a lacquered crocodile’. There are also fabulous gems in imaginative jewellery, and nice selections of boomerangs and things me from rocks. But the nicest, for me, is a bus a couple of feet long made out of scraps of metal, given to her by the Pakistani High Commissioner’s drivers in 1997. It’s brilliantly painted, and on one side they’ve portrayed HM looking suspiciously like Mrs Gandhi, and her consort as nothing so much as the villain in Slum Dog Millionaire.
An erstwhile colleague in his Guardian days where he was the arts correspondent went on to greater things as the great Milton Shulman’s worthy successor as drama critic of the Evening Standard, and he’s retired from Fleet Street so the Critics Circle gave him lunch at L’etoile. It is, of course, Nicholas de Jong who has found new fame as a playwright himself with Plague Over England, and was that afternoon to sign a film contract. Nick has a Bodleian full of anecdotes, but he gave us his favourite which comes not from his career but from his school. The ‘seriously stupid’ headmaster had invited Dame Edith Evans to be the guest at the annual speech day, and turning to her idly asked if she had ever played Lady Macbeth. ‘N-n-nevah!’ she expostulated in her finest ‘uh hairndbairg…?’ style; the fool persevered – why not, he asked? ‘Because I could not play a woman with such a peculiar notion of hos-pitaliteah!’
But while we’re on the subject of the aforementioned black hole, what is this story? It looks like the most appalling incompetence, and maybe it is, but it was covered first apparently after a conversation with a minister, and again even more prominently after more conversations with ‘senior arts sources’ – and no-one has resigned, no-one has been sacked, the spokesman’s quote hadn’t changed from one piece to the other. Off the record comments from DCMS are no more enlightening, muttering about the recession, global tightening, or in other words ‘we don’t know”. Could it be that it’s got nothing to do with DCMS at all, that the real dunderhead isn’t in Cockspur Street at all but further down Whitehall?
‘£100m funding black hole threatens major arts projects’; ‘British Museum and Tate plans could be shelved as funds run dry’. What’s the difference between these two headlines? Not a lot, you might think, but there are two key ones. One is that the first comes the Guardian, the second from the Times. The other difference is that the Guardian piece was splashed on the front page yesterday, July 23; the Times article was tucked away inside… exactly a week earlier, on July 26. Otherwise, the stories are materially the same: the DCMS has found that cash promises it made to national capital arts projects might not be fulfilled because the government has found itself with a £100m shortfall. How does that happen? Not the shortfall, that’s happening all across the façade of this crumbling government – on the same day as the Guardian’s arts black hole the Daily Telegraph had found one in the education budget for exactly the same amount; somebody else’s incompetence, then, not DCMS. But dos it happen that a story that was given some considerable space in one national paper one day appears again in another paper a week later, with clearly different by-lines. Could it be that we’re spending so much time on our blogs, Facebooks, Twitters and the rest of it, there isn’t any left to read the newspapers?
THE OTHER POINT OF VIEWWhat good are prizes in the arts and heritage? Dea Birkett, director of Kids in Museums, believes the best should make a difference
What difference does an award make? The arts have quite a few awards, some of which look in towards the industry, others look out towards audiences.
The museum sector is comparatively short on prizes with the Art Fund Prize (formerly the Gulbenkian) still regarded as the biggest fish in a very small pond. I think awards are great and, if worked properly, can be engines of social change. I must declare an interest. We’ve just launched the Family Friendly Museum Award, supported by the Guardian.
We had a long hard think before we set up the Award. There was one thing we had to get straight from the start – what the Award was for. Was it a simple celebration of good family-friendly practice? If so, who would be celebrating? The winner? The users? The general public? Was it to generate publicity? If so, for and to whom? For us? The winning museum? Our sponsors? Museums in general?
In particular, we wanted to work out how museums might be different, ie better, because of the award. And I don’t just mean the winning or shortlisted museums. All of them. Well, perhaps quite a lot of them may be a more realisable ambition. We wanted our award to make a difference.
I don’t think all award bodies ask these kind if questions and share this aim. Sometimes I wonder if they’ve asked any questions beyond “What will the process of finding a winner be?” and then, later, “Who’s won then?” But if an award is to have any significance for the arts, it must surely influence and drive change. It can’t just be about congratulating someone who is doing it very well already, thank You.
I believe the Family Friendly Museum Award has made a difference. Even the nomination process is an achievement for change. Anyone can nominate any museum – including museums nominating themselves. Taking the Kids in Museums Manifesto as a starting point, many museums use making a nomination as an opportunity for an audit against the Manifesto’s 20 points. So for the hundreds of these kinds of entries, whether they come anywhere near winning or not, a very useful process has already taken place.
Then there’s the judging process. The winner of the award is chosen by families, visiting museums anonymously. We make a huge effort to try and recruit families who have never visited a museum before. Last year, we had some success in this area. So again, before a winner is announced we already have made a difference to a few families, who hopefully will then act as ambassadors to other reluctant visitors.
