I was not, sadly, able to attend the V&A’s big, two-day conference on ‘The Future of the Museum’ because of COVID and so had to give my opening paper on ‘Architecture and Access: The Transformation of the Modern Museum’ online.
Since my internet connection cut out towards the end, I am publishing the paper online, but without illustrations because of issues of copyright:-
• I was asked by Joanna Norman to start the day by providing a set of reflections on the current state of museums, based on the book I published two years ago, The Art Museum in Modern Times.[1] What I plan to do is to review the conclusions I reached in 2020 in the light of how museums are post-COVID in what I think of as a very different environment for museums and then to add some thoughts about what I left out and would — and should — now do differently.
• The book was an attempt to look back over my lifetime and describe what had changed in museums. I started out working at the V&A in November 1982, over forty years ago, at a time when museums were unbelievably different in character and ethos. For those who might be inclined to nostalgia for museums as they were at that time, I found arriving at the V&A from Cambridge and doing a PhD at the Warburg Institute a bit scary and somewhat shocking. The Keepers of the V&A had decided that they were implacably hostile to Roy Strong’s plan to establish a postgraduate course in the History of Design, now celebrating its fortieth anniversary, and since I had been appointed to run the V&A’s side of the Course, they mostly determined to make my life as difficult as possible. On my first day, I was taken out to lunch in the basement of Daquise, the Polish restaurant which still survives close to South Kensington station and there were assembled a large group of mostly elderly men. They were the departmental Keepers and I was told that they were plotting against the Director, Sir Roy Strong.
• The galleries as I remember them were pretty gloomy and not at all well displayed. Not long after I started, I was invited to a meeting to discuss the first of what were planned as a new presentation of what were then called the Primary Galleries. The plans were almost wilfully subfusc because we were told it was so difficult to get anyone to change a lightbulb. Any idea that they might be lively or adventurous or visitor friendly, let alone attract children, was as remote as the moon.
• So, what I wanted to explore in my book was the question of how and why museums have changed during my adult life-time from when they were regarded essentially as a form of research archive, making objects and works of art conveniently available, but without much secondary interpretation or, indeed, much information on the labels, to what they are now — big engines of international tourism, concentrating on the pleasures of visitor experience, trying as far as possible to de-academicise themselves, often by reducing the numbers of works on display, with beautiful shops and multiple forms of catering, designed in such a way as to attract non-traditional visitors and, where possible, to use new technology to do so, abandoning the idea and belief in a grand narrative for a less systematic belief in the virtues of individual and group visitor experience — encouraging social interaction with works of art and the autonomy of private, present-centred interpretation.
• What I initially planned to do in the book was to provide an analysis and narrative of what changes had taken place in museums decade by decade, focussing on the key innovations. But this way of doing the book turned out to be a bit unwieldy and, in retrospect, perhaps lacking a critical narrative because at the time I was still writing as an insider. Also, I found it curiously difficult to analyse what had happened in the last twenty years because the secondary literature tends either to be written from the perspective of museology, often dominated by a critique of the institution of museums, or too celebratory, just promoting some new museum project. What I ended up doing was providing, as far as possible, an examination of new museum projects, beginning with the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which was very self-consciously a critique of museums as they were in the United States in the 1930s.
• My final entry in the book was David Chipperfield’s West Bund Museum on the banks of the Huangpu River to the south of Shanghai. The West Bund Museum is a possibly somewhat extreme example of a contemporary art museum: planned by the West Bund Development Group as part of a new urban neighbourhood and without any prior idea as to how it would be used; a generic set of museum spaces which have been leased in the first instance by the Centre Pompidou as part of its programme of global outreach and unapologetically intended to promote Sino-French international relations; the museum stands as an emblem of several strands of museum building which are as much about international politics and urban regeneration as they are about exhibitions or the display of collections.
• I selected my case studies without an idea of constructing a grand narrative, merely on the basis that they were museums that I had visited and knew enough about to be able to write about them. I developed elements of a narrative post hoc as a series of reflections on what had changed over the period from 1939 when the Museum of Modern Art had opened to November 2019 when the West Bund Museum opened, five months before my book was due to be completed.
• The big changes which I felt were worth writing about and describing in the concluding section which I described as ‘Big Issues’ were as follows.
• First, ‘The Rise of the Private Museum’. It seemed to me fairly obvious that many of the changes to the ways that museums have operated in the last seven decades have been initiated not by the large, state-funded museums, like the V&A, but by the smaller, more agile, private museums, often owing to the beliefs of their founders, beginning, most obviously with the establishment of Louisiana north of Copenhagen by Knud Jensen who was hostile to the formality and what he saw as the dullness of the displays in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. He wanted art to be displayed somewhere smaller, less formal, surrounded by trees and a garden, where people could live with art instead of treating it as remote and transcendent. Louisiana established a different typology for museums: ground-floor, day-lit, smaller rooms, looking out on a garden towards the sea. I left out, but if I were ever to do another edition, would certainly now include Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge, which seems to have been similarly influential in terms of displaying art more informally in a domestic rather than traditional museum setting, intended for students more than tourists. Amongst more recent museums which I think have been influential, I included the Broad in Los Angeles which I am including again today, not least because Liz Diller of Diller Scofidio is speaking this afternoon, and because it seems to have been unusually successful in attracting younger visitors by the strength of its online presence, treating its digital activities as at least as important as its physical presence on one of the main streets of Downtown LA.
