TAITMAIL Shuffling the pack
First, we don’t often do obits here but there’s a museum theme and it would be remiss not to acknowledge the contribution made to museums by Neil Cossons, who died on March 29 at 87.
Chairman of English Heritage, director of the Science Museum, similar of the National Maritime Museum, it was fitting that his last appearance was at the handing over of his beloved Ironbridge Gorge Museum, which he founded in 1971, to the care of the National Trust, thereby saving the thing he had created in the white museological heat of the industrial heritage furnace. There were controversies around him from time to time, you couldn’t do as much as he did and avoid the odd row – and he seldom avoided rows - but through an unshakeable belief that everyone has a right to know and explore our history through, for instance, open air museums, he made an indelible contribution to museums now with a new conviction that the story comes before the object. But he was a champion of modernity in museum presentation, acknowledging that history is always happening, and a champion for small museums and their communities.
He also had an ambivalent attitude towards admission fees, over which we fell out in the most amicable terms. His objection to free admission was largely that he couldn’t see another way of getting enough revenue, and he moved on from the Science Museum to chair English Heritage a year before Chris Smith imposed free entry.
But the ongoing row over museum funding, particularly local museums, is not abating. I don’t know what Cossons’s view on the proposed tourism tax to fund museums as opposed to charging tourists at the turnstile was, but he would have rejoiced in the evidence of new thinking on how to keep our heritage before the public face to the best effect. The National Museums Directors Council (NMDC) has issued a useful round-up of who’s saying what and why, starting with the official DCMS line: “The government believes charging international visitors at national museums could provide significant benefits. It could underpin our commitment to ensure art and culture is accessible, representative and shared across the country, and support the long-term financial resilience of these organisations. We will work with the museum sector to explore options…” They’ll come up with something “before the end of the year”.
Note that DCMS and Lisa Nandy are careful to make it plain they’re talking about national museums. One of those is the Royal Armouries at Leeds, which came back like a whiplash with a profoundly opposite view: “We hold this collection on behalf of all people, everywhere. We remain wholly committed to that principle (of free admission)” said its director Nat Edwards. "Museums like the Royal Armouries are powerful drivers of economic regeneration, pillars of soft power, and engines of national pride. This proposal (to charge at the entrance) is a superficial, short-term response to a deeper problem and offers considerably more challenges than benefits.”
Getting a new strand of funding from the punters might be the answer to chronic underfunding of museums, according to Nandy’s favourite think tank, the Cultural Policy Unit, but charging at the door is “A very bad idea” says Alison Cole, its director. “There’s a much better way to save our wonderful civic museums and cultural infrastructure across the country, and that we believe is a hotel levy” she said. Could be worth £1.2bn a year, enough to pave our heritage future in gold.
Margaret Hodge, fresh from delivering her review of the Arts Council, has waded in telling the Communications and Digital Select Committee that charging admission could only work if we have a universal identity card. Which would be perfect if only ID cards weren’t certain to open us up to the perils of… I forget what they are, but there are definitely perils attached.
The opening of the £135m V&A East this weekend is almost poetically timely. It’s aimed deliberately at the young, its opening major exhibition is about Black music and the visitor is welcomed by a 15 foot bronze Black woman. She’s holding a smartphone as she gazes at the horizon. “She’s probably going to be our future” said its director, Gus Casely-Hayford. “And we think she’s the personification of everything we’re trying to deliver here”. Admission is free.
This week Nandy announced the first hand-outs from the £15bn Arts Everywhere Fund she launched in January to support “cultural infrastructure projects”. This slice, worth nearly £130m, is for theatres/venues (£96m), museums (£25.5m) and libraries (a humble £6.3m).
Much of the museums’ money is to shore up local places, Chester Roman Fort, Bramall Hall Stockport, Whitchurch Silk Museum, Bristol Museums, Ryedale Folk Museum, and Cossons would be chuffed to see Black Country Living Museum on the list, the kind of open-air museum he championed.
The money is basically to stop cultural buildings proceeding on the course to dereliction on which they are bound, not is also to make them more appealing. Many are free, and if they weren’t they’d have drastically fewer visitors, spending their money in the café and the shop. What happens to the rest of the fund?
FINALLY, I’ve just been to the Society of Portrait Sculptors annual Face exhibition at the Garrison Chapel, Chelsea Barracks. Portrait sculpture, as opposed to abstract, is unfashionable for some reason, and to be confronted by these 267 exhibits you have to question why.
Within the parameters of portrait sculpture, these works are full of invention, experiment and supreme craftsmanship. Alekzandra Mazurkiewicz’s devout hymn My Saint’s Circle (pictured) is an extraordinary 16-plaque wall piece in which she deploys bronze, ceramic, jute, linen, string and gold plating. There’s a mesmerising wooden carving portrait by Albert Kozak, From Grottger’s Watercolour that dares you to turn your eyes away. Jethro Crabb’s bronze portrait of Enzo Ferrari in his 1920s heyday as the racing driver, before he founded the company, is pean to arrogant triumphalism
“Our aim is promote this historic art form, ensuring that any public body, organisation or private individual hoping to commission a portrait sculpture can browse our annual showcase and see the talent that is available” writes the society’s president, Louise Forbes, in her foreword. Not all of it is for sale, and for those that are prices range from £350 to £60,000, but you don’t have to buy to be uplifted by this range of accomplishment. Just go and have a look – but be quick, the exhibition ends on April 26.