One of my greatest pleasures in the last few weeks was a long conversation with Romas Viesulas, based in Lisbon, both about my museum book, but more about the books which influenced me while writing it and a couple of books which were being written more or less in parallel.

I feel badly about recommending the book by Michael Govan because it is not easily obtainable, but very revealing of the ideas of the group influenced by Tom Krens at Williams College who have done so much to change the priorities of the museum – from an encyclopedia to a poem, as Govan describes it.

https://fivebooks.com/best-books/the-art-museum-charles-saumarez-smith/

The first review is always a bit nerve-wracking because you never quite know how people will respond and react to things which one has laboured over and then seem obvious when they are in print. So, I was very reassured by my first proper review in Studio International, which is very detailed and very fair. I know that it is all a bit compressed and should really have been six books, but, as she rightly points out, it was a way of providing an overall survey of changes in museums without getting too bogged down in the detail.

https://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/the-art-museum-in-modern-times-charles-saumarez-smith-book-review-thames-hudson

This is a very good survey of how the art world has fared round the world. It is hard to escape the feeling that we have done badly, both in terms of very high numbers of deaths and massacring culture, however well we may have done in developing a vaccine (by the way, I remember being told that we would develop a vaccine within a year in January 2020, so it is not all due to the brilliance of Rishi Sunak).

What will be really odd is the period between April 12th. and May 17th. when Fortnum’s and Hatchard’s are open, but the Royal Academy remains closed and the National Gallery and British Museum too. I suppose it is not long to wait, but indicative of the government’s ranking of culture below beauty parlours.

https://www.theartnewspaper.com/analysis/covid-19-in-the-art-world-a-year-on

I went into the west end today – the first time for three or four months. I felt unexpectedly apprehensive, not looking forward at all to the resumption of minimal human contact, sitting at a distance from people in the tube, all masked up, and walking the streets with almost no-one there. So many familiar shops now closed. Bond Street: empty. Piccadilly: empty. The gates of the Royal Academy firmly shut. I found it incredibly melancholy, walking the streets where I lived and worked, but with no possibility of meeting anyone from a former life. It’s hard to imagine it starting up again.

I keep meaning to buy a copy of the March issue of Elle Decoration, but now I have no need to, because the article about the best of the recent art museums has appeared online (The world’s best modern art museums (elledecoration.co.uk), together with predictions of what comes next:-

There are plenty of new museums planned for the next few years, including Jamie Fobert’s new-look National Portrait Gallery and the LACMA expansion by Peter Zumthor in Los Angeles, both set for 2023. Galleries of the future are likely to be lighter weight, more ecological and even more contemporary – let’s hope they demonstrate the same swagger and confidence as their predecessors.

If you manage to watch My Rembrandt, which I highly recommend, you may, as we were, be slightly baffled by exactly what Jan Six, the hero of the film, did wrong. It is half explained in the attached long article in the New York Times, but only half.

https://nyti.ms/2IH1dfa

One of the benefits of listening to Waldy and Bendy this morning was that it led us to watch the film My Rembrandt this evening, an astonishing exposition of the nature of the art world and the extremities of the passions paintings, particularly Rembrandts, arouse. It both begins and ends with the most beautiful photography of Drumlanrig, where Richard Buccleuch decides to re-hang his Old Woman Reading. The heart of the narrative is about Jan Six deciding to buy a putative Rembrandt at auction and getting it attributed by Ernst van der Wetering, while, meanwhile, Éric de Rothschild decides to sell the two Rembrandts he and his brother jointly owned to the Rijksmuseum and the Louvre jointly. It tells one a great deal about the operation of the art world: the complexities of attribution when so many millions are at stake; the fact that there are still surprises in the sale room; the politics involved in a joint acquisition by the French and the Dutch. The director, Oeke Hoogendijk, has filmed it all with extraordinary access and great sensitivity. Available on Amazon if not in the cinema.

I’ve found out the name of the plant in the garden which has been giving such pleasure over recent weeks. I’m not at all surprised that it originates from Japan:-

I have discovered what has happened to my conversation with Bendor Grosvenor last week, which is that it has been interleaved into his Sunday morning weekly conversation with Waldemar Januszczak called Waldy and Bendy’s Adventures in Art (https://www.podbean.com/ew/pb-s9cbp-fe443d). You have to listen nearly to the end, but the rest of the programme is, I think, well worth listening to as well – a couple of what Neil Cossins would call ‘grumpy fundamentalists’ ruminating and reflecting on their experience of the art world: the recent sale of an NFT (a nonfungible token for those like me who still think the NFT is where you go to see old films); the idea that Reading Jail might be turned into an art centre; the decision by Tate to postpone its exhibition by Philip Guston and the subsequent departure of Mark Godfrey, its curator (is free speech in museums still allowed ?); whether or not the Tate has now become like the French nineteenth-century Academy ruling the art world with its own political orthodoxies; and then me talking to Bendor about the potential refurbishment of the Saimsbury Wing, the role of architecture in the experience of art, the cost of modern conservation, and whether or not Tate should rely on Wikipedia for its knowledge of the lives of artists. I think I can recommend it, however much I hate listening to myself, always talking so much more slowly than I think I do in my head.

It feels as if we are all coming out of a long period of hibernation. I was sent off this morning to buy croissants from the Stepney Farm market and managed to be first in the queue for The Allotment Kitchen’s home-made cakes and buns, so colossally delectable – or is this just an effect of repetitive taste starvation, an admittedly middle class disease ?