Show business: Museums Journal roundtable discussion, full transcript

SHARON HEAL: Can we you give examples of the best recent shows that you've seen?

KEN ARNOLD: I have to go back maybe 15 years, not because there aren't good shows around, but something that really stuck out for me was a small obscure exhibition at the Museum of Mankind, where I worked briefly, although it wasn't on when I was there, called, I think, Bangladeshi Rickshaw Panels.

It was curated by this guy called Brian Morris, who some of you might know is an anthropologist and thinks a lot about exhibitions.

It was very tidy, an exhibition of things I'd never given a moment's thought to. On the backs of rickshaws in Bangladesh they have painted panels, which are sort of advertisements for the trade of carrying these people around.

This was an exhibition which treated them in one room as artworks, so you had about 40 of these things. Some of them were shown because of who made them. Some of them were shown because of what the themes were, drawing on classical mythology in Bangladesh as well as modern themes.

And then the second room sort of lowered these objects into the social context from which they came. So you found out, through these panels, about who were the people who made these machines, who were the people who carried these people round, what were their socio-economic circumstances and on and on.

I'd never thought about this bit of material culture and I suddenly thought, "Here's a whole slice of life that I've not come across," or a slice of art, culture, and this culture had been used to allow me to think about this group of people and their socio-economic context, etc, and somehow the simplicity and the beauty of these objects has stayed with me for 20 years.

And I didn't go along thinking, "Oh, I'm so eager to find out Bangladeshi rickshaw panels". So a surprising delight and just a really skilfully curated exhibition, I thought.

KATHLEEN SORIANO: I think there is something about the smaller focus show that actually if you feel you go in not knowing very much and then just really get into the depth of it, rather than the width, that you can leave feeling much more satisfied. One of the best shows I've seen recently was at the Whitney in New York.

I took my ten-year-old there for the October half term and we popped in to have a look at the Calder exhibition, which started with the circus and the wire sculptures of the heads and the portraits and then moved into some of the toys, and there was a film showing him actually animating these objects, and it culminated in some of his more abstract mobile pieces.

And really the way in which it was displayed encouraged you to really focus and be drawn into the objects. But then also the dynamism of the film placed alongside the objects and the development of his style being explained so clearly was incredibly effective. And again, not an enormous exhibition but something you left feeling that you had a complete sense of knowledge of this one aspect.

SARAH TINSLEY: I was in Copenhagen last week and I went to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, which I had never been to before, and it was great to see because of their setting and collection.

But also they had a Max Ernst exhibition on and I hadn't seen a collection of his work since the 1990s, when the Tate did a show. So it was revisiting an artist and a subject that I knew, but it was really exciting to see some of these great works back together again, and I think that's one of the things that exhibitions can do if you know the material.

The spaces there are not perhaps the most easy to use. The exhibition was on several different floors, so you've got to navigate that. The size of the rooms meant that you could get this real sense of progression through his life and the different interests he had, the different stages. I just came away feeling, "Yes, Max Ernst" - I really saw that. It was very exciting really.

NICK DODD: My one would be relatively recently. I've seen it about three times now. Forty-Part Motet, by Janet Cardiff and George Miller, which we had in Sheffield but was also in Whitechapel and other places. It's the most extraordinary piece, where you have absolutely no idea of what you're going to, and if you've never heard it before, no idea what you're going to come across.

It seems to be incredibly dull. It's just 40 speakers standing in a circle, and you have no sense of what it might suddenly become. And the advertising and the marketing are bound to be really grim because there is nothing to say about it. There's nothing you can actually show people that they are going to get. You actually have to experience it, and therefore you actually have to get it by word of mouth.

And every place it has ever shown, it's transcended its limitations in a way that is quite extraordinary and where numbers of people who, just by hearing about it from other people who have had such an amazing experience, go along to it.

So it becomes increasingly popular over time. So you get all the people who know something about it turn up in the first week, and then over time it becomes democratic, in that very word of mouth way.

It is a cantata by Thomas Tallis for 40 voices, which is sung I think in some sort of cathedral - and the voices are different for every speaker. So every speaker is a person, and they stand in a circle. You can wander around this thing and you hear the sound.

By standing in the middle you get the full effect of and you can go anywhere you want. And it's incredibly rigorously put together, with the most amazing sound quality. And it is a transcendental experience. It's one of those moments you never forget. Just fantastic.

KATHLEEN SORIANO: Well, I've seen it in MOMA. What's also wonderful is to look at people's faces. People have this big smile and there's just real wonder and excitement.

I think there's the fragility of the piece too, where when you hear the individual voices, you can hear the cracks and stuff but then when you go in the middle of the room it's all sort of perfect. So there are all sorts of levels.

NICK DODD: You can hear the rustling of the pages as they turn the pages and all this kind of thing. People just loved it. And they came back and they sat down and they lie on the floor and they do whatever they do, and it's one of those really classic moments.

VAUGHAN ALLEN: I remember doing a review of it and one of your press people saying, "Oh no, you have to stay here", because doing the usual review thing just sort of wandering around and then quickly going out in search of a drink somewhere. "No, you have to stay here. You have to stay. You have to stay."

And it was quite interesting seeing how people's reactions changed over time because on the first evening there was almost this quiet embarrassed, "Well, what am I actually looking at while I'm here?" and sort of "I'll try and find something else to do while the music is going on", and then by the third or fourth day people were more relaxed and able to cope with it better.

KEN ARNOLD: It also touches on, I think, what Sarah was saying earlier, because I saw it at the Whitechapel a couple of years ago, and it's a piece of music I was familiar with, but it's that sense of re-encounter.

It's something about exhibitions that are to do with sometimes creating something completely new.

Most exhibitions I guess are about things that have already had, in some cases, 500 or 1,000 years of life elsewhere, and there's something about that moving it into a new space and doing something slightly different with it, that re-creates it in a way that's not just reminding you of something that you already know, but in that case because you're walking in and out of these singers, I suppose, that happen to be just embodied in those speakers.

MARIA BALSHAW: It's a very different kind of example, but I think the one I first thought of picks up the same kind of theme, and it was a prints show that I saw at the Fogg in Harvard about two years ago. Really small exhibition, and it was called Protest Prints. It brought together works as far apart as Goya and prints produced by students in 1968 on campus in Cambridge.

It was in one of the little rooms that's off the central courtyard in the Fogg, and so the first piece was Richard Serra's anti-war protest print, that was a t-shirt originally, and it had been reproduced as a really big print, and they put it so that it completely filled the gorgeous old door frame.

So you looked through the door and saw this really provocative work. As you went in then you looked left to see Goya and looked right to see students' work, and they talked to each other across the centuries and they weren't laid out chronologically at all.

The reason I loved it so much was that it showed the strength of the Fogg's collections, because you can only do that kind of grading across centuries and moving between the contemporary and the historic if you've got those works to hand. But it was incredibly politicised in terms of how the works had been selected, and it was connected to that place, in that it was all about student protest in this area now, which is not about protest.

It's so safe, so posh. I thought it was really brave of the Fogg to put it in there and allow all of the dissent to happen across the works and also to bring to the fore again the way in which one generation of students had decided to respond to things that they didn't approve of about their government and how we're dealing with that now.

It was on at the height of the protests and complaints about the war in Iraq. So it was bold politically but also really interesting in terms of art historical thinking and curatorial work.

ERNST VEGELIN: Well, for me, the small focus show has already been mentioned, and that's absolutely where my instincts lie. I'm a really sort of zealous advocate for that, particularly because the Courtauld is a university art museum and that suits us so well.

But paradoxically I would pick an exhibition which was actually the exhibition that forced us to rethink and got us started on the small focus model, but it was completely the opposite.

It was before my time at the Courtauld. It was Art on the Line, looking at British painting late 18th, early 19th century, produced and shown at the Royal Academy when it was in Somerset House before it moved to Burlington House, so borrowing Royal Academy pictures that had originally been shown and painted for that space in Somerset House.