Of course, I hope there are other benefits, most importantly encouraging museums to put the visitor at the heart of their work. Museums, galleries and historic homes want to win the award – it brings them huge publicity, apart from anything else. So it’s a carrot to encourage them along the road to family friendliness. We can’t be all stick.
And the award doesn’t finish when the winner is announced. That’s the start, not the end, of the process. Winning should, with any well thought out award, be the first step. Ian Forbes, Director of Killhope North of England Lead Mining Museum, the winner of the first Guardian Family Friendly Museum Award, says, “Immediately it felt like validation of our approach to our public. Later it felt like a challenge. Not just that we had something to live up to, but more that we should use the award as a spur to achieve more”.
How can we continue to improve? How can we continue to ensure that what we offer is fresh and relevant to the next generation of museum visitors?’
Kids in Museums was concerned that we weren’t taking full benefit of this follow-up effect. So now, in the fourth year of the award, we’ve established a Winner’s Forum, hoping to keep the momentum of change going, as well spreading the good news. I don’t think the Family Friendly Museum Award is perfect (well, perhaps almost perfect). We change the process every year, searching for the best way to make the biggest impact. But I do believe awards are a simple, effective way of driving change - but only if those giving them have thought through what change they want to achieve, and how an award is going to help them reach that goal.
To make a nomination for the Family Friendly Museum Award, just go to www.kidinsmuseums.org.uk
CultureLabel, the on-line superstore for the cultural sector, was launched this week to start, its founders believe, a revolution in arts enterprise
The notion of a museum shop conjures images of pencil sharpeners shaped like dinosaurs, fridge magnets of Charles Darwin and kits for building Chinese kites. But politics and economics, we are told, are having to be reinvented, and now it’s time for cultural enterprise too.
There is a long-standing equation for the way our cultural institutions are funded, a simple mixed economy structure that many consider is the reason why our arts are in better health than in the United States or Europe, both of which are considered to loaded on either the public or private funding sides. Our funding tends to be split three ways: subsidy, earned income, and sponsorship.
But that equation might be changing, particularly for our museums and galleries, and three young men might be about to shift the balance, with the launch this week of CultureLabel. The museum shop is being taken out of the annexe and in to our living rooms.
“What we’re doing is carving out a new community of cultural shoppers” says 32-year-old Peter Tullin. “Amazon is to books what CultureLabel is to the great artist-designed product cultural intuitions around the world are selling in their own shops. We’re introducing them to the online community.”
CultureLabel is a web shop selling items from, say an Anish Kapoor limited edition print from the Whitechapel Gallery at £4,700 to a 50p toy from the V&A, originally in the China Design Now exhibition.
In between are canvas shopping bags from the Museum of London; gold desktop sculpture from the Tate; a radio-controlled tarantula from the Natural History Museum; Betty Jackson’s Anne Boleyn underpants from the Historic Royal Palaces; a pigeon light from BALTIC; a Donald Hamilton Fraser watch from the Royal Academy; a Shrinking Violet daisy bracelet from the Great North Museum; and from the Saatchi Gallery, what else but dollar-shaped confetti.
It will, Tullin says, not only provide a new income stream for CultureLabel’s partners, it will change the way they set up their commercial operations.
AI ProfileGAVIN HENDERSON, artistic director, Dartington International Summer School
Gavin Henderson is the kind of fatalist to whom things happen, and he allows his life to go accordingly: trumpet player, sculptor, performer, impresario, director, administrator, academic, he has been led into unexpected places to become ubiquitous in the arts in this country. What makes that un-orientated career all the more remarkable is that he has just begun his 25th summer school in the Capability Brown landscape in the Devonshire countryside outside Totnes.
Dartington is a summer playground for serious and not so serious musicians to mingle, learn, experiment, in the grounds of Dartington Hall. New work by both famous and merely enthusiastic composers issues from this five week idyll.
It was begun in the after-ease of the Second World War when the pianist Artur Schnabel, impressed by the fledgling Edinburgh Festival, said, “But where is the teaching?” His pupil William Glock became artistic dirtector, and it was at first set up at Bryanston School in Dorset.
There was mood for rural summer schools. Tanglewood in the United States had been long established, but they started appearing here too, for drama, poetry, painting and eventually music.
Five years later it moved to Dartington, where Leonard Elmhirst and his wife had founded a school and college of arts, and John Amis, as manager, recruited music students to build stages, shift instruments and create posters. They became known as Trogs because they seemed to appear through holes in the ground, and Amis’s old school chum Donald Swann was recruited to organise them. He and his performance partner Michael Flanders were able to try things out there, and their show At the Drop of a Hat was born.
Britten’s opera The Rape of Lucretia as written for Dartington’s Barn Theatre, but the Elmhirsts were persuaded to allow it to reopen Glyndebourne instead.
Glock continued as artistic director for over 30 years running it alongside being director of the Proms, and it was from his successor, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, that Henderson took over the summer school, an independent company governed by the Dartington Trust.
The appointment, he says, came as a complete shock. “I thought it was a practical joke” he recalls. “I’d never been to Dartington, though I was in awe of its reputation. I drove down the following weekend and just fell in love. He gave up Bracknell but kept Brighton.
