Last month, nominations for the 2011 Art Fund Prize opened, while a new panel of judges, with Michael Portillo as chairman, was unveiled.
If your museum has had a multimillion-pound makeover or instigated a revolutionary outreach programme, you could enter the contest and win £100,000, a PR turbo boost – oh, and temporary ownership of a pretty, silver bowl.
The prize is now in its ninth year; it was the Gulbenkian Prize until 2008, when the Art Fund took over sponsorship.
It’s a high-profile competition that showcases the richness of public collections, often spotlighting great work in overlooked areas, and providing a forum where the mightiest national museums can be beaten by lesser-known institutions: witness this year’s triumph of Ulster Museum’s £17.8m project over the Ashmolean’s £61m redevelopment.
Museum professionals overwhelmingly approve, though there is speculation that judging favours the underdog, and a common refrain is that the judging criteria and the purpose of the competition are unclear.
So what is the point of the Art Fund Prize? The official mission is: “To recognise and stimulate originality and excellence in museums and galleries in the UK, and increase public appreciation and enjoyment of all they have to offer.”
The director of the Art Fund, Stephen Deuchar, who ran the Turner Prize for more than a decade while at Tate, elaborates: “If I were sitting on the judging panel, I would be looking for evidence of what makes an applicant different – signs of originality.
"The award draws attention to progress, change and innovation. It’s not simply about good practice, or architectural distinction.”
The Art Fund has just signed up for another two years’ sponsorship. Its recipe has a notably different flavour from the Gulbenkian dish, adding ingredients that encourage visitor participation through the Love Your Museum weekend and an online public vote.
Attracting entries of all sizes
This year there will be an extra prize, the Clore Award for Museum Learning (see box, below). Deuchar says his main challenge is how to keep the blockbuster projects entering, when they know they may lose out to a titchy, but imaginative, collection.
“If you look at last year’s shortlist and longlist, there was a reasonably good mix of small and large, national and non-national, museums,” says Deuchar. “We have to ensure, for the prestige of the prize, we retain that mix. Christopher Brown, the Ashmolean director, was disappointed that he didn’t win this year.
"That was quite encouraging for us – this was an award that a national museum genuinely wanted to win. But I worry that not as many nationals enter it as might. I’d like to know why the Victoria and Albert Museum didn’t enter the Medieval and Renaissance Galleries.”
So what can this year’s entrants expect? The call for entries is open until 1 December. The longlist is announced in February and whittled down to a shortlist in May. In between, the longlisted collections mount their campaigns, culminating in the Love Your Museum weekend in April. Visitors can vote from early February. The winner is announced in June.
Making the longlist is particularly valuable for smaller museums. Julia Twomlow, director of the Leach Pottery in St Ives, entered after a £1.7m refurbishment, which was finished in March 2008. She found the publicity generated by the prize connected her with a global community of Leach fans.
“It created a lot of interest from all over the world, especially in Japan,” says Twomlow. “When the Art Fund people told us we hadn’t made the shortlist, they said we had the most international response in the online poll.”
Ironbridge Gorge’s £12m Blists Hill Victorian Town development was one of the four shortlisted projects this year. Steve Miller, chief executive of the Shropshire attraction, says being shortlisted galvanised local passion for the project.
“Everybody is able to understand the significance of the prize,” says Miller. “If you can say that you’re up for the largest arts prize in Britain, it really stirs up pride in their museum.”
His favourite memory of the experience was the culmination of the Love Your Museum weekend: “We had 200 people gathered, and four town criers to lead the big shout of ‘I love my museum’. We measured the decibels and we were louder than a rock band.”
Susie Billings, senior development manager at the Ashmolean, values the lessons learned from making this year’s shortlist. “The skills that we’ve developed engaging people and encouraging feedback, and what we’ve learnt from our visitors, will definitely be used again,” she says.
“The most positive part was the visitor feedback – we got more than 1,000 pages of comments.”
Public support
More than 72,000 visitors voted for the museum, giving the Ashmolean first place in the online poll. But winning the poll doesn’t equate to winning the prize. Billings says: “We were really proud to come first in the poll. It’s still a real talking point. People say they heard about it and they’re pleased we won the public element. But it isn’t £100,000.”
So what of those that have bagged the six-figure cheque? Tim Desmond is chief executive of the National Centre for Citizenship and the Law (NCCL) at the Galleries of Justice Museum, in Nottingham, the winner of the first Gulbenkian Prize, in 2003.
His project was an education programme, praised as a model for reducing crime among young people. Desmond says the award was
a lifeline.
“At that time, it made a massive difference to our development and survival,” he says. “It recognised the social role of the NCCL and gave us the confidence to go forward.”