I like it because it does what to my mind every exhibition, particularly for us, should aspire to do, and essentially completely rethought that whole area of artistic production. It's now an exhibition, I think, that you just can't get around when you're thinking about British art of that period.

It just, at a stroke, I think transformed that field and made some really powerful points which could only have been made in that space about, for example, the fact that many of these pictures were painted originally to have been shown in that space, were painted to have competed with their competitors in this very, very crowded exhibition gallery.

It was extremely complex to put on and pretty expensive. It was basically a floor to ceiling hang, in a triple-height room with cantilevered walls leaning forward into the room. It was logistically very complex but absolutely worth doing and a real sort of revelation, I think.

VAUGHAN ALLEN: Probably at the complete other end, it's another one of Nick's, I think. It was a retrospective of the designer David Mellor, which was about seven or eight years ago. Just in terms of the impact of David Mellor's work on fairly simple everyday items like cutlery and turning them into pieces of beauty, as they have been of course over the centuries.

But it was really the by-the-way things that when I went as a good Sheffield boy to go and see this exhibition of another Sheffield boy, it was the things that he'd worked on that I didn't know about, things that he'd done with traffic lights, that were just astonishing, and just those moments of inspiration that reminded you that it wasn't - moments of inspiration are not just about great creative artists, they're about the everyday and the everyday changes.

Ultimately because he'd worked for about 40 or 50 years, it was really telling the history of British middle-class life during that 50 years as well, which is useful for that exhibition to be doing.

SHARON HEAL: I think already you can see some themes that we might explore later on about context, about venue, about the spaces, about the size of exhibitions.

But just following on from everybody's examples, I think it would be good to throw it open to what makes a great temporary exhibition.

Can we pin down what a common factor in any of those examples might be? Or when we're planning an exhibition programme, what do we look to for the outstanding factor?

KEN ARNOLD: I would have great things. Interestingly almost all of what, including mine, that we've talked about is very much in the art sector and none of us have drifted into, I suppose slightly with me, into anthropology, but for me it would include other sorts of objects.

I would have inspiring spaces, which often means exhibition designers. And I think the third thing that I would have, which in some ways is my most important, is an idea.

And I think there is quite a lot of laziness in exhibitions that fundamentally lack an idea. I suppose for me the idea is not something we know already that we're trying to broadcast and disseminate, because I think those are laziest sorts of exhibitions that I go to, but where the exhibition and the work in the exhibition is because it started with an idea that people want to find out.

So for me the core of a good exhibition is a project of investigation.

MARIA BALSHAW: I was going to say story, to kick this off. And that for me is what goes beyond just a vague idea. I was in New York recently and saw some I thought terrible exhibitions at some of the biggest galleries, where they have 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 because they've got such a lot of stuff, they're not having to work very hard at the ideas they're trying to convey with them.

I don't mean story in the social history sense. I mean an idea which everything about the exhibition is trying to convey to the people that come to it.

SARAH TINSLEY: It's a slightly, in some senses an old-fashioned idea, that you can take something that's just marvellous, like some Klees, and put them in a space and think that's sufficient.

It's where museums and galleries were maybe 20 years ago, that it was enough to do that, 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 I was just lost in room after room.

There was nothing that stood out between one room and another, and I just felt this was such a waste of an opportunity, because Klee is an extraordinary artist and I wasn't getting that. Yet I know that if I had seen a room of five really well chosen things I might well have come away feeling very different.

ERNST VEGELIN: I vote in favour of research as an important criterion. That's partly because I'm from a research institution, but I do think that that's important.

Certainly the integrity of the idea I believe in really strongly, but I think research, 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 sort of enjoyment and delight is really important.

One of my favourite exhibitions was the Degas exhibition, Beyond Impressionism, at the National Gallery, which was just so staggeringly 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. So that ability to surprise, disrupt a conventional view I think is quite a powerful tool that exhibitions offer.

KATHLEEN SORIANO: I completely agree. I think beauty is on the top line, certainly for me. And that doesn't mean it has to be conventionally beautiful.

It can also be quite ugly. But aligned with that is that notion of opening the canon slightly. I think it's too easy, and unforgiveable as you say, just to throw the Klees up in a room without stretching the boundaries that little bit, either through provocation of argument, or through context, or through broadening what's represented in that exhibition, so that people are forced not only to think about the broader picture, but also to become more familiar with the broader picture, because in the longer term I see that as an investment in the future of exhibitions.

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

NICK DODD: It's also the story. I couldn't agree more the story is really important, but it's the story also that people want to hear. And I think the conversation we are having so far is about what we as producers want to place within a show, rather than what, essentially, we as consumers might expect of shows people create.

On top of that, there is something else about it being beyond an idea. It needs also to have some kind of zeitgeist to be a really great show.

It can be a good show with a good idea. You need to hit a moment of some kind and the really great shows do that, and they capture that something about - and usually it's because a show is planned three years ahead and you don't know that this is coming up at that time.

The shows that now are talking about recession, or apocalypse, or end of days, or whatever it might be, are really relevant now but at the time they were planned, 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 which is why they might go.

KATHLEEN SORIANO: I think relevance is another key word, and I think it's a big word in the museum sector, especially when you're dealing with the issue-based and thematic exhibitions, which in a way I think are the more interesting ways of approaching subjects now and certainly offer more opportunities to broaden the breadth, broaden what you're presenting to the public, and the artists that you're drawing in, and to provoke thought.

SARAH TINSLEY: Well, especially if you're trying to attract different or new audiences. What it means to me, the individual coming, needs - you're absolutely right about relevance, because otherwise why. It's very hard to reach out to new and different audiences, but part of that must be that there's something in it for them.

They're going to find something in it, at whatever level it might be. We've talked about it a bit, but exhibitions can be opinion changing, and they need to be in some way.

It can be on different levels. It could be that it's absolutely - you know, you came away from Degas thinking, "This is something very beautiful and sumptuous", and it changes your opinion in that way. It can be something much more fundamental, much more serious.

SHARON HEAL: In terms of that exhibition planning and programming process, how do you, if you're doing it three years in advance, anticipate or catch that moment? Because that's what I thought was great about the Emory Douglas exhibition, that it just chimed with Obama and America; was that just fortuitous?

VAUGHAN ALLEN: It was completely fortuitous indeed, given that we were planning it about two years in advance. We didn't know that there was going to be a black candidate for president who was going to be taken seriously.

But we knew that a lot of the issues that were there about the position of black Americans were going to be coming back up in the election. We knew that the economic situation was patently going to get worse over the next five to ten years. So we knew that those sort of issues were going to be there.

It's why we tried with that not to talk just about black American issues but to talk about political process and political violence and how political protest continues to resonate through the images. We did toy very vaguely with - and I think it's now been done a few times - with using the Che Guevara poster and doing something that span off that as well.

That's too familiar to people, I think, and Emory's work wasn't particularly familiar. But it had to have that resonance. It also had to have something which is very important for us but I think is very important for all great temporary exhibitions, is it has to be somewhat open ended.

You can't come out of it saying, "Well that's said everything that has to be said on that subject", and I think that's a really dangerous thing. Sometimes you do come out of exhibitions and you're just blown away by the amount of material there and you do feel, "Well, I don't actually want to experience that artist for at least another decade, if at all".

KEN ARNOLD: There's a huge difference, I think, between exhibitions that try and be monolithic, and often you can weigh it in terms of the catalogue, can't you? Something that feels as though the main aim was that no one else should be tempted to do another show about this artist for at least 30 years.

Definitive - I think that is just the ugliest word you can use for an exhibition. Or there is - I don't know what the opposite of it is - the essay, it seems to me in that sense, the original sense of it, of trying something out. And they are I think we, and I'm sure other people, worry about what is the long-term legacy of exhibitions, and we might get on to talk about that.

But I actually think there is something fantastic about the notion. We are just opening a show tomorrow, Madness and Modernity, the next exhibition; it will be closed in July.