“Over my 25 years it has become more and more part of Dartington, so that now where Dartington will say it is the jewel in the crown, the great thing that trust promotes” Henderson says. The summer school kept growing, and developed to embrace dance, including tango and salsa classes, elements of pop music, a jazz class with Keith Tippett and Herbie Flowers’s RockShop. “But fundamentally it’s about composition” Henderson says, “and it’s about a lot of people talking part - in chamber music, to sing in the choir…”
Seven years and £300m on, scheme needs to be revamped for the new National Museums Strategy MLA is planning
Renaissance in the Regions, the programme launched by the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council to revitalise regional museums and galleries, has been heavily criticised in a report commissioned by the MLA.
Its chief fault, says the report’s author Professor Sara Selwood, is that the Renaissance vision is unclear. “MLA has never restated its aims, nor has it published an overarching statement as to its ambitions in taking Renaissance forward, or set out a strategy for achieving those goals” it says, and calls for a dismantling of the present hubs to be replaced by more flexible partnerships.
There are ambiguities as to whether Renaissance was intended to transform all or part of the sector, what the target was or how it could be achieved. “It is arguable whether Renaissance has changed course, or merely lost sight of its purpose” says the report.
MLA is accused of being myopic and failing to see the bigger picture, so that “Renaissance does not yet amount to more than the sum of its parts”.
And the review sees a tension between serving the public and supporting the museums sector, with reporting tending to be about numbers of people rather than the community empowerment the government had called for.
However, the programme has also had its successes. The report acknowledges that Renaissance has contributed to halting the decline of many regional museums and their financial and political neglect. It has enhanced museums’ appeal, and their confidence.
The report calls for continued government funding for Renaissance to allow regional museums to compete with European equivalents, and to make the proposed National Museums Strategy a reality.
But Prof Selwood adds a long list of recommendations, including:
The vision to be restated and a long-term plan published, focussing on museums’ unique contribution rather government agenda, with more effective use mad of collections;
The programme’s management and delivery are kept strictly to its stated aims, and that the distributed funding should be kept separate from MLA’s other funding;
High level funding partnerships should be forged – there has been a lack of consistency – and there should be integrated partnerships between national and regional museums;
Replace the hub structure with more flexible network partnerships, winding up the present Regional Renaissance ~Boards to be replaced by a National Renaissance Board;
Core museums should have a duty of care to other museums;
The creation of a challenge fund to be bid to by partnerships;
The installation of national programmes for organisational change, with museum development officers co-ordinated in s national framework;
The Management of Renaissance should be from a high level and driven by the pursuit of outcomes, and it should be peer reviewed;
There should be better communications in the management of Renaissance
Funding should be regarded as an investment rather than a subsidy;
That, in the “absence of a coherent and logical framework of performance measures”, Renaissance should be performance measured by DCMS and DCLG.
£100m budget shortfall may hit major developments
Major arts capital projects are at risk because of a reported £100m funding black hole in DCMS budgets.
“Our capital budget is currently overcommitted” a DCMS spokeswoman said. “Ministers are examining the reasons for this and looking for solutions. It is possible that difficult decisions will be needed, but none has been taken yet.”
Projects at risk could include the £215m extension to Tate Modern, to which the government had promised £50m representing half the £70m already pledged; the £135m British Museum new exhibitions centre (£22.5m), work on which is due to start this year; and the £165m BFI Southbank development which is hoping for £45m from the Culture Department.
When the DCMS grants for the Tate and BM were announced in 2007 the schemes were hailed by ministers as powerful stimulants for the economy, creating jobs, multiplier earning and new visitor attractions. Now ministers have written to institutions to say that the pledged cash is no longer guaranteed. “It’s a great idea and we would love to support it, but it’s very difficult at the moment” said culture minister Barbara Follett. “There are too many schemes bidding for too little money”.
There could be a serious knock-on with private support for the projects, warned A&B’s chief executive, Colin Tweedy. ‘When government funding pulls out of a project the private sector immediately thinks there’s something wrong with it, which is not the case here – I believe it’s not due to government incompetence, it’s to do with the banks, and unfortunately these situations are going to be coming thick and fast”.
Nor is sponsorship likely to offer immediate comfort, he said. “The private sector is not in the business of rescuing things, it wants to be in partnership. It will be tough but the private sector will recover before the public sector”.
The sudden appearance of the shortfall for 2010-11 and 2011-12 has caused consternation, and the worry is that the process of making up the missing budgeting will mean cuts in other areas. Following the April Budget the Arts Council was relieved not to have the anticipated £14m cut and was able to absorb the eventual £4 reduction for 2010-11, but that might now have to be revisited.
However, the likelihood, the DCMS sources said, was that the promises would be deferred. That would delay the developments into a period of a new government, which may decide to cancel such pledges.
But while criticism was falling on DCMS for rickety budget management, senior arts figures believe blame may eventually land on the Treasury which has also announced a £100m cut in education spending. ‘It seems an extraordinary coincidence and smacks of the Treasury clawing back rather than ministers getting their sums wrong,’ said one.