• My second theme was what I described as ‘The Morality of Wealth’. It was already evident when I wrote the book that there was a radical change in attitudes towards private wealth and who it was legitimate to take money from, an issue which I do not need to dwell on in a museum which has recently removed the name of the Sacklers from its courtyard on Exhibition Road. I would merely note that some of the problems which were bound to arise from these anxieties are discussed in a good, wide-ranging and balanced article by Gareth Harris in this month’s Apollo.[2] So many forms of private funding are liable to be tainted in some way. This has produced a deep and structural unease about the museum’s dependence on private wealth, as demonstrated by attitudes to the Board members of the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum, as well as problems in museums’ abilities now to raise private funding.
• My third theme was what I described as ‘The End of History’. This is the change in the way that collections are displayed and interpreted from an orthodoxly historical programme to freer, sometimes more cross-cultural, more dynamic methods of interpretation, often influenced by the views of artists and audiences, rather than curators and art historians. This seems to me to be very evident, in a good and creative way, in the new displays at the National Portrait Gallery, which are as much focussed on who we are in the present as who we have been in the past and which try as far as it can to avoid its traditional dominance by a sequence of old white men by diversifying what constitutes achievement.
• My fourth theme was called ‘The Changing Characteristics of Works of Art’, which was a way of describing, if only briefly, the change in medium, from a traditional reliance on paintings and sculpture to interests, as here at the V&A, in photography, new media, design and, most of all here, fashion as a way of attracting new and younger audiences. Attitudes to what constitutes fine art have, and will continue to, change.
• My fifth theme was globalisation. I haven’t yet seen Herzog and de Meuron’s new M+ in West Kowloon, but it is obvious that it is a museum which has been done with the same level of cultural confidence as anywhere else in the world. The same applies to Sydney Modern, the new extension designed by SANAA for the Art Gallery of New South Wales. One of the excellent aspects of András Szántó’s book The Future of the Museum, which consisted of interviews with museum directors during the early stages of COVID, was the number and range of new museums in Africa which I had totally failed to cover and I was also lamentably brief in my coverage of museums in South America.[3]
• My sixth theme was the digital world. To be honest, I think in retrospect that I underplayed the huge impact of digitalisation, the use of mobile phones as a way of interacting with the world and the extent to which many people’s relationship to museums, including mine, is now at least as much online as in person. At the time that I was still working in museums, I confess that I still regarded our online presence as subordinate to the experience of actually visiting the museum, a supplement to the fundamental experience of the physical encounter with works of art. But now that I sit at home exploring the collections of the British Museum, the V&A and the Metropolitan Museum online, studying their prints and drawings without having to get on the underground and pull works out of storage, seeking information about collections through their online catalogues, enlarging the images in order to study details, I feel that I was slow to appreciate the revolution in consciousness that digitalisation has represented.
• I ended with two issues about audiences. The first is what I described as ‘The Seach for the Sacred’. This is the fact that I think nowadays people are at least as interested in visual experience and sensation as they are in information and study. I went a month ago to see the new Faith Museum in Bishop Auckland in County Durham. Now, leave aside the fact that the whole point of the museum is that people should think about objects and works of art in terms of their relationship not to the history of art, but the history of religious beliefs. The ground floor of the museum is essentially historical, a relatively traditional way of looking at artefacts in museum cases. The whole of the upstairs of the museum is devoted to a single artwork by Matt Collishaw, Eidolon, which shows a blue iris being consumed by flames. The music which accompanies the piece is generated by AI. I will lay an extremely large sum of money that what people will remember of their visit, what provokes and stimulates and indeed moves them, is not looking at works of history and archaeology in the museum cases downstairs, but the intensely immersive and experimental art installation upstairs which uses new technology in the most imaginative and inventive way.
• So, the conclusion to my book was that by far the biggest change which has happened in museums is nothing whatsoever to do with how they are laid out or the changes in their design — questions of physical access or the role of the curator — but are to do with the changing expectations of audiences and the care and attention which museums now give, rightly, to analysing and thinking about how different audiences will respond to the displays, as has happened very obviously in the new galleries at the National Portrait Gallery. Audiences no longer wish to be told what to think or even possibly where to go. I will repeat what I wrote in my final paragraph which I wrote just before lockdown because it reflects as clearly as I could what I thought then:
The audience is itself more educated, more knowing, more able and inclined to make its own judgments of layouts and displays, aided by their own knowledge and experience and expertise. Visitors come wanting visual and aesthetic and often social experiences in the museum, as much as intellectual ones. They do not want to be told what to think. They want to discover for themselves.[4]
• So the question, I want to end with and to pose as a question for the next two days of the conference is:- what has changed ? What would I write differently now post-lockdown which I think has changed many of our attitudes to, and understanding of, the world ?
