Eleven museum and galleries have been nominated for this year’s £100,000 Art Fund Prize.

Led by broadcaster Kirsty Young, the judges have chosen the institutions showing the most originality, imagination and excellence. They are:
The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, for its universally admired redevelopment
Blists Hill Victorian Town, Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust, after a £12million expansion
The Great North Museum, Newcastle
Hampton Court Palace for Henry VIII; heads and hearts and its ambitious associated programming
Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, Coventry, after redevelopment
The Leach Pottery, St Ives, reswcvued, restored and once again the most influential pottery studio in the world
The National Army Museum, London for Conflicts of Interest
The Natural History Museum, London for the Darwin Centre
The Royal Institution of Great Britain, for Science in the Making
The Towner, Eastbourne, a local authority gallery reborn as a new public art space
The Ulster Museum, Belfast following its three year redevelopment that has fundamentally reshaped its character

The public can vote for their favourite longlisted institution and leave comments for judges on the Art Fund Prize website www.artfundprize.org.uk.
The shortlist of four will be announced at the end of May and the winner on June 30.

MLA gives cash back to redeploy before year end

The Museums, Libraries and Archives Council has underspent the £50m Renaissance budget for this year by £4.8m, and has already handed the money back to DCMS.

But the underspend is a deliberate ploy to free up money caught in the Hub system, said MLA chief executive Roy Clare. Rather than depriving museums of much needed cash, he said the returned money was the result of an intentional policy change, “a pragmatic and responsible reallocation of public funds”.

The money is intended for the 47 museums within the nine hubs of the Renaissance in the Regions scheme in England. “We distributed the funds via the hubs last year and found at the end of the fiscal year that there was an underspend which was lost. We then made a new spending agreement with the funds being paid in retrospect rather than advance, and directly to the museums so the MLA had better control.

“The money was not going to be spent in the Hubs and we have taken the decision to give the money back to DCMS so that some of it has already been reallocated to other projects that badly needed it” he said. “If we had not done that, the money would have been returned to the Treasury and lost to the cultural sector”.

Since the money was returned to the government, DCMS has pledged an extra £100,000 to the Jewish Museum, which reopens in Camden next month. The Art Fund winning Wedgwood Museum has also been given an extra £200,000. DCMS said that it would not be known where the money had gone until the department’s summer statement.

Previously, MLA had been allowed to carry underspends over from one financial year to the next, but a tightening of the rules covering what is known in Whitehall as “EYF” – end year flexibility – by the Treasury because of the recession had stopped the practice.

RadarAs the dust settles on Apple’s launch of the iPad, rival hardware manufacturers are eagerly scrambling to produce new tools to power the forthcoming consumer boom in digital reading. Simon Cronshaw, co-founder of CultureLabel, explores how publishers in the arts sector can prepare to benefit from digital distribution, protecting their content in the process.

Is cyberspace lawless, separate from the real world, or do conventional laws and business models apply? After decades of internet exploration, we are getting closer to understanding that it’s a space where technical, financial, legal and business considerations are entirely interdependent, all equally critical pillars for successful digital publishers.

Adapting business models is central to the effective protection and management of intellectual property online. For many commentators, the best defence is a good offensive: providing access to content, in a manner that suits user preferences, at a compelling cost.

There are subscription services, pay per play/view models, and the opportunity to develop discriminatory pricing. Get it right and the rewards can be a global audience providing new income to invest in your artistic content.

Back in the 1990s, Napster demonstrated the counter-intuitive rationale for distributing content for free, and then monetising ancillary offerings instead. Two decades later, the newspaper industry is following suit with a variation on the model. The New York Times, for example, has just announced its plans to introduce a pay wall for online articles, with a central “metering” system where everyone gets a few free articles each month. Once users exceed the limit, they have to either pay or move on.

In the most successful projects illustrating this interdependency between business model and technology that we’ve delivered, the income generation principles that CultureLabel promotes (see www.CultureLabel.com/digital-museum/ for a free e-book) are matched with innovations in technology, like CultureLabel’s ability to process micro-payments and instant split-payments of multiple royalties. Both business model and technology must be optimised and in harmony for digital publishing to flourish.