Desmond says the prize has also highlighted the work of museums in the regions. “Before we won, I got the impression that the Department for Culture, Media and Sport didn’t know where Nottingham was. I went to a meeting at the DCMS, and someone said next time they were in the north-east, they would visit us.”
Tim Cooke, director of National Museums Northern Ireland, which won this year’s prize for the Ulster Museum, says: “Winning a prestigious prize sends out the message that Northern Ireland has museums of international quality and that it is more progressive than people realised. People have looked at Northern Ireland through the prism of the Troubles.”
The collections have always been world class, but the work done in the run-up to the prize transformed the way in which the Ulster Museum engaged its local community.
“While the museum was closed, we ran an outreach programme that brought together people in interface areas [urban areas with a border between Protestant and Catholic communities], and Polish and Romanian communities,” says Cooke.
“The audience profile has shown a significant rise in C2DEs, which make up 44% of the demographic now – twice what surveys showed before the refurbishment. The new audience has a sense of ownership over the museum.”
It’s hard to find an Art Fund Prize dissenter. A few critics point out the difficulty of comparing the work of big-budget nationals with niche museums, or that sometimes temporary exhibitions are put forward for the prize, and are closed by the time the winner is announced.
Dea Birkett, director of Kids in Museums, an organisation that promotes family-friendly policies in museums and galleries, queries whether the prize does enough to spread good practice.
“You have to have made a major development before you enter, so you’re limiting entrants to the few museums that have had big cash injections recently,” she says.
“Can other museums learn much from that? It should be integral to the prize that other museums should be able to copy what the winner has done. That would give it a purpose and would do the one thing a prize should do – make a difference.”
Using the prize money
Whatever its benefits to the wider museum world, the £100,000 prize certainly makes a difference to its winners. Mark Taylor, director of the Museums Association and a trustee of the prize, says they don’t necessarily want the winner to throw £100,000 into the reserves. “We want them to spend it on something they wouldn’t have done anyway.”
So sometimes the windfall goes towards a spectacular new acquisition. In June, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art took delivery of 6 Times, six sculptures by Antony Gormley, bought partly with its 2004 winnings.
Pallant House Gallery in Chichester won the Gulbenkian Prize in 2007 and added the £100,000 to its endowment fund as part of a long-term financial plan to give free access to the collections, an aspiration the collection has partially realised with limited free access to the permanent collection from last month.
But not every prizewinner flourishes. The 2009 winner, the Wedgwood Museum in Stoke-on-Trent, went into administration in April because of a pension shortfall. It wanted to use the prize money to help bail it out, but the trustees allowed the release of only about a quarter of it, to help with its cashflow.
The other £75,000 is being held back and can’t be used to pay creditors. The hope is that this money will eventually be used for the original purpose – part funding phase two of the museum, to display some of its stored collections.
One of the downsides of the prize is that as well as winners, there are losers. Mark O’Neill is director of policy, research and development at Glasgow Life, the trust that runs museums and galleries for Glasgow City Council.
He says: “We’ve been shortlisted three times and we’ll be back next year with the new transport museum designed by Zaha Hadid. The prize is fantastic for museums. It gets good publicity and it’s enough money to make a difference.
“You can pretend you’re going to be cool but you really get caught up in it,” says O’Neill. “When they make the announcement, if you don’t win, it’s quite painful.”
Katrina Burroughs is a freelance journalist
This new award, which comes under the umbrella of the Art Fund Prize 2011, will recognise and celebrate quality, impact and innovation in using museums and galleries for learning activities or initiatives.
Activities can be aimed at formal or informal learning audiences and focus on the development or deepening of skills, knowledge, understanding, values, ideas, feelings and enjoyment.
The judging process will be undertaken by a different panel of judges from the main Art Fund Prize, but there will be a longlist and shortlist that will coincide with the schedule of the main prize.
The call for entries opened on 1 October and the deadline for submissions is 1 December. The winner will receive £10,000. Initiatives and projects that were either started or took place mainly during 2009 or 2010 are eligible.
Gulbenkian Prize 2003
National Centre for Citizenship and the Law at the Galleries of Justice Museum, Nottingham
Gulbenkian Prize 2004
Landform, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh
Gulbenkian Prize 2005
Big Pit: National Coal Museum, Blaenafon
Gulbenkian Prize 2006
Brunel’s ss Great Britain, Bristol
Gulbenkian Prize 2007
Pallant House Gallery, Chichester
Art Fund Prize 2008
The Lightbox, Woking
Art Fund Prize 2009
Wedgwood Museum, Stoke-on-Trent
Art Fund Prize 2010
Ulster Museum, Belfast