The last session of the museums conference that I was able to attend was on the age-old, but still highly contentious issue of the future of the curator, with a good and interesting range of speakers from institutions in both history and contemporary art, chaired by Andrew McClellan. Jessica Morgan, a former curator of the Tate, now director of the Dia Art Foundation, argued for the need for new skills and less adherence to traditional art historical expertise. There was an occasional presumption that curators hold disproportionate authority in the ways that works of art are acquired and interpreted. My own experience is that curators increasingly feel marginalised by the growth in other areas of the museum – digital, marketing, finance, learning, all of which require different forms of specialist professional expertise which subtly, but significantly displaces curatorial knowledge, not least in pay scales. I say this as a non-curator.

The final session of the day was a keynote address by Sandra Jackson-Dumont, the Director and CEO of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, which is currently being built in Exposition Park in Los Angeles, right next door to the Natural History Museum. It is a rather fascinating project because it treats art as a broad narrative, encompassing prints and photographs alongside paintings, blurring the boundaries of medium and high and low, so including George Bellows next to Andrew Wyeth next to Dorothea Lange and Gordon Parks. The building is designed by a Chinese architect, Ma Yansong, who worked for Zaha Hadid before opening an office in Beijing:-

Very oddly, it is conceptually not totally dissimilar from the new LACMA in the way in which it deliberately eschews traditional architectural forms for curved walls and shapes and they are both one story up in order to create a plaza below:-

Both are determined to break the mould of traditional museums in ways which are not dissimilar: abolishing the canon; opening themselves up to non-traditional art; treating the experience as more about browsing than study. They are both scheduled to open in the next few years. It will be interesting to compare the ways in which they are received by the museum and art history communities.

I have just attended a good session on the role of empathy in the museum, led by Tom Crow. Art historians have become wary, or hostile, to the discussion of the nature of aesthetic experience in museums, feeling that it is either indeterminate or elitist, too connected to connoisseurship. But it’s interesting to discover that psychologists and psychotherapists feel no such inhibition and are both working with museums and studying the therapeutic values of wonder, pleasure and visual delight, the nature of individual, visual response to works of art and the ways in which it contributes to private well-being and public health.

I attended the first day of a big, international conference organised by the Louvre Abu Dhabi entitled Reframing the Museum and held, of course, virtually, which has the advantage of no travel costs and of being able to view the proceedings comparatively dispassionately. I was expecting to get a better sense of how museums are going to change than in practice I did. There was an interesting session on new business models in which Frédéric Jousset proposed some: flexible pricing; exploiting the museum’s brand; licencing; jacking up the price of entry and encouraging a business class of entry; not treating visitors as uniform; and re-orienting the museum in order to privilege and give more space to the most popular exhibits. I was interested that Max Hollein in his response said that, of course, museum directors are not inclined to think about their visitors as customers, which sounded to me like a voice from a long distant past. I was left with an impression that, although at the beginning of the pandemic, everyone rushed to go virtual, now we approach its end, everyone can’t wait to be back in reality and that museums may end up being unexpectedly the same after all: symbols of the cosmopolis, as Anthony Appiah so elegantly argued.

Although I know our end of the Roman Road very well, I very seldom go down the part beyond Mile End Park. Today, I walked to the park which was looking autumnal:-

Then I discovered that the Roman Road, to my amazement, now has a pop-up patisserie, called Alibi Pantry, which has the most delicious takeaway cakes, and an Italian deli, called Symposium which sells East London beer, new to me, as well as a gigantic range of Italian wine: gentrification no doubt, but I am not complaining:-

I have been asked about the difference between a museum and an art gallery, based on the possibility that museums have traditionally been accessible and democratic, modelled on the beliefs of Henry Cole and Prince Albert, whereas art galleries were more for the cognoscenti. As it happens, it was the first question I was asked at my first interview at the NPG. I can’t remember what I answered then, but would say now that museums belong to a nineteenth-century encyclopedic tradition of public instruction, based on a systematic layout, whereas galleries are for art, where there is much less emphasis on labelling, more on looking. Art museum is, I think, American usage and at the V&A I was discouraged from using the term, but this hasn’t stopped me from using it in the title of my book.

Ever since the beginning of lockdown, or at least since March 31st. when the final text was due, I have been preoccupied by completing my book about art museums, a good preoccupation since it involved detailed picture research, which is now so easy thanks to Google Images, and also liaison with Harry Pearce at Pentagram, which was a pleasure seeing the initial layouts, the design being gradually being tightened, the choice of typeface (it’s Futura) and the amount of care and thought which went into the cover. Now, I have just seen the page of Thames & Hudson’s Spring catalogue and the whole process feels real again. It shows the cover – Frank Lloyd Wright with the model of the Guggenheim and James Turrell in the 21st Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa – and the layout of the pages devoted to MONA in Hobart, the West Bund Museum in Shanghai and the Louvre Abu Dhabi: enough to whet the appetite, I hope.

Today’s post in Spitalfields Life of photographs of East London by Tony Armstrong-Jones suggest that he was a ‘jobbing’ photographer before he met Princess Margaret. On the contrary, I think they show what an interesting and creative photographer he was when he was living in Rotherhithe and riding on his motorbike round East London, exploring aspects of society which were not at all routine for someone making his living as a society photographer.

https://spitalfieldslife.com/2020/11/10/tony-armstrong-jones-east-end/

We have just taken delivery of the first four volumes of writing and poetry, published by a new small press based in the depths of rural Cambridgeshire or, as the colophon suggests, Bedfordshire, a product of lockdown, designed by Dale Tomlinson and printed in Beccles – a very nice piece of small press design and book production.

https://hazelpress.co.uk/#:~:text=Hazel%20Press%20is%20an%20independent,change%2C%20feminism%20and%20the%20arts.

Newlands House, a gallery in Petworth, is doing a programme of high-profile exhibitions, including one at the moment on Ron Arad. I am doing a talk with Ron and Antony Gormley on Wednesday 18th. November:-

https://newlandshouse.gallery/events/webinar-ron-arad-in-conversation-with-sir-antony-gormley-and-sir-charles-saumarez-smith/