Show business

Museums Journal: Is the financial model for temporary exhibitions viable?

Kathleen Soriano: There might be positive aspects in more relationships having to be forged between organisations in order to make this happen in the future. It's not just about sharing costs; it's also about drawing in academic expertise, but it comes down to how you can share costs on the catalogue, on transport, on conservation and all sorts of things.

Maria Balshaw: It's the only way we can afford to make really big shows, because we don't charge and people don't pay to see them when they're on tour. But by charging a fairly modest exhibition fee we can pool resources and produce an exhibition that is of the scale that none of the individual venues could afford on its own.

To commit our staff resource to an exhibition of that scale and then only show it for 12 weeks with us seems like a waste of money, but to have it do three series of 12 weeks in different parts of the country makes loads more financial sense.

Vaughan Allen: There may be two positive things coming out of the recession. One is there's less chance of getting in the big international shows because of the weaker pound, which forces people to talk to other galleries in this country.

The other is as fewer people go abroad, maybe that impetus to have to have the "blockbuster" exhibition to drive visitor numbers won't be there so much because people will be looking for something to do and somewhere to go. And the more quirky things may drive visitors and make people excited in a way that a blockbuster wouldn't do.

Ernst Vegelin: I think some aspects of the travelling exhibition model will come under pressure though. It's something that we're currently looking at because all of the exhibitions we do are organised and curated by our own staff and that puts a huge amount of pressure on them.

We have been trying to explore different models of working with partners. But I do see that certain things will come under pressure; for example, the availability of loans for a series of, say, three different venues, the question of costs and so on.

And I also question, as a lender, the value of lending to three institutions; perhaps you would prioritise the organising institution who's conceiving the idea and for whom the exhibition is more meaningful in terms of their permanent collection. I'm not sure that it's a given that this aspect of exhibition organising will just flourish.

Ken Arnold: There is a real crisis in exhibition making, which is the escalation of the cost of borrowing objects. Part of this is to do with conservation standards and our understanding of acceptable levels. We're putting on a show with some [Egon] Schieles and [Oskar] Kokoschkas and having those objects has cost us probably £20,000 in total in terms of couriers, etc.

It seems to me to be drifting into complete fantasyland. We've got into a situation where we're all now committed to spending hundreds of thousands of pounds moving these priceless objects around the world. Is that really the right thing to be doing?

MB: I was part of part of a seminar last year that brought together people across the world and one of the big issues that came out of that about circulating cultural artefacts was that we have created a position where we will never be able to lend to anyone outside the developed world because of the standards that we have imposed as loan conditions.

If we followed the rules strictly, we wouldn't be able to lend the Yoruban textiles in the Whitworth collection to an exhibition about Yoruba culture anywhere in Africa. That's really wrong.

VA: At the base level there is also a pure financial effect of the current squeeze. We've lost two loans of our exhibitions, going to Australia, and to Japan, in the last four months; one was actually on the ship about to go. For an organisation like ours, losing the £30,000 that each of those would have brought in has a substantial effect.

Some of the stuff we do is either very of its time or somewhat controversial and people are becoming less brave. Finding a London venue for our Black Panther exhibition [30 October 2008-19 April] is just not going to happen.

For a place like ours, which relies on touring our exhibitions in order to pay for next year's exhibitions, then it's pretty simple: there could be a quite nasty effect in the next 18 months.

Museums Journal: Are temporary exhibitions financially and environmentally sustainable?

Nick Dodd: Ultimately, it's about what you're prepared to accept as the rate of attrition on your object, because all objects are decaying, whether they're in an air-conditioned store or not. Is it better that we have a nice air-conditioned store and spaces for works of art, and meanwhile the rest of the world burns?

Or is it better to accept a slightly faster rate of decay in the objects we own and a slower rate of decay of the world in general? I don't think we've begun to face up to that as a sector.

EV: I still believe fundamentally there is a problem with too many large institutions organising large exhibitions on the same high-yield subjects.

I hope one of the outcomes of the recession is that people will start to think of a slightly different model of exhibition and re-embrace the virtues of a smaller exhibition that offers visitors a different type of experience, that loses some of the great rhetoric and the pizzazz and the showmanship of some of the big exhibitions and actually seeks to offer viewers a more detailed experience of fewer works of art. I think more van Gogh exhibitions are probably not what we need now.

KS: I think what we need is both. The depth is even more important than the width sometimes, but sometimes that whole nature of spectacle that you get walking into something like Byzantium [Royal Academy of Arts, London, 25 October 2008-22 March 2009] - which is an exhibition installed as much for the aesthetic beauty of the objects as it is for the sort of social or historical, cultural arguments that go with it - I think they have a different place.