Not that I think it's not a great show, but it just releases you from that sense of having to face up to something that seemed like a good idea briefly - but quite a lot of those good ideas are great ideas and fantastic for it. But there is something marvellous about it just being there and being the experience.

Of course you can try and capture it through websites and things, but actually great exhibitions can't be trapped in that way. That for me is the joy of them, that it is the luck of being in a place at the right time to see them.

SARAH TINSLEY: Just going back to that relevance point, because you have to very often organise exhibitions quite a long way ahead, it can be the broader programme, the events that you plan around it, that can bring an element of relevance, because you can organise that in less time.

And so you can think of that programme adding something else to it. Because I think it's very important that 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.

MARIA BALSHAW: There's also something about a link between research and relevance for me, because in a really great show, the team or the persons making it find something out that they didn't know when they started. And it's usually that that recasts the show in a way which says something about its particular moment.

A nice example of what was really great for us, last year we did a summer show, which was particularly directed at our family audiences, and we wanted to pick up the work we do within our learning programme.

So it was about child art and art education, and in doing the research for the exhibition the curator discovered in an archive in Birmingham that the Whitworth had hosted the very first exhibition of child art that had toured the UK, and it was 80 years ago.

It was just a joy to find that, but it made us completely re-conceive what we did in a way that focused on how children create and moved us away from an educational agenda that actually would have been interesting but not really of a moment where we're thinking about the personalisation of learning and how children can learn outside a school setting, and it just did us loads of good to find out, to have done all of that research and then used it to make it relevant for today.

ERNST VEGELIN: The idea of relevance is quite an interesting one, and it's not as sort of safe as it sounds. I don't want to be the one who is arguing for irrelevant exhibitions here. If you start with that in mind I think that can be a bit of a distraction. I think 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 sort of dig into the theme of temptation and so on. But it was relevant, actually, because it had integrity, it was beautiful, people enjoyed themselves.

Some people may have come out with a slightly different sort of view on the world, as can happen unexpectedly in the best exhibitions. But we didn't go into that project saying we had to be led here by some notion of relevance in terms of Lucas Cranach.

KATHLEEN SORIANO: I think it depends on the subject matter, but I also think it's about layering and it's about the sophisticated way of presenting it to the different audiences that come.

As Sarah said, it's partly about programme, it's partly to do with captions and panels. It might be about creative essay writing in the catalogue. But it's about understanding how even the hardest artist could be made more accessible to someone who might otherwise might feel slightly sort of distanced from someone.

The stories that are told in Cranach were sort of allegories that they might not understand. And going to the Royal Academy I certainly - I sort of feel a sort of responsibility actually that I've never felt before in exhibition making, which is about creating exhibitions that are more complex, are more challenging and that are more thought provoking.

I think that is as much about layering as it is about your sort of key idea or your subject matter.

SARAH TINSLEY: Has that got anything to do with the fact that, I mean obviously the Royal Academy has a collection, but it's slightly different. Is it something about being in a place where the collection is less prominent?

KATHLEEN SORIANO: I think it's partly to do with the thinking that I do about the future of museums and gallery visitations and the fact that the model that we have is now 200, 250 years old and I'm interested to know what the next iteration will be like, which will be much more complex than a purely virtual sort of engagement.

But it's also because of the numbers of people that come through the front door every day and the opportunities that that presents. And you think, it sort of raises your game with regard to what you have to deliver. You feel a responsibility.

SHARON HEAL: Can we just move on to another very broad question, which is why do we put on temporary exhibitions. It's not just about our own personal fulfilment and research and satisfaction, surely?

NICK DODD: We can pick one of the reasons, which is this opportunity to be creative, the opportunity to ring the changes, to try and to test and to pilot and to experiment with something that has a rigour to it that you have to turn the show out.

It has to be on time, it has to be at this point, you can't mess about with it. But at the same time what does it matter if there's another one along in ten weeks' time?

So in one sense 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 and carry on and start again and to try something else. It's a way of introducing things in a way that you can't do with permanent shows.

MARIA BALSHAW: For some of us it's something that you can't avoid. It's the only way, really, to engage with a collection like the Whitworth's, which is so predominantly works on paper that it just doesn't serve us to have a permanent collection and then exhibitions.

We need to put stuff up and take it down so that we conserve the works appropriately. But it seems to me that within that model you have a different kind of curator.

And I've spent a lot of time over the last couple of years thinking about the fact that we don't seem to face the problems that we work with that many other museums and galleries report around the notion of the curator.

And it's actually because the Whitworth's curators have always been curator/interpreters who don't work with that sense of, if I put this up on the wall it's going to be there for 25 years and everyone will judge me on it, which constrains people massively.

They are always working towards an exhibition and thinking about the next one. That's not to say they aren't rigorous; they are very rigorous, but they are willing to put up things which are a statement for now and then move on to the next one, which means they are always thinking about ways to interpret the collection.

VAUGHAN ALLEN: Flippantly, because we have no other choice; in terms of mission, because 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 or whatever.

The really exciting thing is that if you are doing, as we are doing this autumn, a big exhibition on hip hop, we know that if we are talking about British hip hop, the 13- and 14-year-olds who are coming to that exhibition will know considerably more about it than our curators.

So we have to find a way - and it comes back to this question of what is the future of the museum or the gallery experience - we have to find a way of actually allowing them not to feel (a) that we're talking to them but (b) to also put their experiences up and to allow the exhibition to change considerably during that period, because something major may happen within that culture that we just have to be really aware of, which is really difficult.

I think our version of the intellectual challenge which some of you were talking about is really a challenge in terms of what we can get away with or what we can explore.

It was a challenge last year that I just threw out because I was reaching the end of my first contract to turn one of our galleries into an allotment and to do a big exhibition on urban gardening and growing vegetables inside. Now it just so happened that it became very zeitgeisty but that was just a complete challenge.

The next big challenge at the end of my next fixed-term contract is to turn an entire floor into a car workshop, because we're doing something on car modelling. But that actually, as an experience for the curators who were working on it and for us who are really journalists I guess, that is an incredible thing, to then have to try and tackle and deal with and set some challenges, which is very different to the level of deep research that some of you are doing.

KEN ARNOLD: Partly it's to do with audiences, isn't it? I mean I suppose I had the luxury of sort of designing what we would do in our three or four spaces next door, and it just seemed to me that we would die on our feet unless we had the main room there changing periodically, so that people came back.

So I suppose, you know in retrospect it has very much been built on the notion of a core - hopefully quite a large core - of repeat visitors who once you've hooked in will think, "I wonder what's on at the Wellcome".

We managed to do seven shows in our first year, which almost killed the curatorial department, and we'll slow down from that.

And I suppose on the back of that it seems to me what that reflects is that all of our institutions are places where people think, but if you are just mostly showing your permanent collection unchanged, it's a bit more difficult to show where thinking is going on. I think that sense of it being a way of making it clear that there is intellectual, cultural activity is something else that I think is crucial about putting on exhibitions.

And my other bit is just we're part of the entertainment industry, I think. The buzz and excitement - and I don't think we should be ashamed of it - being a version of show business.

We put on shows. I can't understand why some people are so insistent that exhibitions are totally different to shows. It seems to me that fizz that you get on an opening night, the hope that you have lots of people turning up, your press previews.

Of course it's not like being down at Piccadilly with a film starting or whatever, but there is a sense of it being - it needs to have great production value; there needs to be a real thrill of stepping in. You want people to go slightly dressed up to the opening night.

I can't see any reason not to be exuberant about that. Surely that's part of why all of us enjoy what we do, and I think there's slightly too much, maybe this is exactly the wrong crowd to be talking to about it, because you are all very fizzy, buzzy people, but there's a little bit too much po-faced earnestness in too many museums. It just gets me down a bit, really.

NICK DODD: I think one of the advantages of the temporary exhibition is it mitigates against that. Because if it's used successfully you're not only using it for, as it were, show business, you're also using it to drive change.

