The Wedgewood Museum in the Potteries has won the £100,000 Arts Fund Prize for Museums and Galleries for 2009, in a difficult year for the Wedgewood name
If winning the Art Fund Prize for Museum and Galleries has done else, it has the world know that the winner is open and welcoming visitors, because the shock news that exploded in January led many to believe that it wasn’t.
But the Waterford Wedgewood company that went into administration in January had nothing but a family link to the new Wedgewood Museum which opened next to the works at Barlaston in the Potteries in October, and as you now know is not only open but thriving.
And the £100,000 prize money will go towards more development, kick-starting the effort to raise the £2m needed to create a temporary exhibition space within the new building.
“It’s got us national and international coverage which is very upbeat, and we’re delighted” said the museum’s director, Gaye Blake Roberts. Not only was it the choice of the judges, led by Lord Puttnam, but also of the overwhelming majority of the 27,000 who votes on the Guardian’s website. It beat Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow, for its Centre of New Enlightenment; Orleans House Gallery in Twickenham; and Ruthin Craft Centre in North Wales.
“This museum is extraordinary for so many reasons, and we were all but unanimous in our decision” Puttnam, said at the presentation at the RIBA gallery. “The Wedgwood Museum brilliantly highlights the marriage of art, design, manufacturing and commerce; a marriage that resonates more today than at possibly any time in the intervening years. In every respect it fully meets our criteria of what a 21st century museum should aspire to be.”
Dea Birkett, director of Kids in Museums, gives
THE OTHER POINT OF VIEW
I became quite excited recently when a press release landed in my email inbox. ‘National Gallery lowers paintings for those with specific needs,’ read the subject line. Great! Here, at last, a major museum seemed to be taking this issue seriously and making their collection available to disabled people.
But then I read further. Only three iconic paintings – Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, Constable’s The Hay Wain and Monet’s The Gare St-Lazare – were being lowered ‘enabling visitors in wheelchairs to examine the paintings at close distance.’ Well, I thought, three’s better than nothing. Then I read still further. The paintings were being lowered on one evening, for just two and a half hours. By the following morning, they’ll be hung at their full height again.
Surely this quick fix can’t be good for the paintings nor good for the walls. But more importantly, this short-term concession to access is only acceptable if it’s the first step on a roadmap to creating an inclusive institution. I was curious to discover if this were the case, so contacted the National’s Head of Education, Colin Wiggins. He said the evening was an experiment, ‘to see what the reaction is and learn what the needs are.’
But I wanted to know why this wasn’t the first step in a programme of developing an inclusive approach to hanging work – all of the work? And why just these three paintings at least couldn’t be left at the new, accessible height? Wiggins was adamant. ‘If we left them at that height, we’d have to employ someone to answer all the complaints from people who came in and would have to stoop and bend double and have slipped discs to look at the paintings.’ And how many paintings are on display in the National? ‘Around 2300.’ There would still, therefore, be 2297 left for non-disabled visitors to enjoy without having to bend in the slightest bit. I suggested that over two thousand works of art is surely quite enough for anyone – disabled or non-disabled – to take in on a visit.
But slipped disks aren’t the only perceived (and unproven, unless the museum has conducted medical research in the area) risks the National have associated with allowing disabled visitors access to even this tiny percentage of their collection. The notice about the access night advises that ‘booking is essential’. This would, I pointed out, inevitably exclude those who might just want to drop in. The Head of Education explained that the gallery had to restrict the evening to bookings-only, so not too many attended. ‘If we were to be swamped with thousands of wheelchair users, we’d be in trouble,’ he explained. Trouble! What kind of trouble? The answer was, predictably, ‘security and evacuation procedures’. But surely if the collection were accessible every day, not just on one night, there would probably never be more than a handful of wheelchair users in the building at one time. It’s only because the National had set up an exclusive evening, that they were in danger of being, in their words, ‘swamped’.