KA: There is a need for a lot more flexibility. So we need different models of exhibitions. I think there is a problem of applying the same conservation standards to every object. With conservation staff, it is about involving them as part of the exhibition team early on.

Their choices are very much part of what the overall shape and feel of an exhibition is. So rather than seeing them as police who are guarding objects against the incursions of other professional staff, it is about being more involved from the start.

Museums Journal: How do we judge the success of temporary exhibitions?

MB: The two most successful exhibitions in the last 15 years for the Whitworth have been the current one [Subversive Spaces, 7 February-4 May] and one that was about 10 years ago called Treasures of the North [25 February-9 April 2000], which was co-organised with Christie's, and did that: "Really posh things that we've never seen in the north" thing.

It was completely anomalous with everything else that the Whitworth had done before and we would never repeat it, but it did pull in a lot of people and it is a good lesson for why numbers aren't a very good measure of the success of an exhibition.

Sarah Tinsley: It's multiple things that make a successful exhibition and attendance figures are only one of those because it's also about your press reviews, your visitor comments, the sales of the catalogue. Measures of success need to be looked at in the round.

ND: Ultimately, the successful exhibition is one that exceeds what you set out to achieve. So if you articulated that you want an academic component to it or you want audience numbers of X or you want to attract a certain new audience, and you do that, you're successful.

There may be some serendipitous things that you didn't anticipate coming out of the show which you can use for other purposes, but if your show is primarily about putting the pounds in the till in order to make sure you're still there in six months' time, then numbers are the most important thing.

VA: You can do the more aggressively political, interesting shows, but you need to know that when it comes around to the school holidays, you have at least one show that's going to be dragging in teenagers who want to spend money. It's just trying to find the balance.

KS: The variety of exhibitions means that we should allow ourselves a variety of measurements. Some exhibitions will be programmed for very specific reasons, because it's a certain time of year, because there is certain audience availability.

You'll want those exhibitions to achieve things that are very different from something that's slightly more serious, maybe more focused. An intelligent organisation has a balance across a three-year programme.

EV: I'd like there to be some more weight given to the experience that the visitor has in the exhibition. Our most successful recent show - The Courtauld Cézannes [26 June-5 October 2008] - got about 86,000 people for a one-room show.

I'm pretty sure that for a lot of those visitors, it was not a particularly pleasant experience to be in that room when it got crowded and that they weren't able to have the experience of those works that we were hoping they'd have by putting on a small focused show.

Yet that's gone down in our recent history as a model, as something we could aspire to again without actually it having been thought through in all its implications.

ND: I wouldn't want to disparage the visitor number thing because they're a proxy for all kinds of other activity and behaviours. They speak about the quality of experience, they speak about the way that the organisation manages its visitor flow and the way it's marketed and advertised, which tell you something quite often about the nature of the organisation, how capable it is, how well organised it is, alongside how many people actually go.

It's therefore an important measure of success. It's not the only measure of success, but because it has the ability to be a proxy for other activity it does tell you something more than just "this was a blockbuster show".

Museums Journal: What is the future for temporary exhibitions?

ND: We have got to stop being a cottage industry. It's too expensive and it's too difficult to operate in the way that we do in terms of producing temporary exhibitions and shows that rarely run for any length of time.

KS: I'd like to see a greater focus on the relationship between audience and organisation to such a point that you can develop a greater level of trust and confidence in each other, which will allow greater risk-taking in the sorts of exhibitions that we can put on.

KA: I think the people who put on these shows need to be developed. Where is the training? Why isn't there a temporary exhibition curators' group that meets? I think we need to do more to nurture those people to give them a sense of self-confidence.

MB: I'd like to see us all being fleet of foot and cheaper and taking more risks. I want turnover because in that turnover there is the learning of how to do things really, really well and there is the bringing on of new people and there is the capacity to risk doing something that really does feel quite left field because the next thing will be more mainstream and will pull in larger numbers.

VA: I think we need more quick hits, more smaller-scale things that hit every subject that you can think of in interesting, new ways.

EV: Things have become very bloated and exhibitions have sprung up just to fill empty space, without necessarily a real sense of purpose or real meaning in many cases. So I would like to see fewer exhibitions. I would like to see more exhibitions drawing on permanent collections and I'd like to see more of an equilibrium between large exhibitions and smaller-focused shows.

ST: Partnership and sharing: we need to maintain the partnerships we have, but also to develop new ones. I think having the ability to network into others who aren't just our usual group of people will be very important.

Ken Arnold is investigating the role and significance of temporary exhibitions as a research associate for the Museums Association