Organisationally, it's a form of change in organisational direction and debate, because it's creating its own dynamic, and that has to create change in the organisation. It can't possibly not.

Whereas if you just have your permanent collection in the space, it does allow you to sit back and settle down in a way that - you can see it terms of museums that are predominantly about their permanent collections obviously, and those museums that are 25 per cent to 75 per cent or even 100 per cent about temporary exhibitions. There is a difference between those two institutions.

KATHLEEN SORIANO: But the best museums and galleries are those who can do both and who enliven their collections so that people do feel there is always something fresh and new, and I think Compton Verney and the National Portrait Gallery, both places where I've worked, do it brilliantly.

NICK DODD: I'm not saying you can't do both. If the National Portrait Gallery only did its permanent collection, it wouldn't be the place that it is. And you need to have that temporary exhibition thing, not just because of the stories you can tell but also because it creates institutional change.

KATHLEEN SORIANO: But it's also as much about attitude and approach as about subject matter. So I think it is about you know this is a temporary exhibition and this is a permanent collection. It's about the way in which you display it, as Maria was saying with her temporary permanent collection.

MARIA BALSHAW: I think avoiding either/ors is actually something that is quite useful. Because I completely agree with you about admitting to our pizazz as well as our seriousness, and I don't see why it has to be one or the other.

Subversive Spaces had 1,000 people on the opening night, and people were very jealous, and it has also got a very serious academic, properly academic AHRC funded catalogue with it, and the two things don't contradict one another and I don't think they should.

SARAH TINSLEY: And I think 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, an artist who is not represented in the collection and makes you look at the collection, and if you're getting it right, that's what it should do.

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, then you can borrow in and do small displays.

VAUGHAN ALLEN: It's interesting that none of us have actually mentioned the economic imperatives really driving temporary exhibitions.

It might well be different for some of us that are in regional venues where we need to keep driving new visitors or encouraging visitors to return, which may be different to some of the bigger establishments that can rely on a greater tourist inflow of visitors that don't have that need to the same extent.

KATHLEEN SORIANO: There's a distinction between urban venues and rural venues as well, so Compton Verney, being rural, and despite the enlightenment of a permanent collection, the exhibition will determine the level of visitation.

KEN ARNOLD: I think the other thing that strikes me as a real imperative - because we are all sort of semi-detached, it seems to me, to the world of academia - that's where many of our curators come from, but what a space that doesn't have any permanent stuff in it allows is inter-disciplinarity, which is such an over-used and almost slightly kind of clichéd notion now.

But I don't mean inter-disciplinarity in that sense that you find five subjects and you say the reason we're putting this exhibition on is to make sure that these five things come together. But if you're picking your topic well, then the inter disciplinarity is inevitable and comes out of the kind of richness of the research process.

This organisation spends lots of time funding academics, and getting disciplines within an academic setting to come together and work together is much harder, I think, than it is within a museum setting.

Well, certainly within an exhibition setting, because there is a project with a deadline and all of those kind of production things, and it seems to me that that is part of the way in which spaces for temporary exhibitions can really inject new ideas, mix things up.

And it's maybe something that's easier if you start from a fairly small box of medicine and health, as everything we do has to be do with that, and in some ways that's quite a constraint and I think for us here it's a healthy constraint.

It really does encourage us. Everything we do involves reaching out to some extent, because it just seems too interesting and too big to be left just to the scientists and medics. That mixing people up I think is another real imperative that certainly I feel for many of our exhibitions.

KATHLEEN SORIANO: But I think it's really important that you have a foundation from which to build, be it either a permanent collection of portraits or a scientific emphasis, because I think it gives you a raison d'être - a justification on which to build your exhibition programme. One of the hardest things is when you just have a space.

SHARON HEAL: Can we talk a little bit about the relationship between temporary exhibitions and a permanent collection? I'm sure you have opinions on it. Kelvingrove, for example, when it reopened said it was going to change 10 per cent of its permanent collection every 12 to 18 months.

So what is the relationship between temporary and permanent? Does it mean that if you concentrate on your temporary exhibition programme that everybody comes to those exhibitions and the permanent collection is then neglected?

ERNST VEGELIN: It's fundamental for us, I think, at the Courtauld. As I said before, we used to do periodically one very large expensive, complicated exhibition and we've stopped doing that and decided to do three smaller, highly focused research-led exhibitions per year.

And one of the important new criteria was that those exhibitions wherever possible should draw substantially on the permanent collection and one of the purposes should be to put new research for the permanent collection in the public domain.

That was partly born out of a realisation that they are so sort of resource hungry, these exhibitions, you put so much time and energy and curatorial sort of effort and money into these exhibitions.

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 that was really important, that the exhibitions should either be built around, say, one singular masterpiece from the permanent collection, put in the context of very closely related loans.

We did this recently with a Renoir painting in our collection of a theatre box, from 1874, and then borrowed around that other Impressionist theatre box paintings from the 1870s.

So either that approach or again focused exhibitions which drew more heavily on the permanent collection and perhaps only made up of the permanent collection like our Cézanne exhibition recently, or we did a Turner watercolour show that we lent to the Lake District.

And they have been extremely successful, very well attended, very well reviewed by the press, and I think for us it got the real integrity that we are learning more about our collections. So that link really is critical for us.

MARIA BALSHAW: It's really important for us as well in a quite similar fashion, although we have very different scales of displays and exhibitions, but when I came to the Whitworth one of the things I changed was the separation which existed between displays of our permanent art collection, which changed every six to nine months, so they're like exhibitions, and big exhibitions, which had their own identity and their own juggernaut trajectory.

And I said, well, if we regard all of those as the same thing and all of them being about the greater understanding of our collection and our audiences - so we put some constraints on it.

It has fundamentally shifted things for us and for our visitors, I think. Because what used to happen was that there were always very interesting displays of the collection, and they would sometimes be good big exhibitions and they would sometimes be completely random big exhibitions that left you thinking, why is that show at the Whitworth? And 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 all the time really helps us. That doesn't mean that we're particularly constricted, because we have a very broad set of parameters. But you should always be able to, within about a minute of thinking about what the show is, say, "Oh yes, I know why they have that here". And if you haven't got that movement between your collection and what's on show, I think you just start to meander.

SARAH TINSLEY: In the Portrait Gallery we deal with the collection by showing it in galleries that are relatively permanent and then we have quite a considerable changing display programme. And it works very well, but you can sometimes come a cropper with it.

Because we agonise about, you know, it's a small display, it's an exhibition; the public don't necessarily perceive that, and if you market and promote a small display, they can come thinking it's an exhibition, and then there's that sense of let down, that this isn't quite what I want. I think sometimes that can be quite difficult.

And in terms of the numbers and just thinking about the collection, in the last year, the gallery is going to get the largest annual visitor figure, 1.8 million, and probably a third of that is exhibitions. So two thirds of them are going to the permanent collection, and that's a fairly substantial number, and I think one can think sometimes that the collection may be getting forgotten; it isn't necessarily.

NICK DODD: I think it also depends on what you count as your permanent collection. I'm a charitable trust, I don't own anything; we're a management company for other people's collections, and I would take the view that the things that I show are the nation's collections and I'm showing these to the people of the city of Sheffield. And therefore whether I show them a National Portrait Gallery collection or anybody else's collection, it's still the people'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 to anything we might have - we don't have a costume collection But what it is relevant to is design, and we have a fashion course at the university; we have design activity in the city, and it's relevant in that context, about what it's there for and what it was doing, rather than via the collection.

But in any case, the show we've got at the moment which is medieval and renaissance art, in that we have medieval and renaissance history to the city, there are collections that we could show that are relevant to it. But the collection is primarily the V&A's but that collection is ours - we own it as a nation, and I have the right to show it just like anyone else does in that respect.