• I’m afraid I think we cannot, and should not, escape questions about the thefts at the British Museum because I think that the thefts which appear from the evidence so far published to have been undertaken by a senior, long-standing curator in what was the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities, of which he was for some of the time that he was selling antiquities on Ebay the Acting Keeper, will almost inevitably have undermined the trust which has traditionally been vested in curators as the appropriate guardians — the caretakers and custodians — of collections. They had not documented, or even apparently listed in a basic inventory, artefacts, some of which had been given or acquired in the nineteenth century, including from the Townley Collection, and which are said to have been lying about in jars in storerooms available to be pilfered and sold online for a period of ten years without anyone in the museum, apart from a Danish antiquities dealer in Copenhagen, discovering the thefts. An enquiry, described, not necessarily correctly, as an independent enquiry, has been set up under the chairmanship of Sir Nigel Boardman, the former Deputy Chairman of the British Museum, as to how this was able to happen. I am not convinced that the enquiry will be able to face, or want to confront, the reality of the way in which what has happened will have undermined the authority of the traditional museum and where this leaves the status of the British Museum in the future. My own view as to what needs to happen at the British Museum, and indeed all other museums, is vastly much more openness as to what the museums hold in store, much more freedom of online involvement in interpreting the collection, a quick process at the British Museum of producing an online, illustrated inventory of the four million objects which are said not yet to have been listed with photographs which do not necessarily need to be taken by the museum’s own studio photographers, and a democratisation of access to study and interpretation away from what I think of as an essentially nineteenth-century approach to scholarly custody and interpretation.
• At the time I finished the book at the end of March 2020, I was filled with a sense of apocalyptic angst about the future when museums were responding to a total shutdown by mass redundancies and, as here at the V&A, by proposed radical restructuring. I added a final section which dealt with some of the myriad of new problems which museums are now facing, particularly round issues of restitution, but also I should have added more discussion round issues of diversity in the recruitment of staff, the subject areas covered in exhibitions, strategies of acquisition and collection, and, indeed, in governance.[5] But three and a half years on, I don’t see the future nearly as gloomily with new museums continuing to be planned and opened, as in the wonderful new National Museum in Oslo, although I admit that it is pretty hard to be so optimistic about the condition of local authority museums in this country, for example, in Birmingham.
• I want to end with a recent image of the V&A’s Storehouse, because I think it must, and should, represent what a museum is expected to be in the future, its sense of responsibility to its public who, via taxation, are its owners. It is, first, as I see it, a project of urban regeneration, situated on the north-west side of the Olympic Park, part of a move of the city eastwards towards a new and more diverse — a less traditional — audience, similar in motive to the revitalisation of the former Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood as the Young V&A. Secondly, it will show a huge diversity and range of artefact — paintings, objects, cutlery, fashion — arranged, so far as one can tell from the image, relatively indiscriminately in order to encourage the autonomy of personal experience and sense of discovery and exploration. I have looked at the call issued last year for an agency to help with the interpretation at the Storehouse. I quote:
We are looking for a partner to collaborate with us on designing and delivering a new, enticing and memorable experience that enables people to have direct, up-close engagement with museum objects and their stories. We want to create a unique selling point for the V&A East Storehouse, and a new kind of cultural experience for London.
• This is, I think, the correct way of thinking about the future for museums: to be experimental about ways of thinking about and interpreting the collections; to think about collections as places of unsystematic exploration and discovery; making them available in depth and being open as to how they are studied; to consider them as places and spaces for re-enchantment which acknowledges the diversity of ways in which they can be understood and interpreted, rather than treating them as places of more traditional scholarly authority and didacticism.
[1] Charles Saumarez Smith, The Art Museum in Modern Times (London: Thames & Hudson, 2021). I am grateful to Michael Conforti for long-standing conversations about museum and for a more recent discussion about current issues.
[2] Gareth Harris, The Problem with Philanthropy’ Apollo, October 2023, pp.41-43. See also Leslie Ramos, Philanthropy in the Arts: A Game of Give and Take (London: Lund Humphries, 2023).
[3] András Szántó, The Future of the Museum: 28 Dialogues (Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2020).
[4] Charles Saumarez Smith, The Art Museum in Modern Times (London: Thames and Hudon, 2021), 231.
[5] For these issues, see Laura Raicovich, Culture Strike: Art and Museums in an Age of Protest (London and New York: Verso, 2021).
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 
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