IN THEIR OWN WORDS: No. 2 – The Curse of (revenue-generating, thought-precluding) Audio-guides
It’s official: museum audio guides stop people from looking at pictures. It is now clear that it would better to dump them – the audio guides, that is.
SYDNEY SCHAEFER, Staff Photographer. Clay Cofer, an Art Team member at the Barnes Foundation, does a pop-up gallery talk for visitors.
Nick Feldman photo. Courtesy Barnes Foundation. The Barnes Foundation Art Team members (from left) Tamara Mason, Ann Moss, Miriam Klingler, Clay Cofer, Amy Gillette, Florence Hsu, and Sara Land.
“…The Art Team is part of the Barnes’ [i. e. The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia] continuing effort to deepen its ties with its audience. Initiated by Shelley Bernstein, chief experience officer and deputy director of audience engagement, probably best known for her work with digital technology, the Art Team is notable for its relative lack of tech, at least for now.
“‘You begin with the most meaningful thing first,’ Bernstein said, alluding to engagement efforts. ‘So this is what we call the human-interaction layer. It’s not about technology. It’s not about providing people with a thing or device. It’s thinking about what human interaction should be in the galleries and what we want that to be and trying to get that right before layering in other things.’
“First came some testing. Perhaps surprisingly, Bernstein discovered that people spent a lot more time in the galleries without an audio tour guide (110 minutes) than with one (88 minutes).
“Why? Visitors always said they love and want the audio tour, she said. But they spend less time with the art when an audio tour is in play. People want to talk to one another. They even remove the audio tours.
“Bernstein checked with colleagues at other institutions, notably the Broad museum in Los Angeles, which has assigned a group to do everything from taking tickets to chatting about the collection with visitors.
“The Art Team is a result of these conversations and simultaneous visitor research. Audio tours were retired. Visitors were launched tech-naked.”
Brilliant. Never mind the art jargon, this account in The Inquirer (“Art Team is Barnes Foundation’s new twist on visitor ‘engagement’”) is a most heartening and culturally healthy development. Consider this passage:
“Orbe caught Cofer’s rap in a small gallery filled with a Goya, a Renoir, a Manet, a de Chirico, and several other paintings, and pieces of ironwork and furniture.
“‘Goya is a very important anchor from the past,’ Cofer said to the people crowding the room. He swiped through iPad images. Back and forth.
“Goya harks back to Frans Hals, he told them. Manet, across the room, relates to Hals, as well. Consider Goya’s brushstrokes, said Cofer. Consider the rosy complexion on his portrait here. Is it not like the rosy complexion of the Renoir portrait far down on the wall?
“Visitors watch Cofer’s almost magical manipulation of his iPad images. And then, five or so minutes are up and he’s gone.”
For one thing, that intervention sounds very much in the spirit of Barnes’ educational notions: let art speak through its own variously assembled images. More than that, it sounds positively subversive and revolutionary in terms of today’s museum practice. Here is a man (it could be a woman, of course) who talks about art as art and who is clearly alert to artists’ practices and to the distinctive, culturally-enriching uses to which past artists-of-talent, so to speak, have put them. In talking, he shows, he engages with images – he sees the eloquent testimony of brushstrokes (see picture below). How much more appropriate is that than the museum world’s now bog-standard aesthetically obtuse didactic and patronising “story-telling”? (Whenever people talk of “Art and its Stories”, we should all run a cultural mile: those who would convert art into class, sex or other politics are, by definition, technically philistine and therefore unfit for purpose.)
Is this historic photograph above – of a detail of Frans Hals brushwork – not worth a thousand of anybody’s words?
