The mutating museum
Posted: 01 Jan 2012 | By: Patricia Anderson - Editor
A certain mindset was also laid bare: the remnants of other civilisations — especially classical ones — would provide a gloss to one’s own. That was then. Today, with the advent of the ‘modern’ museum and the quest for pleasing the ‘customer’, a patronising attitude has appeared which is based on the idea that the trepidation — supposedly induced by the august institution in the heart of the suburban bumpkin — must be alleviated by tedious over-explanation. It has become harder and harder for the museum visitor to examine anything in solitude without the ringing tones of the army of ‘experts’ and well-meaning volunteers conscripted to graft culture. What the armies of consultants to art museums have yet to discover is that visitors don’t necessarily wish to feel the bland familiarity that the supermarket provides. They would like their pulses to race a little when they walk through the doors of a museum.
There has been much said about the lack of philanthropy for the arts in Australia, and the discussion generally centres on a lack of generosity. By comparison, the American example of staggering bequests to establish whole museums or entire wings — let alone the chattels to fill them — is routinely referred to, as if to illustrate our shortcomings. However, many celebrated examples — the Metropolitan Museum, the Frick and the Isabella Stewart Gardiner Museum, to name a few — were established in the engine room of American industrial growth, rapacious speculation and unembarrassed exploitation. Federal income tax in 1894 was 2% and the so-called robber barons (which Theodore Roosevelt was the first to tackle) were able to circumvent even this.
In the western world, wealthy and frequently eccentric individuals gave to the community in a spirit of disinterested philanthropy tinged with that particularly English notion of ‘uplifting the masses’. This sort of money is now routinely referred to as ‘old’ money to distinguish it from ‘new’ money — the kind generated by so-called arrivistes, parvenus and nouveaux riches. Clearly this concept found ample expression in French, but it was also a fundamentally English notion. Naturally, for money to be ‘old’ it once had to be ‘new’. And there is plenty of evidence to suggest that the older the money, the more unpleasant its means of acquisition. Untold British and European wealth, which found its way onto walls of country houses, outdoor follies and splendid townhouses, was arrived at from the slave trade, the cotton mills in Birmingham, rubber plantations in the Congo, sugar plantations in the West Indies and coal seams at a convenient distance from the gravel drive.
In Australia today, every taxpaying member of the community contributes to the extension and upkeep of their local museums, whether they visit them or not.
The exceptional growth of museums and galleries and the recognition that they must attract ever-larger crowds to sustain their funding has made for the most astonishing transformation in museum exhibitions and in the gallery-going habits of the locals. For a long time, galleries relied on imported ‘blockbusters’ such as Colombian gold artefacts or Chinese tomb figures; but of late, museum curators have been turning to their own collections, finding impressive thematic potential right under their noses and fleshing it out with judicious international borrowings.
In this issue we focus on regional galleries around Australia. These have some advantages over their larger city cousins. They can pay more attention to local artists and mount temporary theme shows which dovetail with community concerns. They can share significant travelling shows. They can be more relaxed when planning their exhibitions — reacting with more flexibility when an interesting or unexpected offer presents itself — than a state gallery whose programme may be in place for a decade to come. Lastly, regional galleries are sometimes the beneficiaries of the estates of wealthy grazing families and descendants of families who made their fortunes in industry and commerce. This giving has seen a pattern of generosity combined with discretion.