SHARON HEAL: But in that particular example - it is the nation's collection, but you have to pay for it in Sheffield and you can see it for free in London at the V&A. Is the financial model for temporary exhibitions and touring exhibitions viable?

NICK DODD: Well, I would correct your first statement, and I am not sure I am going to answer the second one - I'll leave that to someone else. But just to make sure, so the record is straight. This is an exhibition. It isn't the permanent displays of the V&A; it's an exhibition they assembled for tour.

So it's never been shown at the V&A as an exhibition, it's been curated, and what you are paying for is the intellectual copyright essentially, the intellectual creation, the creativity attached to creating that show and its tour, not the fact that the work could have been seen in its individuality somewhere else for nothing.

And I think there is a fundamental error in that thinking, that you could - if you wandered round the whole V&A you could see all the objects that are in this show, or most of them, but you would have to walk along quite a long way and you wouldn't have the relationships that they exist in themselves as a show.

And yes, we charge for that. But we charge for all shows that are of that scale, because basically, it's a cost thing, it pays for the cost of having to put it on, and Sheffield people would not see it otherwise. That's the point.

SHARON HEAL: But it is that a factor in terms of the economics of it, putting on the temporary exhibition?

NICK DODD: It depends on the size of the show.

KATHLEEN SORIANO: I think we might see more creative sort of partnering. Compton Verney worked with the Whitworth recently on an exhibition and the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts. And you can achieve so much more and be more ambitious I think when you work as a team.

Actually I think there might be positive aspects that come out in more relationships having to be forged between organisations in order to make this happen in the future. And certainly with the Royal Academy, we always want to partner more closely with venues abroad or in this country. We're working with Nottingham Castle this year and with the National Galleries of Scotland.

And it's not just about sharing costs, it's also about drawing in academic expertise, but it comes down to the bottom line as well, about how you can share costs on the catalogue, on transport, on conservation and all sorts of things.

MARIA BALSHAW: Yes, it's the only way we can afford to make really big shows, because we don't charge. We don't charge when they go - people don't pay to see them when they're on tour, but by actually charging a fairly modest exhibition fee we can pool resources and produce an exhibition that is of the scale that neither the Sainsbury, Compton Verney or the Whitworth could afford on its own.

And also, as Kathleen says, pool the intellectual resource, it was linked into the academic programmes at UEA and at Warwick quite deliberately so that it went to different audiences. It repays our effort.

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.

KATHLEEN SORIANO: I think what it also gets then as well is that three moments. And you were talking earlier, Ken, about there being a moment when you go and see something.

And yes, we all know when we've missed that one showing of something in New York or Manchester. But actually to have three different moments which are very different sorts of exhibitions in different contexts I think is also very refreshing.

And I remember when I used to do work on exhibitions that went out from the National Portrait Gallery, and one of the things I loved the most was going to see the exhibitions open at another venue and see how the curators there had played with your ideas.

SARAH TINSLEY: I think that's very true, and our current Constable exhibition is going to Compton Verney and it looked very different there and it may have slightly different works. I think that's the other thing that you can do with exhibitions is that each venue doesn't necessarily have the same works.

That happens perhaps a little bit more internationally, but it's also because perhaps some of those venues have more works that they can amplify or they choose to do something slightly different. So they're not always - I mean they are never really the same in different venues.

KEN ARNOLD: It's partly place and space and context, isn't it. It's very unlikely you'll get the same footprint for two different galleries. Even if it's the same square meterage, if it's long and thin it's going to be a different experience to if it's short and fat.

And then thematically, I mean we've just had a really dramatic instance of doing an exhibition on War and Medicine, which just closed here a month ago.

We did it in collaboration with a gallery in Dresden, and of all the places in the world for a London institution to collaborate with on an exhibition on the theme of war, the way in which the same object will or won't resonate in those two cities is, you know, a country that has basically been at war every year except for three years since the second world war, here, and a country that has not been at war since the second world war in Germany.

The way in which in those two countries the same theme will play out in different social and cultural contexts, they've had to completely rethink, particularly of course what they say about the holocaust and the Nazi context, etc. That to me is where that you visited in a space, in a real place, which carries its own ideas and messages makes exhibitions a completely unique cultural phenomenon, I think.

VAUGHAN ALLEN: I think there may be positive things coming out of the economic decline and recession/depression. One is there is less chance, if it was ever there, of getting in the big international shows; because of the weaker pound it's going to be much less possible, which forces people, if they're not already doing it, to be talking to other galleries in this country or other galleries that want to work on particular areas. We all know recessions can be incredibly creative times.

But I think the other one is really as more people stay in the country, as fewer people go abroad, as people are looking for things to do, maybe that impetus to have the "blockbuster" exhibition to drive visitor numbers won't be there so much because people will just be wanting to look for something to do.

But actually, the more quirky things, the more interesting things may continue to drive visitors and actually make people excited in a way that maybe a blockbuster wouldn't do.

KATHLEEN SORIANO: It's also a fact that during times of recession and difficulty people search for beauty. They search out beauty and things that feed the soul and sort of emotional responses as opposed to a more practical, acquisitive climate in which we sort of have lived until recently.

ERNST VEGELIN: I think some aspects of the travelling exhibition model will come under pressure though. It's something that we're looking at because the Courtauld doesn't take any travelling exhibitions, we don't buy in any shows, so all of the exhibitions we do are organised and curated and catalogues are done 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.

We're doing a show with the Met the year after next around Cézanne's Card Players that we will organise and we'll travel to the Met, but we've also done things with the Wordsworth Trust and others. But I do see that, at that level certain things will come under pressure; for example, the sort of availability of loans for a series of, say, three different venues, the question of costs and so on. So I don't think it's a given.

And I also question, as a lender, perhaps if you sort of look at it from the other side, the value of lending to - necessarily to three institutions; perhaps you would prioritise the organising institution who's conceiving the idea and for who the exhibition is sort of - is more meaningful in terms of their permanent collection.

So I'm not sure that that is - you know, that's a given, that this aspect of exhibition organising will just flourish.

KEN ARNOLD: I think there is a real unexamined crisis in exhibition making, which is the escalation of costs of borrowing objects. I think part of this is to do with conservation standards. In the 20 years that I've been putting on exhibitions things have moved, even in my own collection, from getting things out of the library, putting them up on decently made cradles and then putting them away again myself to now not being allowed to get in the same room as some of them, probably quite rightly too, some of my colleagues say.

We're just putting on a show with some Schiele's and Kokoschka's and having to choose every one of those objects has cost us probably £15,000 or £20,000 in total in terms of three couriers that can travel with them etc. It seems to me to be drifting into complete fantasyland; it's not that anyone wants any of these objects to be degradated by their travelling around, but we've got into a situation where unexamined, it seems to me, 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?

MARIA BALSHAW: I think it is time to question that. Kathleen and I were both part of the seminar last year that brought together people across the world, not just across North America and Europe. One of the big issues that came out of that in terms of thinking about circulating cultural artefacts was that we have escalated ourselves into a position where we will never be able to lend to anyone that's outside the developed world because the standards that we impose as loan conditions.

If we followed the rules strictly, we wouldn't be able to lend the Yoruban textiles in the gallery in the Whitworth collection to an exhibition about Yoruba culture anywhere in Africa. That's really wrong, just not acceptable. I think as directors and as teams of people who work with the guidance of conservation professionals, we need to look at that.

It affects us locally as well. I mean, this isn't a criticism of the British Museum directly, but they lent Lindow Man to the Manchester Museum, close to where it was found, and it's a very, very ancient person and it needs very carefully looking after, but the requirement to be able to show it in Manchester involved having a £40,000 crate made for it.

That, last year, meant that the Manchester Museum had to fundraise to do that, but they're left with a £40,000 crate that they're not going to have to use very often.

KEN ARNOLD: Well, and obviously, ironically that's not quite the amount of money that they spend showing it down the road from here, so there is that sense of things are treated much, much better when they go to somebody else's institution than when they're in your own storage.