This evening is being specially hosted by the National Gallery’s new-ish Director Nick Penny, in conjunction with an organisation called Access to Art. Access to Art admirably works mainly with older people in London, enabling them to visit museums and galleries by providing transport and volunteer support. They have a more pragmatic approach to the one-off event.
‘On the whole, paintings are there for the standing public,’ says Jane Turner of Access to Art. ‘This is a start. It’s never been done before. I hope this is going to happen in other galleries.’
But other galleries have other hopes, which involve not more one-off events but long-term commitment to inclusive practices. ‘At times there’s the impression that the nationals, in an act of largesse, put on an event or an exhibition for the benefit of that section of the masses which they have identified as being deserving of their favour,’ says Tim Desmond, Director of the Galleries of Justice in Nottingham. ‘In the 21st century, galleries and museums should have a social agenda which runs through all their work, where accessibility is the right of all and is not limited to one evening, for which you need to apply.’
Will one night with a lower Hay Wain make any difference to anyone, except those few who are lucky enough to attend? I don’t believe so. I don’t believe that a few dozen people being able to see a few works of art for two hours can count as access. What will make a difference is if institutions work towards being inclusive – for everyone, for always. Young and old, disabled and non-disabled. So we can all enjoy the opportunity to admire the great works that belong to us.
www.kidsinmuseums.org.uk
AI Profile – John Cassy, channel director, Sky Arts
Monday’s “unveiling”, if that’s what it can be called, of Antony Gormley’s One & Other on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square is probably the biggest public art project to date, in terms of participation and of audience.
You know how it’s going to work: every hour, 24 hours a day for 100 days, individuals who have applied with an idea of something they want to do will take their place on the plinth and do it. They’ll be people like David Rosenberg, a London designer, who wants to pedal his pink bike to generate enough energy to make him glow in the dark. Or Heather Pringle here, who will celebrate her 20th birthday on the plinth. Or 83-year-old Gwynneth Pedler who wants to signal with semaphore flags (if she can find some).
It’s also the point at which reality television and art meet, because every minute is going to be covered by Sky Arts.
“We want to engage with arts audiences on air but also on the streets, and we think this a very democratic way of getting them involved in the arts” says John Cassy, the channel director.
After five years the sponsorship of ENO is ending, and the Fourth Plinth is part of Sky Arts’ next big thing in sponsorship.
They will go live on line from the plinth on Monday from 8.15am (the official start is 9) and you get it at www.oneandother.co.uk
This is part of the channel’s “evolution”, as Cassy puts it. For three years it has sponsored and covered the Hay Festival, and the Gormley marathon is only the beginning of a three-year sponsorship of Artichoke, the creative company that brought London the Sultan’s Elephant in 2006 and Liverpool the giant automaton spider La Machine last year, and is organising One & Other.
One in seven of England’s 9,300 conservation areas is at risk, according to English Heritage, suffering from neglect, decay and damaging change.
Launching a campaign to save the nation’s neighbourhood heritage, EH chief executive Simon Thurley said that in the first ever survey of conservation areas as part of compiling the Heritage at Risk register, among the worst perpetrations was the use of plastic windows of doors, which has affected 83% of conservation areas.
“People think that by using plastic, or UPVC, windows and doors they are saving the planet” he said. “There’s no evidence that they save energy, they look wrong, and while they are supposed to last 50 years they won’t last for more than 20 and many will have to be replaced after seven.”
Other key issues are badly maintained roads and pavements, street clutter, loss of front garden walls and hedges, unsightly satellite dishes, the effects of traffic calming, alterations to house fronts and roofs, and unsympathetic extensions.
“Problems fall into two main areas: what owners do to their properties and what councils do or fail to do to the streets, pavements, parks and public spaces” he said.
He called on councils to make more use of guidelines to advise on protection of details, to get council departments to work together to improve public areas, and to get local people involved through civic societies and residents;’ groups.
Thurley also announced that the winner of the national award for local authorities which have done most to improve their conservation areas is Stockton-on-Tees.
