When Victor Hugo wrote that necessity is the mother of invention I doubt he was thinking much about museums and the curatorial ingenuity needed these days to keep them and their collections thriving.
But if you work in museums it won’t come as a surprise to hear that acquiring new work – once the very soul of curatorship – is rarely a priority these days. Collecting is in danger of becoming something of a forgotten art, and with funding ever scarcer, there are very few signs of respite.
To understand this seemingly inexorable downward trend and to start to look at what can be done, the Art Fund has carried out some research. Some of our findings are very positive. For example, the need to find new ways of keeping collections fresh has made curators notably inventive.
But only 2 per cent of the 276 museums surveyed said that collecting was their highest priority and a shocking 50 per cent said they were unable to allocate any money at all to collecting, and spending on acquisitions as a proportion of income was falling.
Their response has been to work more innovatively in terms of partnerships. Museums are increasingly turning to methods such as borrowing to bring new work into their institutions. Forty-seven per cent of museums told us that displaying loaned works was on the up and 59 per cent expected this trend to rise.
In the past two years the Art Fund has witnessed at first hand what temporary loans can bring to regional museums through its sponsorship of the Artist Rooms tour, drawn from the former collection of art dealer Anthony d’Offay.
This year 21 British museums and galleries from Llandudno to Fort William are able to show “rooms” from the collection, reaching and inspiring audiences that might otherwise never have seen art of this kind and quality at first hand.
Joint acquisitions are clearly a model for the future too. Thirteen per cent of museums said that joint purchases had increased since we last ran our Collecting Challenge survey in 2006 and 20 per cent said they expected to make more joint acquisitions in future.
One recent example of this has been the collaboration of Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery with the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery in Stoke-on-Trent to acquire the Staffordshire Hoard, a process supported by the Art Fund’s £3.3m fundraising campaign.
The hoard attracted speculation from the moment it was unearthed – not least about where it should end up. Happily, a consensus emerged that its rightful home was in the West Midlands, where it had been found.
The treasure’s valuation could have put it beyond the reach of a single museum but a partnership between Stoke and Birmingham meant that the groundswell of local interest in the hoard was rapidly and efficiently harnessed.
Together, with a little help from their many friends across the country, including the staunch support and expertise of the British Museum, a monumental acquisition was successfully made.
But partnership working aside, the research has shown that museums are worried – and rightly so. Sixty-eight per cent believe that the government’s next priority for museums should be to commit to maintaining core funding and 83 per cent supported the introduction of a tax incentive to encourage lifetime gifts to museums – something the Art Fund has been advocating for years.
While this would benefit museums, it also shows that “passively” acquiring works is the best that some museums are able to manage to boost their collections: indeed 60 per cent said that the most common way they acquired was by gift, not by purchase.
Those museums that are regularly making purchases have told us that they are increasingly reliant on external funding sources and 62 per cent of the museums surveyed had applied to the Art Fund for assistance in the past five years. Two-thirds said avoiding cuts after the election was the biggest challenge, with local authority museums considered most vulnerable.
Personally, I am most concerned about the longer-term impact all this will have on curators. With the ability and will to acquire sliding down the priority list, curatorial skills are bound to suffer steadily and diminish in the long term.
Twenty per cent of museums said that avoiding staff cuts and the loss of expertise posed the biggest challenge to collecting and 30 per cent said that a shortage of specialist staff was currently an obstacle. Once expert knowledge disappears from an institution it is very hard to replace.
I think it should be a priority for us all do our utmost to preserve curatorial scholarship – the passion for and knowledge of the object – for the sake of the next generation of museum goers. Without nurturing understanding and love for collections, and without curators to inspire people through their knowhow, insights and ideas, museums are nothing.
Stephen Deuchar is the director of the Art Fund
But if you work in museums it won’t come as a surprise to hear that acquiring new work – once the very soul of curatorship – is rarely a priority these days. Collecting is in danger of becoming something of a forgotten art, and with funding ever scarcer, there are very few signs of respite.
To understand this seemingly inexorable downward trend and to start to look at what can be done, the Art Fund has carried out some research. Some of our findings are very positive. For example, the need to find new ways of keeping collections fresh has made curators notably inventive.
But only 2 per cent of the 276 museums surveyed said that collecting was their highest priority and a shocking 50 per cent said they were unable to allocate any money at all to collecting, and spending on acquisitions as a proportion of income was falling.
Their response has been to work more innovatively in terms of partnerships. Museums are increasingly turning to methods such as borrowing to bring new work into their institutions. Forty-seven per cent of museums told us that displaying loaned works was on the up and 59 per cent expected this trend to rise.
In the past two years the Art Fund has witnessed at first hand what temporary loans can bring to regional museums through its sponsorship of the Artist Rooms tour, drawn from the former collection of art dealer Anthony d’Offay.
This year 21 British museums and galleries from Llandudno to Fort William are able to show “rooms” from the collection, reaching and inspiring audiences that might otherwise never have seen art of this kind and quality at first hand.
Joint acquisitions are clearly a model for the future too. Thirteen per cent of museums said that joint purchases had increased since we last ran our Collecting Challenge survey in 2006 and 20 per cent said they expected to make more joint acquisitions in future.
One recent example of this has been the collaboration of Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery with the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery in Stoke-on-Trent to acquire the Staffordshire Hoard, a process supported by the Art Fund’s £3.3m fundraising campaign.
The hoard attracted speculation from the moment it was unearthed – not least about where it should end up. Happily, a consensus emerged that its rightful home was in the West Midlands, where it had been found.
The treasure’s valuation could have put it beyond the reach of a single museum but a partnership between Stoke and Birmingham meant that the groundswell of local interest in the hoard was rapidly and efficiently harnessed.
Together, with a little help from their many friends across the country, including the staunch support and expertise of the British Museum, a monumental acquisition was successfully made.
But partnership working aside, the research has shown that museums are worried – and rightly so. Sixty-eight per cent believe that the government’s next priority for museums should be to commit to maintaining core funding and 83 per cent supported the introduction of a tax incentive to encourage lifetime gifts to museums – something the Art Fund has been advocating for years.
While this would benefit museums, it also shows that “passively” acquiring works is the best that some museums are able to manage to boost their collections: indeed 60 per cent said that the most common way they acquired was by gift, not by purchase.
Those museums that are regularly making purchases have told us that they are increasingly reliant on external funding sources and 62 per cent of the museums surveyed had applied to the Art Fund for assistance in the past five years. Two-thirds said avoiding cuts after the election was the biggest challenge, with local authority museums considered most vulnerable.
Personally, I am most concerned about the longer-term impact all this will have on curators. With the ability and will to acquire sliding down the priority list, curatorial skills are bound to suffer steadily and diminish in the long term.
Twenty per cent of museums said that avoiding staff cuts and the loss of expertise posed the biggest challenge to collecting and 30 per cent said that a shortage of specialist staff was currently an obstacle. Once expert knowledge disappears from an institution it is very hard to replace.
I think it should be a priority for us all do our utmost to preserve curatorial scholarship – the passion for and knowledge of the object – for the sake of the next generation of museum goers. Without nurturing understanding and love for collections, and without curators to inspire people through their knowhow, insights and ideas, museums are nothing.
Stephen Deuchar is the director of the Art Fund
