There is a risk that I might eventually overdose from talking about museums, their opportunities and travails, but, at the moment, I am very much enjoying it because every interlocutor asks different questions and has a subtly different perspective. And, also, what I am discovering, which should have been obvious, is how completely different it is talking from writing about museums. So, for example, I was asked on Monday for my views of the relocation of the Barnes Collection. I had been careful in my book to describe the process and not be too judgmental. Even now, I’m not sure of the answer: good in so many ways; a good modern building accessible to so many people, the original hang reproduced meticulously, and exhibition rooms alongside. But inevitably, some of the idiosyncratic atmosphere of the old Barnes can’t be reproduced, however hard it has been tried.

Then, it is amazing, as has been pointed out, how short the lifespan is of so many of these new museum projects. The Ondaatje Wing still feels new to me, but is in the process of being overhauled. The Sainsbury Wing is going to be revamped. Tate Modern 1 was followed instantly by Tate Modern 2.

On the day after it has been announced that Lacaton & Vassal have won the Pritzker Prize, maybe it will be no bad thing if we are entering a new era of Make Do & Mend.

https://www.vam.ac.uk/event/653AwVrX/online-talk-the-art-museum-in-modern-times

You probably won’t be able to read the attached interview, because, like me, you won’t have a subscription to the Daily Telegraph. It is a very fair and scrupulous interview-cum-review of my museums book, which makes clear the ambiguities of some of my views: in person as well as in the book. In the book, I have tried to trace the changes in the way museums operate without being too judgmental about them. Each generation is entitled to do things differently. Museums have changed in complex ways in the past and will continue to do so in the future. But, of course, I have views too, which Alastair was good at extracting. Actually, it wasn’t that difficult.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/art/what-to-see/charles-saumarez-smith-interview-concept-museum-attack/

I have come across a reference in a book of articles about Henry-Russell Hitchcock and John Summerson to a lecture that Henry-Russell Hitchcock wrote in 1939 in the Architectural Review about ‘Museums in the Modern World’. He wrote that ‘The Museum is an institution worth saving.   But let us be sure that in saving it, it is not the marble shrine of the dead past, but that combination of learning place, centre of entertainment and workshop of the future which few museums of the world are today’. The wording is strikingly similar to similar statements about what museums should be today.

If you think I’ve been quiet on my blog, you’re right. My intellectual energies are going into my museums book – writing talks, thinking about how to promote it, waiting anxiously for reviews. It appears today in Art Newspaper’s March book bag. I wrote the Conclusion nearly a year ago, but one did not have to be clairvoyant to see the inevitability of a necessarily harsh retrenchment (witness what is happening at the V&A), a search for new sources of income, and the likelihood of fewer big building projects. What I perhaps did not fully anticipate was the ferocity of the critique of their colonial inheritance, which I maybe made a mistake in thinking was more an issue for the so-called Universal Museums than art museums. The book has been described as a love letter to museums and I’m quite happy to be excoriated as a true believer.

https://www.theartnewspaper.com/blog/march-s-book-bag-from-geoff-dyer-s-guide-to-decoding-photography-to-a-survey-of-the-world-s-most-celebrated-museums

A little while ago, I was asked by Andy Ellis, who runs ArtUK, if I would write something about William Kent as a painter, which I was pleased to do, because of his prominence, although somewhat disregarded, in painting a number of ceilings at Burlington House, and his close friendship and alliance with the third Earl.

Reading it again, I am not sure it makes a totally convincing case for his work, but at least it brings it to public attention.

https://artuk.org/discover/stories/remembering-the-art-of-william-kent

One of the signs of spring is that Leila’s lovely shop in Calvert Avenue is now open to the passing cyclist, instead of having to order in advance for collection later in the day. One person at a time. Hot cross buns are available. And Sally Clarke’s cheese biscuits. The most delicious Lancashire cheese. It feels like old times. And from Wednesday to Saturday, you can pick up hot lunch in a tiffin-tin:-

I would not normally quote myself, but I was looking up something on my blog and was intrigued to read what I wrote a year ago yesterday:-

7 March 2020

In so far as my blog is a record of my routine preoccupations, which it half is, it would be odd not to make reference to the fact that the whole of the last week has been occupied by anxieties about the consequences of Coronavirus: from early in the week when it seemed odd and a bit discourteous not to shake hands and embrace to the end of the week when the best one could expect was a greeting elbow to elbow, when travelling on the underground meant standing stock still terrified of the first person who might sneeze, and even the Wolseley was half empty for breakfast. It is presumably sensible what we are all doing: making efforts to avoid crowded places; paying attention to the passage of germs; earnest hand washing to rid one of the taint of possible infection. But it is odd how a week can change everything.

8 March 2021

So, it has been a whole year of on and off lockdown, getting used to social isolation, not seeing people, listening to much more classical music, going out only to the local parks and shops. I don’t regard it as all bad – the need to slow down, not travelling, more time to think and reflect. Now, today, children are going back to school, spring is coming, one day we might be able to go back to Wales. More than anything, more than art galleries, I have missed a view of the mountains of Wales.