Once, when looking closely at Titian’s (now restoration-wrecked) Bacchus and Ariadne in a quiet lunch-time spell at the National Gallery, I half-registered a voice saying “I’m about to start talking about the painting” but, absorbed in thought, did not heed it. The phrase was politely repeated. When I turned I saw not only the NG badge-wearing speaker but an entire party of elderly grown-ups sitting on little fold-up stools like expectant primary school children. They were asked to identify the brightest colour in the picture. Hands shot up – “Blue!” they chorused. “That’s right”, the speaker said and she then asked: “and what is the pigment?” More raised hands and then a riff about lapis lazuli and its great expensiveness. Ariadne, the class learnt, was an abused and dumped woman whose depiction had been commissioned by a super-rich man for his private engendered-gaze…John Berger would have been so proud.
I wandered off and encountered another guide; another seated party (this time of teenagers sitting on the floor) in another gallery. The guide – a true “Dave Spart” – was explaining how Uccello’s Battle of San Romano was a “celebration” (Berger again) of capitalists’ hired mercenaries…and imperialist blood-letting.
On another occasion I went to re-examine the attributed Rubens Samson and Delilah without noticing a row of head-phoned tourists perched on a bench in the middle of the gallery. They soon began tutting. It seemed that by standing and looking at the painting I had breached cinema etiquette: the seated customers could no longer match the (paid-for) voice-in-their-heads to the image on the screen. They’ll have usherettes soon, selling ice cream.
The greatest benefit/privilege/luxury of museums – the opportunity for people to examine works of art at their own pace while thinking their own thoughts – is being systematically denied by museum staffs grinding their own (- but DCMS-demanded) axes and harvesting cash from contraptions. Such, no less than the cumulative debilitation of the artefacts in the name of the name their “conservation”, constitutes a crime against art and an injury to people.
Michael Daley, 6 March 2018
CODA – AN OPEN LETTER:
Dear all
The next issue of British art periodical The Jackdaw (May) will contain a statement against the current tendency in arts management to apply identity politics. The text is below. It does not contain any aesthetic, political or stylistic subtext. It simply asks for those in the art world to judge art works individually and on merit.
I and a number of artists, editors, writers and others will be signing the text. If you would like to add your name and how you would like it to be presented (i.e. “Dr Robert XX, art historian”, “Sarah XX, artist”) then please email David Lee, editor of The Jackdaw, at david.lee@thejackdaw.co.uk (T: +44 7773 673 722).
You are welcome to forward this email to anyone in the art world who may wish to add their name.
Thank you.
Regards
Alexander Adams
Against Identity Politics in Arts Programming
1) Art should be judged primarily on its intrinsic merit.
2) Artists should not be judged on their demographic characteristics but upon their merits as demonstrated through their production.
3) There should be no quotas (official or unspoken) along demographic lines regarding art programming, prizes, awards, bursaries, exhibitions and acquisitions, as well as the staffing of arts organisations.
4) Arts organisations should be staffed by individuals with sufficient competence, experience and personal attributes to make them suitable for their positions. In their official roles, they should be committed to serve art and their organisation not their private political convictions.
5) Consumers of art should not be patronised but treated as individuals of unique tastes and interests. If members of the public choose not to engage with art then that is not a failure; it is the choice of individuals. There should be no targets for audiences in terms of demographic characteristics.
6) It is healthy for opinions of various political outlooks to exist within the arts. It is important for reasoned dissent to be heard in order to combat the emergence of an unhealthy political monoculture.
We believe that if these principles are applied then the arts – and public life more widely – will benefit.
Yours, etc.
Dicing with Art and Earning Approval
Since Monday the Goyas and the Canalettos of the National Gallery’s rooms 38 and 39 have received half of their previous levels of surveillance. Warders are being made responsible for two rooms instead of one. The gallery contends that its rolling programme of reductions will improve surveillance, on a belief that perambulatory warders will be more alert and effective as “policing” presences than ones who combine sedentary supervision with opportunities to congregate and chat at the ends of their respective galleries.
