Brief encounter

Museums Journal: What makes a great temporary exhibition?

Ken Arnold: What is most important is an idea. There is quite a lot of laziness in exhibitions that fundamentally lack an idea. The idea is not something we know already, that we're trying to disseminate: the core of a good exhibition is a project of investigation.

Maria Balshaw: In New York recently, I saw some terrible exhibitions at some of the biggest galleries. They had no driver to tell a good story because they can just put a load of Paul Klees in a room, followed by a load of Picassos. They're not having to work very hard at the ideas they're trying to convey.

Sarah Tinsley: It's a slightly old-fashioned idea that you can take something that's marvellous and put it in a space and think that's sufficient. It's where museums and galleries were maybe 20 years ago, but we've moved on so much from that.

I saw a Paul Klee exhibition in Berlin last year. It was enormous, but it didn't seem to have the story, there was nothing that stood out between one room and another. Yet I know that if I had seen a room of five really well-chosen things, I might have come away feeling very different.

Ernst Vegelin: Putting research into the public domain is an important function that these exhibitions can play. I also think in a slightly more light-hearted way the ability to surprise, the ability to challenge viewers and to offer enjoyment and delight is really important.

One of my favourite exhibitions was Degas: Beyond Impressionism, at the National Gallery, which was just so beautiful that it has satisfied me ever since then. And what I've carried away from that is just the sheer beauty of the things that they had gathered together.

Kathleen Soriano: I think beauty is on the top line. And that doesn't mean it has to be conventionally beautiful. Aligned with that is the notion of opening the canon slightly.

It's too easy, and unforgivable, just to throw the Klees in a room without stretching the boundaries that little bit, either through provocation of argument, or through context, so that people are forced to think about the broader picture, because in the longer term I see that as an investment in the future of exhibitions.

If you can stretch the boundaries a little bit, the next time you've got an exhibition on something that's related slightly, people have already had an introduction, so their eyes are more open and ready to encounter something.

Nick Dodd: The story is really important, but the conversation we are having so far is about what we as producers want to place within a show, rather than what we as consumers might expect of shows people create. It needs also to have some kind of zeitgeist to be a really great show. You need to hit a moment of some kind and the really great shows do that.

The shows that are now talking about recession, or apocalypse, are really relevant but they were planned in a moment of unbelievable abundance. So it's that ability to try and capture something that is meaningful to people now and it's the reason why they might go.

KS: Relevance is another key word, especially when you're dealing with issue-based and thematic exhibitions, which are the more interesting ways of approaching subjects now and certainly offer more opportunities to broaden what you're presenting to the public and to provoke thought.

Vaughan Allen: The Emory Douglas exhibition was completely fortuitous, given that we were planning it about two years in advance and didn't know that there was going to be a black candidate for US president who was going to be taken seriously. But we knew that a lot of the issues about the position of black Americans were going to be coming up in the election. We knew that the economic situation was going to get worse.

It also has to have something that is very important for all great temporary exhibitions; it has to be open ended. You can't come out of it saying, "Well, that's said everything that has to be said on that subject." I think that's really dangerous.

ST: Because you have to very often organise exhibitions a long way ahead, it can be the broader programme, the events that you plan around it, that can bring an element of relevance. You can think of that programme adding something else to it. It's not just the exhibition that you come to see; it's all the things around it that can add to that as well.

EV: The idea of relevance is not as safe as it sounds. If you start with it in mind, I think that can be a bit of a distraction. There is a strong case for doing exhibitions because you believe you've got something to say about that particular subject matter and its importance, and people will find their own relevance in it.

We did a Lucas Cranach exhibition; I'd struggle to say how in conventional terms that is relevant, unless you dig into the theme of temptation. But it was relevant because it had integrity, it was beautiful, people enjoyed themselves. Some people may have come out with a different sort of view on the world, as can happen in the best exhibitions. But we didn't go into that project saying we had to be led here by some notion of relevance.