News focus
A right of centre think tank is calling for Arts Council England’s national office to be abolished, and for the nine regional arts councils to be directly funded from DCMS, because a “managerial culture has poisoned the Arts Council”.
The Arts Council – Managed to Death, a paper written by Marc Sidwell for The New Culture Forum, also calls for the Crafts Council and Arts & Business to return to direct funding DCMS, and for a watchdog, OfArt, to be created.
“It is time… to abolish the Arts Council and start again, building a new settlement for the arts in Britain that takes account of the new realities of funding levels” the report says.
It wants national arts organisations - the “flagships” - to be funded directly by the government, with some of them being given greater independence to, for instance, set rates of pay “unhampered by civil service bureaucracy”.
At a time when the national ACE has been repositioning itself as a purely strategy-making body, the paper, launched in Westminster on Monday, wants to reverse the process to encourage a decentralisation of arts funding. It refers back the report two years ago of Sir John Tusa’s working party for the Conservatives that stopped short of calling for the abolition of the national Arts Council but recommended direct funding for the flagships, which the party at that time did not adopt.
‘The very idea of a central policy on the development of art should be anathema, both as a matter of personal freedom and in recognition of the many contested visions of artistic value among English citizens,’ the report says.
The 45-page report says that Ace’s administrative costs rose from 3.8% of the arts budget to 14% between 1994 and 2007, that an independent researcher reckons that the chief executive’s salary has risen by 93% in six years, that ACE has spent £700,000 on recruitment consultant in the last five years, and that the Arts Council employs 49 press officers, more than Sport England, UK Sport, the MLA and English Heritage combined.
It points to failures such as The Public arts centre in West Bromwich and Manchester’s B of the Bang sculpture, and says that more statues have been erected between 1990 and 12999 than between 1910 and 1989, “often bland community projects with very little real merit”.
The report calls on arts organisations to raise more of their own money from private sources, for education programmes to be focussed on audiences rather than schools, and says “DCMS should take on the responsibility of safeguarding artistic freedom as an explicit task”.
Davey dismisses ‘naïve
and inaccurate’ report
ACE chief executive Alan Davey has dismiss the New Culture Forum report as a “naïve recipe for bureaucracy” and “hampered and its analysis called into question by some serious and highly misleading factual inaccuracies… most worryingly of all, it seems to hint that cuts to arts funding would be a good thing”.
Among the errors, ACE says that running costs have been reduced rather than increased, standing at 6/6% of income and set to fall further to 5.5% by next April. And in another example, The B of the Bang sculpture by Thomas Heatherwick was not an At Council-funded project.
Davey says the report is worryingly old fashioned. “It proposes an expansion of the civil service, a removal of around £40m of education money from the arts to the education system, and a splintering of the Arts Council back into small regional pockets without national scale” he says. “That’s a naïve recipe for bureaucracy and for the creation of a complex net to tie artists up in – which is what the 117 funding schemes that existed prior to the merger of the Arts Council and regional arts boards did.”
He says that criticism of the Arts Council by the likes of Sir Simon Rattle and Sir Nicholas Kenyon quoted in the report was made seen years ago and had been taken on board and acted on in ACE’s subsequent restructuring.
“It is a pity that, in publishing their report, the New Culture Forum missed the opportunity for a proper analysis of arts funding and of the challenges that lie ahead” he says
“In order for excellence in the arts to fly, for genius and beauty to flourish, Arts Council England will need to make hard decisions about artistic priorities and how we fund ambition. That’s our job – one for which we will never be popular, but one which we are determined to do in a sophisticated, intelligent and economical way.”
‘Arts Council
safe with us’
says Vaizey
The Conservatives are expected to distance themselves from the New Culture Forum report. Speaking just two weeks before its publication, shadow arts minister Ed Vaizey pledged that a Conservative government would not scrap ACE, or remove the flagship companies from its funding control.
