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Editorial
by:
Christopher Thompson
ENHANCING THE NATIONAL COLLECTION
In recent months, museums, art galleries and libraries throughout Australia have sought to focus public interest on recent enhancements of their collections. Much of the debate has been directed at the miniscule size of the acquisitions budgets of Australian institutions, which have been contrasted unfavourably with those of privately supported art museums in the United States and the lottery funded acquisitions programs that prevail in the United Kingdom. The new director of the National Gallery of Australia, Ron Radford, has suggested a pooling scheme, whereby the acquisition of major items is shared. Such a scheme was entered into in 2001 when the National Gallery joined with the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery to acquire John Glover's Mount Wellington and Hobart Town from Kangaroo Point, 1834, for their collections. This obviously benefits institutions with limited acquisition budgets, such as the TMAG, giving them privileged access to works that relate to their collections they would otherwise be unable to acquire. And, as the Glover painting demonstrated, publicly owned and accessible works of art are vital to a community's understanding of its cultural and social development.
Analogies between Glover's Mount Wellington and Hobart Town from Kangaroo Point and J?rn Utzon's Sydney Opera House might seem rather far-fetched, but both have the power to move their viewers; both mark the landscape in an extraordinarily emotional way and define a sense of place. One need only recall the feeling of loss apparent in Geelong in 1996 when the Geelong Art Gallery failed in its bid to acquire Eugene von Gu￩rard's View of Geelong, 1856, a painting that in its recording of a glorious history imputed a vision of future prosperity for that then economically hard hit city. Such works have the capacity to reach out beyond their traditional audience and, in a tangible sense, redefine the role of art in the wider community.
At the time Radford made his comment, the press reported Edmund Capon, director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, recalling that he had sought to enter into a similar joint purchasing arrangement with the National Gallery of Victoria - twenty years ago - to acquire a version of Tintoretto's Christ washing the feet of the disciples. The NGV was disinterested and the painting, which had been owned by the cathedral of St Nicholas in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, eventually ended up, locally, in the Shipley Art Gallery in Gateshead. Despite the failure of this bid, there has been a perceptible level of activism in the AGNSW's approach to acquisitions: aside from the recent purchase of Cy Twombly's Three studies from the Temeraire, 1998-99, its collections have expanded remarkably over the last decade or so. Writing recently in the Sydney Morning Herald, Peter Hill opined that 'new purchases by Australian state and regional galleries deserve to be reviewed more widely than they are.'
Yet, as can be seen from this issue of the World of Antiques and Art, Australian public museums and art galleries are acquiring works of national, regional and local significance. While the AGNSW was able to outlay a reported $4.5 million for the Twombly, the Ipswich Art Gallery in Queensland acquired, more modestly and thanks to the assistance of a supportive local council together with a network of local CEOs, a silver racing cup presented at the Ipswich Free Handicap Race in 1866.
This recent focus on acquisitions is welcome; they not only benefit the national collectionin the widest sense of the termbut also provide the grounds for further research and scholarship, for a wider appreciation by the public of the arts and design and, as Hill observes, 'it is the acquisitions made on our behalf, with our money and trust, that eventually become part of our collective psyche.'
By contrast, some museums seem still obsessed with chasing the chimera of popularity, by focussing not just their public programs but their entire image on transient and often trivial blockbuster exhibitions, transmogrifying their venues into megastores for the marketing departments of global enterprises. In allocating what are, by international standards, scant public resources into the promotion of already wealthy corporations, these exhibitions benefit neither the museological standing of their institutional hosts nor the intellectual betterment of their visitors; theatrical props do not make a museum. For these institutions, their response to external - usually financial - pressure has been to deny their core audiences 'the donors, collectors, researchers, scholars and, most importantly, the keen-to-learn visitors' in favour of an 'heads through doors' way of benchmarking their programs. It's a shallow, knee jerk reaction that has grave consequences for the health of a museum's central rationale: its collection. This is not to disparage blockbuster exhibitions tout court but to argue that they must be balanced in their presentation and promoted in the context of other institutional activities, notably education, research, scholarship and the development of collections.
There are encouraging signs that this approach is changing: the newly appointed director of the National Museum of Australia, Craddock Morton, announced that his organisation would, belatedly, commit over $1 million a year to acquisitions. Hopefully, others will follow suit. This comes on top of a February 2004 decision by the Cultural Ministers Council to establish a Collections Council of Australia 'to represent the shared interests of galleries, libraries archives and Museums and [which] will play a critical role in developing long term strategies to address issues facing our collections'. The council will have an uphill task in addressing its remit, but it is an indication that the issue has been given some recognition at government level. |
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