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Thursday 4 December 2008

Exhibition suspicion

Martin Gayford questions the point of art shows. Should they educate or give pleasure — or both?

His case, briefly, is that temporary — ephemeral — shows are almost always held with an ulterior motive. Often, in the past, that has been a political one, such as national aggrandisement. In a chapter entitled ‘Botticelli in the Service of Fascism’, he narrated how the Royal Academy’s Italian art exhibition of 1930 was organised with the personal co-operation of Mussolini (who happened to be a friend of Lady Chamberlain, wife of the then foreign secretary). The purpose of this astonishing array of masterpieces was to emphasise the greatness of Italy in the past, and the beneficence of the fascist government in the present.

It succeeded; even the New Statesman was grateful. Some exhibitions still have an obvious political aspect. The First Emperor, recently at the British Museum, for example, was only possible with the active co-operation of the Chinese government; the same is true of From Russia at the Royal Academy. But most exhibitions, Haskell contended, have as their aim the aggrandisement of the museums that hold them — the maximisation of their attendance, fame, income and so forth. And many, if not most, of the exhibitions that constantly proliferate around the world are, he argued, ‘pointless’.

By that, he meant that they serve no scholarly purpose, don’t increase knowledge of an artist, style, medium or period. The truth is that some exhibitions do this — they may indeed focus minds and eyes on a subject as little else can — and some do not, but do cause a lot of pleasure to the public. It would be hard to argue that From Russia extended scholarly understanding of anything much, but it was as hard to move in Burlington House while it was on as Maria Bicknell found it at the British Institute in 1814.

Haskell worried that ‘pointless’ exhibitions may be positively harmful — because they cause works of art to be shipped about and possibly damaged, they distract the energy of art historians and curators, which would be better spent in other ways. I suspect that such considerations are at the back of the mind of our new director of the National Gallery.

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