Editorial
by:
Elspeth Moncrieff
As political barriers tumble there has never been a greater opportunity for museums to organise travelling exhibitions from their collections. The communist regime in China and the Cold War in Europe have until recently made the collections of Eastern Europe, Russia and China so inaccessible to the traveller that an international audience is particularly hungry for exhibitions of treasures locked away in these countries. Although still a major undertaking, by factoring in advances in conservation standards and techniques, vulnerable objects can travel and go on exhibition with a much greater degree of safety. Added to this is the ease of access and communication made possible through the internet, air travel that is now cheaper than ever and the willingness of
multi-national corporations to engage in art sponsorship-we look set for a golden era of travelling exhibitions.
A glance through the international news section of the magazine highlights this age of travelling shows. The treasures of Catherine the Great are continuing their American tour as are the treasures of Tutankhamen. The exhibition on the Ming and Qing emperors has just closed at London's Royal Academy. The list of cultural exchanges on every level from major blockbuster exhibitions to individual relationships between particular museums is endless. Not to mention the huge arena of international contemporary exhibitions, new biennale and art fairs seem to spring up every year. Anyone planning a once in a life time trip to a major destination could be well advised to check that an object they have always longed to see is not on tour elsewhere.
These factors present a great temptation for museums to put together blockbuster money raising exhibitions with little thought to scholarship or true cultural interchange. They must avoid the temptation to 'hire out' their collections like so many celebrities merely to put money in the coffers, however much the funds are needed. There has never been a greater opportunity for museums to use their collections responsibly both to break down entrenched cultural barriers and to make major advances in scholarship.
In this issue of the World we report on two Chinese exhibitions which demonstrate these points. An exhibition of seventeenth-century Chinese porcelain organised jointly by the Shanghai Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum was small in scale but ground breaking in content. The project brought together leading experts from around the world for the first ever international conference on seventeenth-century Chinese ceramics to be held on Chinese soil. This pooling of scholarship and resources has dramatically altered accepted understanding of so called 'transitional' period ceramics. The exhibition will now travel to the Victoria and Albert Museum and although it will not make headlines it is exactly the sort of 'old-fashioned' scholarly exhibition curators can pull off on a relatively small budget.
It won't compete with the mass appeal of the exhibition of Ming and Qing treasures from the Chinese National Collections, which has so overwhelmed visitors. While this could be classed in the blockbuster 'pack up and tour our best objects' category, it was presented in such a way that it dramatically enhanced the understanding of the period. The exhibition told us so much not only about the artefacts on a scholarly level but also about the personalities of the emperors; the way they ran their courts and embraced the influences of western art, thus humanising and personalising an essentially foreign and distant culture.
Such exhibitions would have been inconceivable even a few years ago.
These new opportunities present an exciting challenge, opening the door to debate and research, initiatives that should not be lost on museums looking to engage in cultural exchanges. Now more than ever material culture can be used in a way to encourage a climate that dispels bias, moving towards creating one of cultural parity. Through setting up face to face encounters and exploring the collections and interpretations of other curators and museums, public institutions are able to touch their audience, opening the door to further contact and dialogue. |
