The Politics of Museums
I’ve managed to geta copy of the Director of the National Gallery, Charles Saumarez Smith’s, lecture/essay on The Politics of Museums. As far as I am aware, only an extract has been published on the web, so it feels a bit Samizdat to have it on my desk.
The article in last week’s Observer was, by definition, more polemical because it was a precis. The full lecture is much more balanced. It is a valuable oversight of - and insight into - the the politics of the arts for the last thirty years. Whether it is fair or not is irrelevant - it fairly reflects, I think, the perception of the arts world, given that it is written by someone who has been at its heart for the last thirty years.
Saumarez Smith is certainly fair to the Government - he praises them at length for free admissions and long-term funding. So his critique should be taken seriously. Saumarez Smith makes three powerful points. The first, the need for politicians to encourage philanthropy, not just with fiscal changes, but also by signalling that the arts are important and worth supporting. This, I think, will be the main focus for debate in the next few years. Secondly, a need to move away from an obsession with the glossy and superficial, and to re-engage with the sense of the virtues and values of the past - a deeper cultural understanding. And finally he focuses on the need for museums and galleries to add to their collections, somethingwe tried to address at the last election with our proposal for an acquisitions fund.
Saumarez Smith’s contribution has been followed by the warnings of the British Library and the Arts Council about funding. It’s clear that the arts world is beginning a debate about their relationship with Government over the next decade, as they recognise that whether it is Brown or Cameron, the climate is changing.