The fact remains that halving staff coverage halves the quantity of surveillance in galleries whether or not its quality improves marginally or even significantly. The most alert and attentive persons cannot be in two places at once. They have only a single pair of eyes. They cannot see through walls or screens. Despite such intractable realities and inevitable “incidents” (on the expectation of which conservation staff are on permanent stand-by), the Gallery has claimed an endorsement of its arrangements from the National Security Adviser who works for the MLA (Museums, Libraries and Archives). Soon after the National Security Adviser had approved the National Gallery’s reductions, a double act of vandalism occurred. On July 16th (as we reported on July 20th, and the Guardian today discusses), two Poussin paintings were attacked and defaced in a room where the warder was also responsible for the adjacent gallery. Apart from a terse National Gallery statement, near silence has been maintained.
We also cited an artist visitor to the Tate who, on complaining to a warder about people standing in front of paintings while having their photographs taken, was told that this is now allowed because staff cut-backs make it impossible to enforce gallery rules. If that is the case – and a second source now reports the same disturbances at the Tate – does this new arrangement also have the approval of the National Security Adviser? When in July 1994 the Tate lost two Turner paintings loaned to a gallery in Frankfurt that shared its premises with a music college and had no perimeter defences, it issued a self-exculpatory press release:
“The Tate and other British national collections have previously lent works to the Schirn Kunsthalle without incident… Built in 1984 the Schirn Kunsthalle is fitted with modern alarm systems to detect both intruders and fire. It is approved by the National Security Adviser for loans from British galleries…”
On the day of that apologia (29 July 1994) the Tate’s Director of Programmes, Sandy Nairne, visited the gallery and was promptly told by the Frankfurt police “Your pictures have been taken hostage”. He soon learned that Serbian gangsters had employed thieves to take the paintings and that Frankfurt has a Serbian mafia which runs the city’s red light district and associated crimes. He learned that the theft was an inside job with masked men overpowering the night guard just after he had shut the front door as fourteen security staff (employed by a Frankfurt security firm) had departed and just before he was due to turn on the alarm systems. Nairne ruefully retraced the guard’s steps from the door:
“I saw the onward route taken by the guard, surrounded, so it appeared to me, with places where thieves might hide after closing time – the back stairs? Behind partitions on the mezzanine? An entry point from the sister institution, the music school? Any of these seemed workable as places from which to launch an internal attack. It was already clear that this theft was of a kind known as a ‘stay-behind’. ”
Whether or not the National Security Adviser evaluates buildings’ interiors in such an attentive manner or does so on paper submissions alone, the possibility of “stay-behinds” will likely be present in National Gallery minds: one of the paintings which this week became subject to NSA-approved semi-surveillance – Goya’s portrait bust of the Duke of Wellington (see Fig. 1) – was a victim of a “stay-behind” theft at the gallery on August 3rd 1961 while left hanging on a screen facing the main entrance.
The Goya was held for four years, the Tate Turners for six and eight years respectively. The recovery of the first Turner was kept secret and the painting was hidden to be produced at a Good News press conference on the (expected) recovery of the second painting. Learning of an imminent newspaper story on the recovery of the painting from Serbian criminals, the Tate produced a press statement, in the name of the director, which misleadingly implied that no knowledge existed of the paintings’ whereabouts and that no negotiations were taking place. Because the Tate was in fact engaged in protracted negotiations about the mechanisms of buying back the paintings for the full £3.1m ransom demanded by the Serbians, the gallery and the Metropolitan Police pursued a joint policy of secrecy and disinformation. It has been revealed that in the Tate’s “recovery operation” no serious attempt was made to catch the criminals holding the paintings – the aim being to get the ransomed pictures back at all costs. Has the National Security Adviser taken a view on the advisability and security ramifications of a national museum that is a registered charity using charitable monies to pay a £3.1m ransom to criminals? If criminals appreciate that museums are now prepared to pay ransoms at 13.4% of insurance payouts might we not expect an increase in thefts?
Shortly after the National Gallery displayed the recovered Goya at a crowded and joyous press conference on 24 May 1965 it received from the police what its director, Philip Hendy, termed “the very embarrassing news” that the thief had turned himself in and would “probably have to be charged”. The news was indeed embarrassing: how to explain the fact that a single portly northern unemployed man of almost pensionable age was able (on his account) to leave through an open lavatory window adjacent to a builder’s ladder in the back yard, while carrying a framed painting that had just been purchased for the gallery and the Nation at great expense and with enormous publicity and fanfare? The thief was charged and, after a highly newsworthy trial, acquitted of stealing the painting but convicted of stealing and destroying the picture’s frame. (On the theft’s legal ramifications – British theft laws were changed as a result of it – see the current History Today.)