So, why add your content to the digital space? Income to recoup costs and invest in content is not the only reason. Creating and distributing works can also have much to do with managing your reputation, gaining acceptance within online communities, or simply satisfying a drive to create.

For entrepreneur Esther Dyson, the end-game is nurturing a relationship with content users: “Controlling copies…becomes a complex challenge” she says. “Much chargeable value will be in the certification of authenticity and reliability, not in the content … The trick is not to control the copies of your work but instead a relationship with the customers – subscriptions or membership”.

If poetry must owe something to other poems or novels to other novels, the free circulation of ideas and information provides a difficult balancing act for arts publishers. Where on the spectrum does their distribution policy lie between the progress of art and the rights of authors?

The cuts will come, but they may provide the chance for new thinking in local government cultural provision. Simon Tait reports from Nalgao’s Outside In symposium

The atmosphere was heavy with words like “Armageddon” and “meltdown”, and with resentment at the unfairness of it all. After all, at long last the arts had established themselves in municipal thinking as integral to urban regeneration and community well being, and now they were facing terrible cuts.

Lorna Brown, chair of the National Association of Local Government Arts Officers (Nalgao) and head of arts and cultural planning for West Sussex, spelled it out for the 200 delegates. Between 2011 and 2014 local authorities’ budgets will be cut by between 7% and 15%, and because funding for culture – apart from for libraries – is a non-statutory local authority requirement, the arts is where the cuts will fall first, and the upper number for them is more realistically going to be 20%. And although she is also careful to underline that this is not across the board, the experience will be different from one authority to another, around the conference hall they were talking about the top figure being nearer 30%.

But the symposium Nalgao had brought together in Camden was not to hoist a rallying cry against cuts, which might have been the response ten or even five years ago. The purpose was to examine alternative ways of delivering what we all know the public wants but which the politicians are not going to help to ensure they get it.

Following a breakout session at the Nalgao annual conference last October, they commissioned a report on the benefits and issues involved in contracting out local authority arts services. The result was Outside In, compiled by Paul Kelly of Cultural Futures and Rick Bond of The Complete Works. “What is the change going to be” asked Kelly, “and how bad? There are different ways of managing the arts”.

Almost without exception, leisure/culture services are delivered in-house, but they don’t have to be. You can partially contract out, shifting a theatre to commercial management, for instance; you can put the whole operation out to a trust or to an independent company, which might save you VAT but would certainly mean you not being obliged buy in services from other departments that you don’t need, as often happens now; you can combine the cultural services of two authorities, maybe more, sharing the costs, the staff, audiences and, of course, ideas.

The council taxpayer has been a slightly obscure but powerful funder of the arts in this country. Obscure because it is very difficult to pin down figures in the patchwork nature of the 350 councils of different sizes and political colours that change, often, every four years. Taking regular figures from the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy (CIPFA), analysts have always been content to agree that councils spend about same, or a bit more, than the Arts Council in England.

That assumption no longer applies. Last year ACE spent £438m of their government grant on arts funding, excluding lottery money; and although the local authority figure is said not to be a safe one and could be much more or possibly less, a survey last year estimated it at £220m.

AI Profile Stephen Snoddy, director, New Art Gallery, Walsall

There were lots of reasons why the New Art Gallery, Walsall, should have flopped: it was the wrong place or a £16m temple to contemporary art; its revenue funding was inadequate; it was hooked on an existing collection of little appeal to modern audiences; national critics would never trek to this corner of the West Midlands to review exhibitions; artists wouldn’t want to be seen in a town like this, alive or dead.