SHARON HEAL: Part of the problem is we've agreed that temporary exhibitions are a good thing; either for our staff or for our audiences, but are they sustainable from a financial or an environmental point of view and can we carry on with this model? Are we saying no?

NICK DODD: Well, I think it depends on what you're showing, doesn't it? I mean, in a way, essentially the people around this table are showing on the whole, very expensive works of art that have very specific attributes and very specific criteria, and they catch the attention more readily of conservators than if you want to ask permission to show something for much lesser value. But there are plenty of shows that people put on that are made up of collections that are not of huge value.

So it's really more about whether we continue to be able to show the full range of art, natural history, decorative arts, whatever it might be, rather than becoming much more narrow to those things that are cheap or easy or reproducible.

That's the problem, the things that the public currently turn out in droves to see on the whole and the ones that are likely to draw the most audiences are the ones where the lender puts the most restrictions on, because they are obliged to lend them more frequently than anything else and therefore they're more likely to suffer attrition.

SARAH TINSLEY: Yes, I think that's true, and demand on particular objects can be very high. Therefore, an institution that might be very willing to lend may not because it's just being asked to lend that work, not necessarily just to one type of exhibition but to a range of exhibitions. We've had an issue recently with our Gerhard Richter exhibition where Richter is an artist that is in great demand and not only exhibitions of his work but thematic exhibitions. It's very difficult to navigate that.

The most expensive parts of exhibitions are the transport and insurance costs, courier costs, and the installation set build. The set build and the installation is much more in your control and you could make things much simpler and less expensive, but the transport and insurance is out of your hands.

There are groups of people who meet to talk about that in London there's the London Exhibition Organiser's Group who try to deal with that, there's an International Exhibitions Organiser's Group - there are a number of forums, but it requires everybody to sign up to some of those issues and not necessarily sending couriers, not asking for insurance when they could have British Government's indemnity. These are real issues that we have to continue to tackle because they're not going away.

KATHLEEN SORIANO: Just going back to Nick's point, I think that's one of the reasons why I'm also interested in broadening the canon, because I think it takes you slightly away from those single suspects.

But one of the things that does worry me is in a time when we're trying to be more adventurous with the types of exhibitions we're putting on, at the same time there's a sense that thematic exhibitions often have less value when you're trying to get a loan.

I know of more than one venue that will lend their van Gogh if they know the exhibition is purely about van Gogh. If it's van Gogh in the context of, I don't know, letter writing, and there are lots of letter-writing artists, they'll be less favourable.

So in a way I think we need to change our own appreciation of value for those different types of exhibition, especially in the context of relevance as opposed to a connoisseurship thing, which is no less valid but I just think it needs to be slightly more level.

VAUGHAN ALLEN: At the base level there is also, I think, a pure financial effect of the current squeeze. We've lost two loans, one to Australia - our exhibition's going out there - and one to Japan, in the last four months; one that was actually on the ship about to go. For an organisation like ours, losing even the £25,000 or £30,000 each of those would have brought in has a substantial effect.

But also because some of the stuff that we do is either very of its time or somewhat controversial, people are noticeably becoming less brave. Finding a London venue for a Black Panther exhibition at the moment when you'll think, "With Obama there", you could not have a more perfect time to find it. No, you're not going to - it's 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.

KATHLEEN SORIANO: On the sustainability front though, I think there are organisations that have really pushed the boundaries recently. The National Trust, for example, have done a lot of work on what is and isn't acceptable for the works in their collections. I think museums and galleries are going to have to start talking about this.

I'm about to install an exhibition in 6 Burlington Gardens, which is the building behind the Royal Academy, this winter on the subject of artists, contemporary artists, and their responses to issues around climate change.

It's going into a building that has no environmental controls. Certainly, I notice the conversations that have been developed through these international exhibition organiser groups in London, but some of the big guys need to stand up and sign up to something.

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. They're all in decay. It's about the speed at which they decay that is the nature of the debate.

Is it better that we have a nice air-conditioned store and exhibition spaces and so forth for works of art, and meanwhile the rest of the world burns? We're doing the best to help that process along through things like air conditioning. 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 even begun to face up to that as a sector because we are still locked into that era when we were attempting to professionalise ourselves back in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s and part of the way we saw ourselves as being professional was to have rigorous standards of conservation because in some way what we have done previously as an industry was awful.

It was generally ropey. So part of upgrading ourselves, if you like, was to create this whole band of professionalisation around conservation, and other areas as well, and we locked it down. We locked it down and made it solid and it's very hard to break it.

Whether for temporary exhibitions or any other purposes, it's going to be something that we are going to have to give serious thought to because we are, in our own small way, a major contributor to climate change.

MARIA BALSHAW: Our Head of Conservation at the Whitworth is a flexible conservator and a rare character and she's leading the sustainability work for the whole organisation.

So she is looking at all of the kinds of controls that we use as the standard for our own collections and thinking about loans, conditions, and all of that work as well as reusing packing cases and all our exhibition bills across a whole range of practical and then scientific and philosophical positions.

Because she does absolutely take your view; it's all decaying, we're only arresting it, and how much do we want to intervene now?

A lot of her work is about looking at the long history of a work, not just thinking about, "I'll care for it now". The Whitworth has always kept all its records, so she can know that in 1937 if the British Museum wanted to borrow some of the Turners they wrapped them in brown paper and put them on the train and someone came and collected them, hopefully.

She can bear that in mind that that was how it was looked after earlier in its career and think about how she wants to look at it now and what we will want to do in the future.

KEN ARNOLD: It's a balance between decay and reconstruction, isn't it? I mean, most works of art have had varnish stripped off them and reapplied and most steam engines have had pistons replaced.

NICK DODD: Ultimately it's a political decision, isn't it? However much science we apply to this process, ultimately you're taking a judgement decision.

To put it on the train in brown paper, that would be one judgement and who's to say that's not necessarily a good way of circulating stuff if nobody knows what's inside the brown paper?

I think that we've created a canon that we're finding difficult to make relevant for the change circumstances in which museums now find themselves.

It could be another canon, but it just happens to be that this is one of our issues that we need to face and we need to decide. We may decide that what we've got right now is the right thing, but we do need to place it in front of people and say, "Do we really think this is essential for the purposes of being able to tour collections for temporary exhibitions or otherwise? That this is an appropriate way of going forward forever."

SHARON HEAL: Isn't it the case that the conservators will only conserve to the standard that they're asked to conserve to?

NICK DODD: Yes, that's right; it's political.

SARAH TINSLEY: But it's also about risk management, isn't it? I mean, what is the risk for letting this go to this historic house that cannot support the same kind of conditions and how do you mitigate the risk? I think it's being brave enough to take those steps to say, "Actually, we can do this and we'll do it in this way".

One of the groups that I've mentioned is the Bizot Group, which is an international group of directors who meet and they are doing a bit of research into kind of environmental conditions.

I'm just simplifying this, but if you take relative humidity, we ask for it to be X; what happens if it's X minus 3? I mean, if we could all agree that it would be less, what is the consequence of that? I don't know the timeframe for that, but it's the beginning of something to review some of these.

ERNST VEGELIN: I think that's certainly important, but if you looked at it from the other side I still believe fundamentally there is a problem with too many large institutions organising large exhibitions on the same high-yield subjects, and that is also creating a problem.

So we will lend our van Gogh landscape to the RA because that's an important show; a new publication on his letters and the drawings and the paintings and the letters and our paintings illustrated in one of the letters.

We'll lend it to an exhibition in Switzerland coming up which is about landscapes in van Gogh and seasonality. But there are probably three or four further requests in the pipeline, which will get to us by the end of the year.

One of the outcomes, I hope, of the recession is that people will start to think of a slightly different model of exhibition and sort of re-embrace the virtues of a smaller exhibition that offers visitors a different type of experience, actually, 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.