The National Gallery disputed the thief’s claimed time of theft on the grounds that the alarm system was said by its security staff to have been on at the time. It could only have been taken, staff insisted, during a very brief period before the alarm had been activated. If so, that too would likely have been an “inside job” as well as a “stay-behind”. Nonetheless, the gallery learned its lesson and increased the numbers of warders. It has not (so far as we know) had another theft since. Odd corners that had carried pictures were no longer allowed to do so and screens used to carry additional pictures were removed. Moreover, the director admitted that even if some subsequent misdemeanours appeared to have been “incited by irresponsible press men, the Press as a whole is doing no less than carrying out its responsibilities in reporting crimes and anti-social acts”.
The theft was reported in the gallery’s 1962-64 and 1965-66 Annual Reports which, by coincidence, contained news of two then recent purchases that were both to suffer catastrophic damage at the gallery: Beccafumi’s panel painting “Marcia” (see right), and Leonardo da Vinci’s famous Cartoon – his working study for the Louvre’s painting “The Virgin and Child with S. Anne and S. John the Baptist”.
In the 1962-64 Report the director spoke of pressures to lend the gallery’s Leonardo drawing – “the costliest and at the same time the most delicate of it acquisitions”. That now more than five centuries old drawing is to be subjected to needless risks in an act of inter-museum horse-trading. In exchange for the Louvre’s newly announced preparedness to lend its version of Leonardo’s “Virgin of the Rocks” to join the National Gallery’s version in the forthcoming Leonardo blockbuster exhibition, the Cartoon will then go to the Louvre to be shown next to the painting for which it was a preparatory study. This swap is celebrated in a National Gallery press release as an historic and “extraordinary collaboration between the National Gallery and the painting department of the Louvre”. No celebratory release was issued by the gallery last September when a Denis Mahon painting, Guercino’s “The Presentation of Jesus in the Temple”, was damaged by a visitor and had to be removed for three days for conservation treatment. No press release was issued three years ago when the Gallery dropped and smashed its Beccafumi panel.
We cannot suppress the thought that this last-minute swap – which adds another Leonardo to the already fate-tempting concentration of his works to be assembled for the forthcoming blockbuster exhibition – might be being hoped to be seen as an endorsement of the National Gallery’s safety record at a time when the new Board of the Princes Czartoryski Museum in Krakow is reconsidering its earlier decision (made against the advice of leading Polish scholars and conservators) to lend Leonardo’s “The Lady with an Ermine” to that exhibition.
In any event, there is a great asymmetry in the relative vulnerabilities of the two loans. The Louvre painting was transferred from its original panel to canvas in 1806. That transfer was performed badly but with the consequence that the surviving paint remains locked into an embrace with the canvas by a permanently too-hard glue. The Cartoon is a work of the utmost delicacy consisting largely of flimsy traces of charcoal and chalk that adhere to the surface of the paper.
No National Security Adviser, no museum curator, no conservator and no art insurance underwriter – can guarantee to works of art either complete safety in transit, or stable environments throughout their multi-vehicle, international travels. Nor can it be assumed that today’s ever-increasing velocity of art trafficking between museums will never produce a catastrophe. Underwriters are already fearful. Robert Hiscox, chairman of Hiscox Ltd has admitted that:
“In insurance underwriting you have to balance your books and there is no way we are getting in enough overall premium income to cover what will one day be an enormous loss when an aeroplane full of valuable art crashes, let alone if it lands on MOMA.”