Only one of those proved true, in that critics from London still balk at going to Walsall. It’s their loss, because there has been a string of important exhibitions at the New Art Gallery. There have been major solo shows for Gordon Cheung, Vidya Gastaldon, Christopher Le Brun, Conrad Shawcross, Hew Locke, Neal Rock, Gavin Turk and Joanna Vasconcelos, and the current free show, Party!, devised as a kind of birthday cake, has work by a small nation of artists, alive and dead, including Peter Blake, Michael Andrews, Renoir, Spencer Tunick, Marc Chagall, Gilbert & George, Chris Ofili, Goya, Nan Goldin, Sam Taylor Wood and Gillian Wearing.

But it was a risky undertaking, one that Stephen Snoddy’s predecessor, Peter Wilkinson, had nursed for over a decade in a gloomy local public library to get the important Garman-Ryan Collection of art, essentially the work of Jacob Epstein, into a proper, purpose-built gallery. And he did it, in a building designed by the award-winning Caruso St John which didn’t stint. “It looks fantastic” he said last week. “The stairs, the floors - the quality was absolutely right to go for, and it’s something people in Walsall are as proud of as ever”.

But there were problems that had nothing to do with the running of the gallery. The major sponsor, alongside the Arts Council, was the local authority the party colour of which seemed to change every four years, with a differing shade of opinion on the gallery each time. When Jenkinson left a year after the opening to set up Creative Partnerships with ACE, an interim director was put it in, and then for two years it was run from a civic office, to the growing exasperation of the Arts Council who said they wouldn’t consider reviewing their grant upwards until there was a professional director in post.

While all this was going on, the permanent staff and in particular the head of exhibitions, Deborah Robinson, continued to devise imaginative exploitations of the Garman Ryan Collection and temporary exhibitions.

A new assistant director of culture and leisure at Walsall Council saw the importance of a professional head of the gallery and Stephen Snoddy was appointed in 2005, to the great satisfaction of the Arts Council.

Snoddy had a long track record. He was at the Arnolfini in Bristol as exhibitions head just as the BritArt phenomenon was exploding, and though he modestly protests that the could hardly ignore it the exhibitions of the work of the likes of Rachel Whiteread meant his eye for contemporary work was quickly acknowledged. At the Cornerhouse in Manchester he mounted the first John Baldessari UK retrospective at a time when no-one in this country rated him – when Tate Modern announced the big Baldessari which has just finished Snoddy had to call Nick Serota and contradict the publicity which said it was the “first” retrospective, and that he’d been there almost 20 years before.

The old row between metro-centric national press and regional arts rears its over the New Art Gallery, Walsall. As we all know, it was a bold and risky project for a local authority in this kind of community to go for, but theydid, ACE bac ked them, Peter Jenkinson got it made and opened, Jenkinson left for neew adventures, and rocky times followed. Then, five years ago, Stephen Snoddy came in and turned the place around. Out went the top floor restaurant nobody used, in came a Costa café on the ground floor, along with evening events, in exhibitions, partnerships with other galleries, artists’ studios. But the last five years seemed to pass by at least one national journalist. Last week NAG celebrated its 10th birthday with 1100 guests at a party and a celebratory exhibition with work by Renoir to Gilbrt & George. But that morning Rosie Millard had chosen the anniversary to have a piece in the Indy about failed lottery funded arts projects. Out came the Pop Museum in Sheffield and the Doncaster Earth Centre, both undoubted mistakes. But she included NAG in her catalogue of failure: ‘…where were the temporary shows, the must-see exhibitions, the retrospectives, the touring presentations of interesting work? Last year, it had such difficulty attracting a crowd that it only managed to reverse its unstoppable downward visitor spiral by introducing a raft of free events… it is not a seriously rated contemporary arts venue. “Frankly, the collection was much better when it was hung in the local library,” a contemporary-art curator murmured to me’. Not nice, but what puzzled Snoddy that the erstwhile BBC arts correspondent had never been near the place, in his time at least, ‘and got it so badly wrong’. The truth is that since 2006 visitor numbers have gone up by leaps and bounds and last year broke 200,000 for the first time. Emails, texts, letters and phone calls have been fired off from Walsall, needless to say, expressing ‘disappointment’ at the ‘lazy journalism’, but it goes deeper than that. The coming three or four years are going to be extremely tough for regional galleries like this one when subsidy is going to be cut, even when they are on the up as NAG is, and they are going to rely even more heavily on visitors spend, sponsorship. ‘A story in a national paper saying we are failing, however untrue, could have very serious consequences for us’ Snoddy tells me. So he’s invited Rosie up for a personal tour, but she should beware if the conversation turns testy: Snoddy is a Level 6 rugby referee.