That's definitely swimming against the tide and I'm aware of that, but it's certainly something that we have tried to do by having smaller exhibitions with fewer objects and encourage people to spend more time looking at those in detail and thinking about them in depth. I think more van Gogh exhibitions is probably not what we need now.

KATHLEEN SORIANO: I don't think it is swimming against the tide and I think what we need is we need both, actually. I completely agree with you that, as I said earlier, 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 - 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, despite the weight of the catalogue that you might have to carry around afterwards.

But if I could just go back to the sustainability issue because I think this is important, and I'm sure Nick would agree, that we must not undervalue the role of the conservators in leading this change. This isn't about museum professionals sitting here and saying, "Conservators are asking too much and they don't understand".

This is about museum professionals understanding that they have the expertise so need to lead us through the changes that are required.

NICK DODD: I would agree. I mean, it's not an attack on conservators; it's about being locked into a particular canon that may be out of date, or becoming out of date, or becoming open to conjecture again in a way that it hasn't been for 20 years.

KATHLEEN SORIANO: But the whole move at the Trust that's been led by the conservation teams.

NICK DODD: Yes, but it probably requires something beyond that, because it is about a much bigger thing; it's about a canon that you all ascribe to or need to change jointly, so we all need to be addressing it in a way.

KEN ARNOLD: There is a need for quite a lot more flexibility, plurality, across the whole piece, isn't there? So we need to get different models of exhibitions.

Instead of small exhibitions which don't involve great disappointment when you arrive, so a beginning of a sense of people turning up having an expectation that all exhibitions aren't Tutankhamun again.

Then there is a problem of applying the same conservation standards to every object or notionally that sense in which as soon as you understand how a piece of paper is degrading then that has to be the way every object on paper is - that sense in which you do become more flexible, you have a case-by-case approach to some of this.

Certainly with conservation staff, it often seems to be that it is very much about involving them as part of the exhibition team very 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 that are guarding objects against the incursions of other professional staff it is being more involved from the start.

NICK DODD: I would also like to put a case down that says lenders need to consider other things other than whether it's about a single-artist show or about a themed show or whatever.

They need to consider regional equity, and national collections and collections in London have issues of regional equity about where their pictures go. Is it right that a picture should go to New York before it's ever been to Manchester?

Is it right that something should have its first sight somewhere in another country, or indeed where it's impossible for a regional museum to borrow a work of art that belongs to the state, belongs to the nation, rather than it being shipped off somewhere in a major show? I think there are other aspects to the national collections other than whether it's academically or curatorially in one kind of show or another.

I would also suggest that London has a surfeit of art and of activity, so there is a certain sort of ennui sets in sometimes it's all sort of just another great show and another great show.

It's not the case in the rest of Britain. Even in the major cities, even in Manchester, which is probably, in terms of culture, it's probably the most cosmopolitan, or perhaps Liverpool was this last year, but the majority of cities and towns, the idea that you might have a van Gogh in your town in your museum is incredible.

We had a Five Masters of Imagination years ago I think it came from the National Portrait Gallery, but it was the biggest audience we've ever had for one of our galleries, because it had five masterpieces from the 19th century in that show.

We had ten Leonardo da Vinci's a few years ago from the Royal Collection on one of those Royal progress sessions around Britain. The numbers of people to that were absolutely astonishing, whereas people would probably pass it by in London.

I think you cannot underestimate the power of the iconic item, the iconic cultural artefact, whether it's art or anything else for that matter, in parts of the world where historically you have been undersupplied.

VAUGHAN ALLEN: It comes back to that dissonance, I guess, between those of us who work in the trade and go around with a particular eye when we go and see other exhibitions and want to see something new and want to see something different and actually going back to the Klee example, for the ordinary punter, going to see a Klee exhibition; in many cases they just want to see as many as possible in the chronological progression and is that just as valid as trying to then do something new with it and open it up?

SARAH TINSLEY: Well, in some respects it is just as valid because if that's their only opportunity to see it they have they can see it.

VAUGHAN ALLEN: Which it is, for many punters.

SARAH TINSLEY: Yes, it is. The problem is you can do a disservice to that exhibition and to then their experience of that artist. I mean, I think that was the point really that I was trying to make: just because you can do it doesn't necessarily make it good and the experience isn't good. That's all about kind of the value that they then place on that, I think.

NICK DODD: You've also got the added thing of that if you do have one of these major shows, the people who have lent to that show won't lend again, so that show has an opportunity cost for the next person who wishes to show works by Klee or anybody else but they can't get that work because it's been in this mega-show.

If that mega-show is actually not very good, the chances of you being able to then do a better one are much reduced as a result because you just can't get the loan.

SHARON HEAL: Can we just talk a little bit about how we judge the success of temporary exhibitions?

MARIA BALSHAW: In terms of numbers the two most successful exhibitions in the last 15 years for the Whitworth have been the current one, obviously because it's marvellous, and one that was about 10 years ago called Treasures of the North, which was co-organised with Christie's and absolutely 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 has done since and we would never repeat it, but it did pull in a lot of people and it is a very good lesson for why numbers aren't a very good measure of the success of an exhibition. Because, actually, it did quite a bad thing to the organisation and to perceptions of what a gallery like the Whitworth might be for.

SARAH TINSLEY: It's multiple things really that make a successful exhibition and attendance figures is only one of those because it's about your press reviews, it's about your visitor comments, it's about your sales of the catalogue, if you have one. It's so many different things, I think.

Measures of success need to be looked at in the round. How many people came to the learning programmes or the events? They're all part and parcel of it.

The problem is that people often just consider the attendance figure and if you haven't met your target it seems that wasn't a success. I think that is dangerous because it is about other things; did you find that there was new research; were there other benefits for the institution?

NICK DODD: But doesn't this all come down to what you set out to achieve?

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 through the till in order to make sure you're still there in six months' time then numbers are the most important thing that you're trying to drive at.

I'm sure plenty of people have had experience of where you really do need to be successful with numbers through the door in order that you can be less successful with your next show and be there to have the rewards from that.

VAUGHAN ALLEN: For us, because we're only temporary shows with a few on at the same time, we can do the more aggressively political, interesting shows, but then when it comes around to the school holidays, we need 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 so that you can look yourself in the mirror when you get out of bed in the morning, because you're doing something valuable with those visitors, and the quite banal basic things that you need to do; getting the money from the café and all that sort of stuff.

KEN ARNOLD: I'm struck by how little we make of our own peers in terms of working out what we think of our programme. After we'd been open for about a year we got about a dozen people from the museum sector, and also scientists and artists and asked them what they thought.

We're not the only people to do that, but that sense of inviting other people who do this stuff all the time to come so you get your evidence from your visitors and you get your evidence from your reviews and you get your evidence from the people who work in the institution. I was really struck by how valuable it was and how unusual it is to get other respected colleagues to pass comment.

KATHLEEN SORIANO: It's part of Brian McMaster's excellence recommendations, peer review. I know the Portrait Gallery has been one of the DCMS pilot organisations. I think it has tremendous value. My big concern is when it then becomes used as a point-scoring activity against other institutions.

MARIA BALSHAW: Within academia we use a peer-review model and have to as part of the university's annual assessment process But Kathleen is absolutely right. The research exercise for academics has become directly about getting financial resource into the institution, but if you speak to individual academics, or if you speak to my colleagues at the gallery or the museum, the thing that's most valuable about the process is not that, but it's about the critical feedback that you get that is from peers that you respect.

I think academics within the subject disciplines have done quite a lot to resist government pressure around, "This all equals money". They do a really thorough and quite incredible job of reviewing each other's work. There's so much to be drawn from that that doesn't take us down a route of point-scoring and peer comparison.

KATHLEEN SORIANO: We should allow ourselves a variety of measurements across exhibitions in exactly the way you described. 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, and it's having that flexibility.

As you say, identifying what it is you're trying to achieve with that particular show right at the start. I think an intelligent organisation has a balance of that across a three-year programme so that you don't then have to deliver five different models over the course of one year, which is impossible with one exhibition space, or two if you're lucky.

