Shows must go on

At the start of 2010, Arts & Business announced a dramatic decline in private funding for museums. According to its figures, during 2008/09 the combined contribution from business, individuals, trusts and foundations to UK museums fell by 37 per cent from the previous year, compared with a drop of 7 per cent across the cultural sector as a whole.

And, says Arts & Business chief executive Colin Tweedy, this year’s figures are likely to be worse still.

The reasons why museums have been particularly hit by the downturn in private investment are complex, and it is important to remember that these are relative figures that need to be set against the successes of previous years.

Even so, it is evident that the recession has had a swift and painful impact on those museum activities that both depend on and have the potential to raise private cash.

In many institutions, the activities most reliant on sponsorship, donations and earned income are temporary exhibitions.

Of course, the effects of less corporate sponsorship and reduced income from exhibition admissions are not evenly distributed across the sector.

Those museums that do not rely on exhibitions as a driver of marketing and box office are likely to be less vulnerable to the vagaries of what Arts & Business calls “private investment”.

Historically, temporary exhibitions have always been particularly important to art museums as a primary generator of audiences, publicity and finance.

But nowadays, exhibitions are equally significant in the programming mix of institutions ranging from the Wellcome Collection and the Design Museum in London to the Imperial War Museum North in Manchester. All three have overturned the conventional role of the exhibition as an adjunct to the display of the collection.

In each of these museums, the collection has receded spatially and programmatically, while the temporary exhibition holds the limelight. As a result, they need a continuous churn of large and small exhibitions throughout the year.

Elsewhere, the pace of change is slower. Temporary exhibitions run for six months at a time in the recently reopened People’s History Museum, Manchester, while across the city, exhibitions in the Manchester Museum often last for about ten months.

It is not only a question of how best to allocate finite curatorial and economic resources: exhibitions play a different part in the mix of these museums whose core strength resides in the scholarly and popular appeal of their collections.

So, when times are tough, are museums rethinking how they can harness their collections to make smarter, cheaper exhibitions? The evidence is mixed.

When Nicholas Penny was appointed director of the National Gallery, London, in 2007, he announced a shift from expensive, audience-pleasing shows that depend on the existing familiarity of an artist’s name to pull a crowd.

In place of overtly populist shows, Penny advocated a programme that would include less well-known artists, alongside exhibitions based on the gallery’s own collections.

The first manifestation of this policy was not a resounding success. In 2008, a show of Italian fin de siècle painting by a fairly obscure Italian group known as the Divisionists did not attract unanimous praise. But plans for 2010 may well vindicate Penny’s approach.

Painting History: Delaroche and Lady Jane Grey (pictured above), showcasing one of the most popular pictures in the National Gallery, opened in February (until 23 May). Paul Delaroche’s hyper-realistic painting of the execution of the tragic young queen has been alternately celebrated and deplored by art experts, but its public appeal has never waned.

The exhibition comes with a clever catalogue that adroitly repositions the picture within art historical debate. Meanwhile, the gallery hopes that the painting’s recognition-value will persuade people to buy a full-priced ticket at £8 to take a fresh look at a picture which they can usually see free of charge.

Lady Jane Grey is followed by Close Examination: Fakes, Mistakes and Discoveries (30 June-12 September), which promises to reveal the unexpected histories of some of the paintings in the gallery’s collection that have been discovered by its conservators, scientists and curators.

The exhibition will show how new scholarship has rectified the false assumptions of the past, including the unmasking of fakes unwittingly acquired by previous generations of curators. It is devised as a fresh look at how and why the gallery collects and studies paintings, albeit sometimes in an unfortunate order.

Lady Jane and Close Examination both fall into a category sometimes known as dossier exhibitions in which a museum’s holdings are reworked into alternative histories or interpretations. It is, perhaps, a reflection of current corporate risk aversion that neither show has a commercial sponsor.

By giving a rare outing for past misjudgments that would usually be lurking in the stores, well away from the main exhibition galleries, Close Examination is also a variation on the “hidden histories” approach that has been pioneered by local and regional museums in recent years.

In many museums, hidden histories projects have re-evaluated (often neglected) holdings from the perspectives of marginalised constituencies and hitherto excluded voices. Among the benefits of such projects are the expansive research processes that they involve.

In the case of Close Examination at the National Gallery, research is both the subject of the exhibition as well as being central to its production. Applied to a topic such as the bicentenary of the abolition of the British slave trade, the hidden histories approach stimulated research from multiple perspectives, so that curatorial authority was deliberately decentred in many of the projects mounted in 2007.

Similarly, the multi-site project Rethinking Disability Representation, led by the School of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester, produced new exhibitions from museum collections by reviewing them through a lens of disability experience (see link to book review below)

Will we see more exhibitions like these that are research rich, but cash poor? The current trend for museum-academic collaborations points in this direction. With universities now required to demonstrate the social, cultural or economic impact of academic research, partnerships with museums have never looked more attractive.

For many academics, turning research into an exhibition is a way of reaching beyond the readership of peer-reviewed journals. A growing number of museums are working with academic partners, many for the first time.