Here’s a shocker which could lead to calls for the heads of Roy Clare and Sir Andrew Motion as heads of the MLA. The council’s Renaissance budget which feeds our troubled regional museums is underspent by almost £5m for 2009-10, and the money has already gone back to the DCMS. The Museums Journal quotes Clare as saying ‘It’s not an under-spend, it’s a right-spend. There would be no point in shovelling money out of the door just to spend it before the year-end’, but we can each of us think of a dozen museums at least that would have benefited for a smidgen of that pot – which is 10% of the budget. Apparently the underspend is due to the MLA’s new way of allocating money to the regional hubs – a simple system of not giving it to them?

The longlist for the £100,000 Art Fund Museum Prize is out and among the eclectic selection of 11 is a surprise omission. The Ashmolean is there, Hampton Court Palace, the Great North Museum in Newcastle, the National Army Museum, as well as the more exquisite candidates such as the Leach Pottery in St Ives and the Towner in Eastbourne. But why isn’t the V&A’s £32m medieval and renaissance galleries which opened in November? Simple. They didn’t apply.

80m handed out in penultimate recession awards
The Leicester Theatre Trust, which runs The Curve, opened 18 months ago at a cost of £61m, has got the largest award in the penultimate Arts Council Sustain awards, with £1.03m over the next two years to help the deal with cash flow probl,ms and maikntain quality dstandards after losses in box office and ghrants fropm tirsts and foundastions.

The Roundhouse in London, which re-opened in 2006 after a £30m refurbishment and redevelopment, is awarded £800.000.

Sustain was set up last year by ACE with lottery money to provide a quick and strategic response for arts organisations effected by the economic downturn, and ensure that artistic excellence does not decline. It was closed for new applications in October.

The seventh awards are worth around £8 million, with 27 arts organisations getting grants ranging down to £77,000. It brings the total handed out so far to £41m, and there are 13 more applications to be considered, asking for a total of £6m.

Other institutions and venues which have benefited this time include the Brighton Dome (£611,700); Nottingham Contemporary (£594,000); • Whitechapel Gallery, (£480,000); Royal Court Theatre (£454,000); West Yorkshire Playhouse (£424,710); Hall for Cornwall (£416,500); City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (£388,000), which has been hit by a lack of development and touring income; the Norfolk and Norwich Festival (£330,00); Derby Quad (£260,000); FACT, Liverpool (£233,500); Warwick Arts Centre (£215,000); Customs House Trust, South Shields (£179,600); Seven Stories, Newcastle upon Tyne (£175,000); Future Everything CIC, Manchester (£150,000); the Monteverdi Choir and Orchestra (£150,000); the Lake District Summer Music (£140,000); the Britten Sinfonia (£126,000); the Academy of Ancient Music (£120,000); Milap Festival Trust, Liverpool (£120,000); and the National Centre for Early Music (£120,000); Forma, London (109,800); First Movement, Rowsley (£99,761); TIPP, Manchester (£81,450); Travelling Light Theatre Company, Bristol (£79,439); Natural Theatre Company, Bath (£77,000).

‘Sustain has been crucial in helping over 130 arts organisations weather the effects of the recession,’ said ACE chief executive Alan Davey. ‘It’s been a vital interim support, but now is the time to look to the next challenges and ensure that the right conditions are created to maintain artistic excellence in the long-term.

‘We’re determined to build on the successes of recent years to make sure arts organisations can continue to produce groundbreaking work and play a major role in our collective economic future.’