KEN ARNOLD: But also then you need to be able to get a sense of good programmes rather than just good exhibitions. So in the end it's the mixture of different shows and the one show takes you into a subject you've never thought of and another does a broad theme, or whatever, that can end up being just as valuable as an individual exhibition.

ERNST VEGELIN: I'd like there to be some more sort of weight also given to the actual experience that the visitor has in the exhibition as criteria. Our most successful recent show was one room; this is an exhibition of our own permanent collection, drawings, prints, letters, paintings, and new research on that. It got about 85,000 people from just a one-room show.

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

MARIA BALSHAW: I absolutely agree because it comes down to: lots of people came, but did any of them actually like it?

It's the question we really ought to ask ourselves because quite often they might be coming because it's something they've heard of or a very famous image is used in the marketing. What they experience when they get there can be the absolute opposite of what you might have intended.

I think London institutions suffer in that way particularly at the moment. I haven't had a nice experience at Tate Modern in a temporary exhibition for ages, and that isn't because there haven't been lovely shows, but I can't get here very often for 9am, which is the only time you would see them without falling over people.

One of the things I think we're not very good at is finding ways to catch qualitative feedback. We talk about this all the time but we're still rubbish at it.

KATHLEEN SORIANO: I do question the quality of the visitor experience in the London metropolitan venues, as opposed to the regional museums and galleries where I think the quality of the visitor experience has been prioritised for a longer period. So I think there's much to be done in London.

NICK DODD: I wouldn't want to disparage the visitor number thing; I think it's really, really important. Because what visitor numbers do, apart from being the bold thing about how many people attend, they're a proxy for all kinds of other activity and behaviours and experiences.

They speak about the quality of experience, they speak about the quality of the way that the organisation treats and manages its visitor flow and the numbers of people passing through it and the way it's marketed and advertised, all those kind of things, 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".

MARIA BALSHAW: What's been most useful recently is our visitor services staff saying that in Subversive Spaces they have noticed a qualitative shift in how visitors talk to them.

They're talking to them for longer, they're asking more questions about the exhibition and they're asking unusual questions. Now, triangulating the fact that we've got a lot of visitors coming through that show, with that information it's really powerful and we're starting to understand then why it's working well as an exhibition because it is making people engage with the ideas.

KEN ARNOLD: The other thing surely is don't we have to trust ourselves a bit, there is a sense in which we want to seek evidence and I'm convinced by everything everyone says here, all of that counts, but actually also I think: I've been doing this for 20 or 30 years (and it's difficult not to squirm as one says this) but I think I know what good exhibitions look like and I think we have to stick up sometimes within our own organisations, to hold on to projects.

It's not just ask the person who runs it what the best project is, but I think that is part of our role, to some extent, is to work out for ourselves, and then to make a meal of that and to hopefully to be convincing about why those projects are good.

VAUGHAN ALLEN: I think that's a problem with trying to outline the qualitative research and there's a sort of preconception which comes from the museum gallery trade that sees these shows as: "This is what we would like them to be" and working their way up this chain. I think one of the wonders of, say, young British art particularly was actually to wander around and listen to people talking in The Saatchi Gallery and, actually, they were just having a jolly good time going, "My daughter [or my whatever] could have done that" and actually that was an incredibly bonding experience for an awful lot of people and incredibly valid.

Actually, that will probably stay with them as long as something which we would like to think was terribly beautiful and whatever would. I rely hugely on what my stewards tell me, what people are running up to them and telling them, and what teenagers have scribbled in books, as long as they're not, "Darryl loves …".

KATHLEEN SORIANO: But your reference to the Saatchi experience, I think again goes back to relevance and you don't know always know when you've got it.

I remember one of the most powerful moments for me was when I was going to the pub on a Friday night and everybody was talking about Damien Hirst. It was almost like art had come out of the galleries into the public domain.

SHARON HEAL: Can we explore what we would like to see and what the possibility is for the future of temporary exhibitions.

NICK DODD: I have two things I want to say. One of them is we have just 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 the fact that shows rarely run for any length of time. We just do it the once and then kick it into touch and forget about it forever.

We don't have any mechanisms currently where we universalise the process of exhibition-making because the same show, like with repertory theatre, could tour a wide variety of activity, but we don't do that. The private sector does; we don't.

The second one is that we need to be doing more in partnership. We need to have more consortiums, we need to have more groups. They're very much more complicated to organise, they're more expensive in their initial start-up, but they do create opportunities which wouldn't otherwise exist.

In my experience of working with the National Portrait Gallery and with the Tate and with the V&A on joint partnerships on a series of shows over the last ten years has been that we would not have had the quality of shows or the opportunity to show our citizens what's available without those partnerships.

KATHLEEN SORIANO: I'd like to see a greater focus on the relationship between audience and an 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. That will also require the confidence and support of our peer organisations. I think that's number one.

KEN ARNOLD: Given how absolutely crucial exhibitions are to the public consumption of galleries and museums, I think more thoughtful discussion, more stirring around the issue.

My other thing, which we haven't talked very much about, is curators. I have a genius team here. I worry a lot about what happens when they get too big for their boots and move on. Where do the next batch of those people come from? Where is the training? Why isn't there a temporary exhibition curator's group that meets?

That sense of nurturing curators has been a very important part of the public intellectual sphere. They do make ideas and bring them out into the general world in a way that I think is incredibly important for culture in general. I think we need to do more to nurture those people to give them a sense of self confidence, to give them training etc.

MARIA BALSHAW: I echo that. We've developed an assistant curator's role that involves all of that kind of training so that they work under whoever is leading an exhibition so that they develop the capacity to do it. But it links to my larger point, which is I'd like to see us all being fleet of foot and cheaper and turn things over quicker and take more risks.

One of the things that really surprised me after coming to the Whitworth was discovering how much else other people spent on making their temporary exhibitions.

The tradition at the Whitworth had always been to make exhibitions very, very cheaply and not of low quality, but it was just because they were the organisational dimensions. So people learnt how to do it in a relatively fast and cost-effective way because there was no other choice. I think that's also your experience at Urbis.

It's tremendously liberating. We've benefited from an expansion of our funding, but we've tried not to let that make things get more expensive just because they can.

I'd like us to hold to that because I'm not sure I want things to go on tour like repertory theatre, but I do 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 leftfield and pushes the boundaries a bit.

Because the next thing will be more mainstream and will pull in larger numbers. I think we need that anyway, but we particularly need it in this economic climate.

VAUGHAN ALLEN: I'd just echo that. Clearly, I think we need more quick hits, more smaller-scale things that hit every subject that you can think of in interesting, new ways.

That question about new curators coming through; I had a wonderful conversation with one of my curatorial team when we're looking at a particular budget of around £45,000 or £50,000 for an exhibition, I thought I could find another £20,000 and she just looked at me blankly and said, "What would I do with it?"

Well, perhaps a nice conversation for a chief exec to have, but there's something about that experience of actually having to work the phones to get some nice carpet in from somebody who might sponsor it. I think that is a really good lesson for people to have.

ERNST VEGELIN: In my view I think that in the recent years of plenty things have become very bloated and I think 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 perhaps 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.

I don't see that as a retrenchment; I see that more as being more ambitious about what exhibitions could do beyond just being entertainment and spectacle. Also, in what they could do for our visitors and what we expect our visitors might be coming for and what they might be expecting from exhibitions.

SARAH TINSLEY: Mine are about partnership and sharing because once you start a partnership you don't want to end it too quickly, it develops over time. I think it harks back to what Nick said about that and I think we need to continue to work it out and for us to maintain the partnerships we have, but also to develop new ones.

We are in a very particular time and we don't know how it's going to evolve over the next 18 months, two years and beyond, and I think that may change quite a lot about how we think about things. I think having the ability to network into others who aren't just perhaps our usual group of people will be very important.

For more features, news, comment and reviews, click here