I went out to buy a bottle of milk this morning when my eye was caught by the wording of a poster right next to the tube:-

idea for a new art world

003: Curators should ask the public what they want to see and what they think galleries and museums should be used for

Interesting, I thought. The New Museology has arrived in the Mile End Road, alongside the chicken shops.

I read the rest of the suggestions:-

001: if I were the Tate, I would simply remove my racist paintings

How many might this involve, I wondered ? It’s a massive collection of nearly 70,000 works of art. Do they mean paintings on display or paintings in the collection as a whole ? Which count as racist ? It could be a lot, starting with Rex Whistler.

002: Universal Basic Income and affordable housing so that everyone, including artists, can make a living

A sensible suggestion.

004: people across the art world need to declare if they have rich parents who helped them get where they are today

I was interested by this being amongst the six top priorities of a guerrilla group and clearly an issue where internships have been so common across the art world and postgraduate courses so expensive.

005: the art world should not replicate the capitalist structures of other industries and instead should set a better example with a horizontal approach to decision-making and pay

006: dear museums, give back all stolen objects

An interesting set of thoughtful observations for the morning, written in a style they describe as cazjjj. I can’t think so many people are going to stop to read them, although it’s right next to a bus stop. Signed, the white pube.

Christie’s have just published a list of the books they recommend for spring reading: a book about Carlo Scarpa, with new photographs, much needed; a book about the way Napoleon’s armies commandeered paintings to create the Louvre; a book about Louis Kahn, with photographs by Cemal Emden, the best; AND (keep scrolling) The Art Museum in Modern Times on cue for COVID. I like the idea that I sat down in March and wrote my book as a response to the challenges of Coronavirus and am only too happy if it gives it timeliness. Beautifully illustrated it is ! And beautifully designed and produced.

https://www.christies.com/features/Best-Art-Books-2021-11481-1.aspx?sc_lang=en&cid=EM_EMLcontent04144B51Section_A_Story_3_0&COSID=1000003828&cid=DM440006&bid=249632787

I have found myself engaged in a surprisingly animated discussion on Twitter – at least, by my standards – on whether or not it is a good thing that museums have shifted from the idea of learning – absorbing and imbibing information about art and the world in a broadly passive/receptive way – to a belief and interest in visitors’ ‘experience’ – the idea that autonomous individuals don’t just absorb information, but construct it according to their own desires and interests: a more active idea as to how people experience museums. It may be that the idea of ‘experience’, as used in The Experience Economy, has become a cliché. But it is still a way of describing a big shift in the way that museums now think about visitors. I like the comment of the person who said ‘[Museums] forget they aren’t the centre of people’s lives, but one modest sausage roll at the buffet table of life’.

For reasons which will be obvious, I have spent time today thinking of Wilmington, Delaware where we spent two months in the summer of 1988 exchanging not only our house, but our car as well with Henry and Sue Moncure. Joe Biden had already been a Senator for fifteen years. What a relief it is to have a President who is representative of that aspect of America which I have always admired.

We were sent an invitation last night to watch a film made in 1981 by Margy Kinmonth about the visit of Jack Yeats and John Millington Synge to Connemara to report the effects of rural poverty and the famine in the so-called ‘Congested Districts’ for the Manchester Guardian. The film was very low budget and all the better for it: because it was made 40 years ago on location in Connemara, it was astonishingly evocative, as if it was them in person, with some of the accents barely comprehensible. The voiceover was done by John Huston who was apparently dying and summoned Margy to the Savoy Hotel where he read the entire script there and then. The film had faded, but has been repurposed. It won lots of prizes at the time and deserved to (https://store.foxtrotfilms.com/To_The_Western_World/p731917_3245763.aspx).

Now that the Inigo website has gone live, I can credit the photographer, Elliot Sheppard, with the excellent photographs not only of the interiors – not an easy thing to do so atmospherically – but of me as well. He was responsible for the big looming close-up which has been a feature of the blog for the last few months and this post is a way of thanking him for allowing me to reproduce it.

A new website and business has been launched today by the founders of The Modern House, which has done such a brilliant job of making the rich variety of modern architecture better known. Now they plan to do the same for historic houses. Our house is featured, but it’s not for sale.

https://inigo.com/almanac/charles-romilly-saumarez-smith-my-inigo-home

The book on the Hermitage is very good on the peculiar character and culture of curators, which in some ways was peculiar there because dealing with western European works of art was both necessary, but at the same time forbidden, and gave the privilege of travelling outside Russia. Of course, I now realise that the reason the Impressionists were in the attic was because they too were particularly disapproved of, relics of the State Museum of New Western Art which had been opened in Moscow in 1923 and closed by Stalin in 1948, half of it exiled to Leningrad.

There is a very good description of the difference between academic art history and the experience of art developed in a museum. ‘If you are in the slightest degree sensitive to art, then, when you carry this painting somewhere, when you look at it in inclined sunlight, look at the canvas’s backside, discuss it with restorers, these things turn out to transgress conceptual frameworks…The pieces are endlessly more complex. And all the considerations of style, of tendencies in history of art, are so helpless at explaining anything…’

My next work of museum study, a form of travelling in the mind, is a recent book about the Hermitage, called Art of Memories: Curating at the Hermitage, written by a French sociologist, Vincent Lépinay, who spent some time as Director of a new Center for Science and Technology Studies at the European University at St. Petersburg, and was instantly given the task of examining the nature of the Hermitage by its long-standing director, Mikhail Piotovsky, whose father, Boris, was director before him.

The Hermitage is huge and somehow unknowable: still as much Catherine the Great’s palace as a twenty-first century museum, with room after room after room of great treasures, right up into the attics where the Impressionists used to be displayed with windows wide open and the curtains flapping. Its first catalogue of paintings appeared in French in 1773. By the time of the publication of the first Russian catalogue in 1797, there were already 4,000 paintings. Now, it would take eight years to look at every object, allowing a minute each (most people apparently spend an average of only twenty eight seconds looking at works of art in museums).

I am looking forward to talking to Tim Marlow about my book about new museums. There was a time when I thought of including John Pawson’s new Design Museum as a case study, but in the end narrowed the field to art museums. But it fits the recent narrative: big on the visual excitement of public circulation space, growing from small building to big, treating grand architecture as part of the museum experience (and one of the best shops):-

https://www.artscapades.org/tickets/saumarez-marlow