In 1991 Hiscox put the risks for loaned works as being ten times higher than for works left at home. More recently the insurers AXA put the risk at six times greater. With the irreplaceable and peerless Leonardo Cartoon, the risks of travel should have been judged too horrendous to contemplate by any responsible National Gallery curator. In 1963 an international investigative committee composed of leading conservators, drawings curators, and five National Gallery officials, concluded that this drawing, which is composed of eight sheets of ancient paper glued along their overlapping edges, was “weakened by a highly acidic condition making it brittle and fragile”. Those experts could not “envisage the possibility of strengthening the support to such an extent that the Cartoon will ever be fit to travel.” They highlighted a particular vulnerability:
“Humidity variation is the chief cause of movement within the structure of the Cartoon. Every time the humidity changes, such a moisture-sensitive object expands, contracts or warps; and eventually such movement causes cracking, breaking, detachments of small pieces etc.”
During 1962 the Leonardo Cartoon had been displayed on a screen at the National Gallery while an appeal was made for purchase funds. On June 27th 1962 a man threw a bottle of ink at the drawing. He had a second bottle of ink in a pocket but “before he extracted it he had been seized by an Attendant.” On the 26th of July he was found unfit to plead at the central criminal Court and detained indefinitely. The ink was not spilt but the drawing’s Perspex shield cracked and caused “a chain of scratches about 12 inches in total length and the cutting away of the paper in one very small area.” The Perspex was replaced with a double plastic screen, the first being 1 inch thick.
Since then the work has undergone a major restoration following an attack by an unemployed ex-soldier who entered the National Gallery with a concealed sawn-off shotgun on July 17th 1987. Five minutes before closing time he stood directly in front of the drawing and blasted it with his shotgun, shattering its (by that date) strengthened-glass protection. He, like the man who spray-painted the two Poussins on July 16th, made no attempt to move off or to resist arrest. He was later judged unfit to plead in a court of law, sparing the gallery the embarrassment of a trial. The subsequent restoration of the Cartoon was quietly celebrated in the gallery’s 1989 Technical Bulletin as a miracle of patient technical ingenuity and resourcefulness – which it certainly was – but (characteristically) no attempt was made compare the most damaged area of the drawing after the “restoration” with its appearance before the shooting, and thereby evaluate its artistic as well as its conservation consequences (see right). The most remarkable and eloquent feature of this series of technical studies was the account of the utterly nightmarish fragility of the drawing’s condition given by the then head of Conservation, Martin Wyld. No one who has read his detailed explanation of why it is not safe to undertake even the most otherwise urgent conservation measures, can be in any doubt that this must be the least suitable work in the Gallery to go on a jaunt to Paris – see opposite. We would urge the gallery to reconsider its decision. We expected better of the present director – who has, himself, written eloquently in the recent past of the perils of movement for works of art.
Art and the maintenance of its integrity should be the driver of museum policies. It is wickedly irresponsible of EU bureaucrats to be encouraging inter-museum loans as a means of job-creation, and then to claim of travel-injured works that:
“…in many cases, after the exhibits have been restored, only experts can assess the alteration resulting from the damage. The restored artworks can therefore be exhibited as they are.”
We deceive ourselves if we believe that modern, scientifically assisted restorers can make good any injury that might arise. They cannot, as the best of them will admit. The fifteenth century is not ours to remake – and we should not put what little survives of it at needless risk. This should be appreciated at the National Gallery where Beccafumi’s panel, “Marcia”, was recently dropped and smashed during “de-installation” from a temporary exhibition that had – like the forthcoming Leonardo show – attracted more loans than expected. That panel is now considered too fragile to be loaned outside the gallery – but compared with Leonardo’s Cartoon it is in rude good health. After its recent hasty restoration, it has been relegated to the reserve collection which is open to the public for only a few hours each week. Sad though this, it is a better fate than being on the road – or than being on the floor.
Michael Daley
Comments may be left at: artwatch.uk@gmail.com
Such variations make more difficult any comparative “before” and “after” restoration evaluations of the area of the Virgin’s breast that was most damaged in the shotgun attack. It is also a matter of regret that the gallery so rarely publishes side-by-side directly comparable records of pre- and post-restoration treatments.
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