Just over £41 million has now been invested through Sustain, and there are a remaining 13 applications requesting a further £6 million still under consideration. The Arts Council announced in November that they would be committing additional Lottery funds for the Sustain programme so that all remaining applications are assessed fairly against criteria.

THE OTHER POINT OF VIEWWe shouldn’t be, argues Dea Birkett, director of Kids in Museums

So, when is a museum not a museum? It may be apparent to all who work in them, but it’s not to anyone else. Try explaining to a member of the public why the Tate is a museum, not a gallery. Or the National Portrait Gallery is, well, a museum. Your first attempt at explanation might be to say that a museum has to have a permanent collection. Then you can try and explain why the Royal Academy of Arts isn’t, technically, a museum, despite its collection of Reynolds and Gainsborough upstairs. And why Eureka in Halifax, with no collection at all, is a museum after all. Then there are places with names like the Wallace Collection and Somerset House. What are they? And there’s the National Trust. They have over 200 museums, most disguised as historic homes.

That’s why Kids in Museums decided from the start that if visitors think it’s a museum, it’s a museum. That’s the only way to define it. It’s all to do with the choices a visitor makes. I don’t think someone thinks, “I wonder if I’ll take my family to the Victoria and Albert or Alton Towers today”. I do think they might make a choice between the National Gallery and Kensington Palace. So, as Kids in Museums sees museums from a visitor’s perspective, they’re all part of the big museum family as far as we’re concerned.

But some people are choosing to opt out of the museum fold, feeling, I presume, it’s a word so besmirched that it’s impossible to save. The first thing Vaughan Allen, a former style journalist, did when he took over Urbis in Manchester was change the name. “We banned the word museum. The word museum does mean things in cabinets, and we didn’t have any”he said. He isn’t the only person to shun the M word. A couple of years ago, the Museum of Television and Radio in New York announced it was becoming the Paley Center for Media. In a New York Times article, Pat Mitchell, the president and CEO, said, “Museum was not a word that tests really well with the under-30- and -40-year-olds, especially in the context of radio and television”.

He did not, however, list any positive associations for the title “Center”. Most Centers or Centres I go to are to have bits of me examined by a doctor, and it’s never pleasant. But many places prefer such words to being branded a museum. When I was writing a list of Britain’s best museums recently, I imagined most would want to be on it. But I was warned not to include the Eden Project in Cornwall, as they don’t like being called a museum because of the image it conveys, to some at least. (Eden – do write in and say that’s not the case and I’ll list you immediately!)

I have very mixed feeling on the M word. Museums have transformed dramatically in the last decade, and are often not the glass-cabinet stuffed, unloved, deadly silent places they were not so very long ago. But the word itself undoubtedly still has strong negative connotations, in particular for young people. Mention the M word to my teenager, and she has a tantrum. She’s not going to One of Those. Call it something else – a gallery, even – and she just might consider stepping over its threshold.

So, if we don’t have museums, what do we have? Quentin Blake is currently raising funds for a House of Illustration, to hold much of his work. Note – the word “museum” does not appear in the new building’s title. We could have more Houses of …, which does sound a great deal friendlier. House of Mummies, House of Dinosaurs, House of 19th Century French Porcelain. When the International Spy Museum in Washington DC was being built, the planners commissioned a study to choose a name. They came up with The House on F Street, which they felt conveyed an appropriate sense of intrigue. But when the public were surveyed, they overwhelmingly preferred the straightforward International Spy Museum, which seemed to them to represent what it actually was.

But perhaps we could find a single word to conjure up the spirit of the place, like Urbis, Eden or Fact in Liverpool. Under this poetic scheme, what could we call the British Museum? Conquer? And the National Gallery? Paint? Or, I quite like Frame.

But before any museum rebrands, listen to this cautionary tale. Urbis, no longer called a museum, is closing down, having lost support. It’s being replaced by a wonderful set of objects on popular culture. It will reopen as the Football Museum.

www.kidsinmuseums.org.uk