The precise amount of UK research council funding going into exhibitions is difficult to quantify because research and development costs are often wrapped into collaborative PhD projects and research fellowships.

In 2009, exhibitions part-funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council included An Archaeology of Race: Exploring the Northern Frontier in Roman Britain at the Segedunum Roman Fort on North Tyneside; Hidden Histories of Exploration at the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers); and Madness and Modernity at the Wellcome Collection.

Working with external researchers and advisers is not new for museums. The collaborative nature of exhibitions is perhaps best described by anthropologist Mary Bouquet as a “process of translation” in which an initial idea or group of objects is turned into a spatial and visual narrative through the combined expertise of the curator, academic adviser, community consultant, designer, photographer, model-maker, text writer and others.

Disentangling the role of the exhibition curator within this mix can be tricky. Increasingly, their job may be to unlock the creative and research potential of collections to make affordable shows.

One commentator recently asked if museums could edit their way out of the recession by deploying their collections more cleverly. While that is not the whole solution, for many museums it may be part of it.

Helen Rees Leahy is a senior lecturer and director of the Centre for Museology at the University of Manchester.

Iain Watson, assistant director, Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums

“The market for temporary exhibitions has been changing for a while, since before the ‘credit crunch’ and big blockbusters have been beyond the reach of most museums for some time.

"Exhibition budgets are certainly under pressure and we fund exhibitions from a diverse range of sources. Recently, projects such as North East Beat, funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund, documented and then produced a touring exhibition on the history of the north east music scene.

"A combination of credit crunch and commitment to sustainability has led us to look carefully at exhibitions ensuring we get maximum use from an exhibition and, hopefully, that some or all of its components can be reused.”

Deyan Sudjic, director, Design Museum, London

“For the Design Museum, temporary exhibitions are a vital part of what makes us attract visitors. We have to tailor them to our audience’s expectations of a stimulating and wide-ranging programme.

"And that is also what makes them attractive to the sponsors that we depend on to make them possible. Even when investment is tight, strong ideas are in demand, and we have to work even harder to be creative.”

Ken Arnold, head of public programmes, Wellcome Collection, London

“At the Wellcome Collection, we are probably luckier than many colleagues in that our direct budgets have not yet been significantly dented. However, the recession is clearly having affects across the board and pops up in unexpected places.

"Projects that we were planning to work on in collaboration with other institutions, for example, have had to be rethought because they are no longer able to be involved. It’s also clear that audiences for our paid events are now booking later, and are weighing up the options and likely value for money.”

Sally Manuireva, director of public programmes, National Museums Scotland

“Special exhibitions will need to work harder across National Museums Scotland and must continue to be cost effective. As we are opening a new exhibition space in 2011 as part of the Royal Museum Project, we will seek to minimise the impact. One way of doing so will be collaboration with other organisations, sharing opportunities, costs and risks.

"Options we may consider include fewer or extended-period exhibitions and ones that are repurposed for different spaces. Ultimately, we see special exhibitions as being one of the key ways of attracting and retaining audiences, so they will continue to be a priority, but undoubtedly ‘leaner and meaner’.”

Richard Calvocoressi, director, Henry Moore Foundation, Perry Green, Hertfordshire

“As part of one of the UK’s leading artist foundations, the Henry Moore Institute (HMI) isn’t funded in the same way as other galleries. Last year, by awarding more than 100 grants to arts organisations, the Henry Moore Foundation helped to support a range of temporary exhibitions across the UK and abroad.

At the same time, we are keen to make our own temporary exhibitions budget work as hard as possible. This can include longer runs, exhibiting different kinds of work and drawing upon local collections.

"Our focus at the HMI is upon sculpture, but we have always interspersed traditional shows featuring large three-dimensional objects with wider interpretations of the genre, including film, video and archival material.”

Jim Forrester, director, Imperial War Museum North, Manchester

“In the current financial climate the rationale for a changing exhibition programme at the Imperial War Museum North remains the same: creating marketable change to draw in first-time visitors and encourage repeat visits.

"Now exhibitions must work even harder across all the audience-facing functions of the museum to maximise opportunities for income generation, marketing and press coverage, and integrated learning programmes.

"The public programme is assessed on a cost/impact matrix, and, rather than compromising on quality, costs will be further reduced by using less inward loans and extending the runs. Exhibitions will also increasingly transfer between Manchester and London, including the current Shaped by War: Photographs by Don McCullin exhibition.”

Sarah Tinsley, head of exhibitions and collections management, National Portrait Gallery, London

“In the short term we would review expenditure and consider more modest set builds and the recycling of sets between one exhibition and another, reduction of interpretation where appropriate, review of openings hours and ticket prices.

"In the longer term we are reviewing the balance of the programme over the next five years, while remaining committed to keeping the broad range (across media and between historical and contemporary) that we offer to the public.”

Book review, MJ April 2010, p56

One of the themes of this year’s Museums Association conference is Showing off, which will explore how museums can redisplay their collections and use objects to tell new stories.
Click here to find out more