Museums Journal: Why do we put on temporary exhibitions?

ND: The opportunity to be creative and to ring the changes, to try and test and to pilot and to experiment with something that has a rigour to it. You have to turn the show out. It has to be on time. But at the same time, what does it matter if there's another one along in 10 weeks' time? So you've got the rigour of delivery of something that's important, which drives an organisation to some extent, but you've also got the opportunity to put it behind you, to try something else.

MB: It's the only way to engage with a collection like the Whitworth's: it doesn't serve us to have a permanent collection and then exhibitions. We don't seem to face the problems that many other museums and galleries report around the notion of the curator and it's because the Whitworth's curators have always been curator-interpreters. They are always working towards an exhibition and thinking about the next one, they are always thinking about ways to interpret the collection.

VA: What we intend to do is reflect what is happening now and to talk about subjects that are happening now, whether that's political or whether it's popular culture. Our version of the intellectual challenge is what we can get away with. It was a challenge last year to turn one of our galleries into an allotment and to do an exhibition on urban gardening. The next big challenge is to turn an entire floor into a car workshop, because we're doing something on car modelling.

KA: Partly it's to do with audiences. I had the luxury of designing what we would do in our spaces and it seemed to me that we would die on our feet unless we had the main room changing periodically.

In retrospect, it has very much been built on the notion of a core of repeat visitors who, once you've hooked them, will think, "I wonder what's on at the Wellcome?" We're part of the entertainment industry and I don't think we should be ashamed of it. There's too much po-faced earnestness in too many museums.

ST: The other thing that exhibitions can provide for an institution if it has a collection is an amplification of the collection, or an introduction of a theme, a period, and an artist who is not represented in the collection. And you can do things in exhibitions that you can't necessarily do in a collection, because you haven't got the works to do it, by borrowing them in.

Museums Journal: What is the relationship between temporary exhibitions and a permanent collection?

EV: It's fundamental at the Courtauld. We used to do, periodically, one very large, expensive, complicated exhibition. We've stopped doing that and do three smaller, highly focused research-led exhibitions per year.

One of the important criteria was that those exhibitions should, wherever possible, draw substantially on the permanent collection and should put new research for the permanent collection in the public domain. That was partly borne out of a realisation that they are so resource hungry.

In order to make sure that some of that is an investment in the permanent collection and it isn't just ephemeral, we felt that this was really important, that the exhibitions should either be built around, say, one singular masterpiece from the permanent collection, put in the context of closely related loans.

MB: When I came to the Whitworth one of the things I changed was the separation between displays of our permanent art collection, which changed every six to nine months, and big exhibitions.

What used to happen was that there were always very interesting displays of the collection, and there would sometimes be good big exhibitions and there would sometimes be completely random big exhibitions that left you thinking, "Why is that show at the Whitworth?"

It didn't help us in terms of understanding our collection, and it certainly didn't help our visitors. Putting some constraints dictated by the collection on what we show helps us. You should be able to say, "Oh yes, I know why they have that here."

ST: At the National Portrait Gallery (NPG), we deal with the collection by showing it in galleries that are relatively permanent and then we have quite a considerable changing display programme.

It works very well, but you can sometimes come a cropper because we agonise about what is a small display and what is an exhibition, but the public don't necessarily perceive that; if you promote a small display, they can come thinking it's an exhibition, and then there's that sense of let down.
Last year the gallery got its largest annual visitor figure, 1.8 million, and a third of that is from exhibitions. So two thirds are going to the permanent collection, and that's a substantial number.

ND: We're a charitable trust; we're a management company for other people's collections. The things that I show are the nation's collections and I'm showing these to the people of Sheffield. Whether I show them a NPG collection or anybody else's collection, it's still owned by the public.

So I'm not so fussed about whether Vivienne Westwood, which we had last year, had any relevance in costume terms - we don't have a costume collection. But we have a fashion course at the university; we have design activity in the city, and it's relevant in that context.