Speaking at the National Campaign for the Arts Future Britain where he shared the stage with Alan Davey, Vaizey said: “I want to put on the record that the Tories are not going to abolish the Arts Council.
“There is a huge opportunity for the Arts Council. We feel its independence has been eroded over the last few years. We want to see a thriving relationship.”
AI understands that Tony Hall, chief executive of the Royal Opera House and the former chief executive of BBC News, is to be the sought for “ringmaster” for the Cultural Olympics.
His appointment to the London 2012 organising committee (Locog), chaired by the Olympic gold medallist Sebastian Coe, was expected to be announced this week. He will then become chair of the Cultural Olympiad committee, with an almost new board expected to include major cultural figures such as Sandy Nairne, director of the National Portrait Gallery, Nicholas Serota of the Tate and Alan Davey of ACE.
Jude Kelly, artistic director of the Southbank Centre who led the cultural bid that won the 2012 Games for London, is expected to step down as chair but to remain involved.
The International Olympics Committee makes a cultural element an essential part of bids for the Games, and it is believed that a programme of national cultural inclusivity in the 2012 proposals helped to ensure London beat Paris.
But since then there has been growing dissatisfaction with the lack of obvious focus for cultural input. In his last interview as chairman of the Arts Council, given to AI in February, Sir Christopher Frayling said the Cultural Olympics needed a “ringmaster” to raise the profile and give a new impetus. “It’s over complicated, too brand obsessed, and needs an arts person at its head to smack it into place, as Casson did with the Festival of Britain and Phil Redmond has done with Liverpool” he told us.
Andrew Whyte leaves the Arts Council next week, rather peremptorily it seems. The rumour is that he has been ousted by the new chair, Dame Liz Forgan, who is said to find him too susceptible to the disease of control freakery. In fact he has a big new job to go to, in the civil service proper as director of communications at DEFRA on about the same pay scale, so it’s hard to see how it is a move up. The truth is that in his three years he has both presided over ACE’s acknowledged biggest PR disaster, the funding cuts of 08, and the biggest opening to information from and about the Arts Council since Anthony Everitt was secretary general a generation ago. And if it hadn’t been for the latter, the former would not have happened.
A splendid dinner at Whitgift, the public school in South Croydon, to celebrate the 500th anniversary marriage of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon. The table decorations are of red and white roses with pomegranates, Catherine’s badge; the wine is English and Spanish; and the music is by the schools own 16th century ensemble, complete with a unique shawm modelled on one found with the Mary Rose. For the dinner is more realistically to celebrate the exhibition the school has on of finds from the Mary Rose wreck. How the headmaster Christopher Barnett managed to persuade the Mary Rose Trust to put this show on is a mystery, but he did and the result would not disgrace a national museum. The real question is, why can’t it be seen anywhere else? Surely to tour it around the country to places where state school pupils could see these extraordinary artefacts – including the heads of the bosun and gunner reconstructed from their skulls – wouldn’t be beyond the bounds of the state, and seems to be exactly the kind of thing the newly retitled Creativity Culture & Education, formerly Creative Partnerships, could spend some of its large resources on. The dinner was fabulous, but it needs be obligatory…
As if he hasn’t got enough to do running the Barbican’s arts programme and the City’s Olympic effort, Graham Sheffield has got another job. He is the British Council’s long-awaited advisor for arts and the cultural economy – and that will be a dual role, too. He will also chair the BC’s arts advisory group in the rejigging of the department by its still newish head, Rebecca Walton, which she hopes will assure the cultural communities here and aboard of the BC’s newly discovered commitment to the arts.
The Wedgwood Museum in Stoke-on-Trent has won the £100,000 Art Fund Prize for museums and galleries for 2009. Owned and run by an independent charitable trust, the new £10 million museum is housed on the historic manufacturing site of Josiah Wedgwood and Sons, and tells the story of one of the world’s most recognisable consumer brands. Visitors to the museum not only see ceramics but also a range of manuscripts, documentation, factory equipment, original models and fine art related to this world-renowned ceramics company.
