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The Victoria and Albert Museum: Confrontation of Museum Ideologies

Since the fateful 26 January 1989, and the far-reaching policy decisions taken then by the Trustees of the Victoria and Albert Museum, there has been little attempt to distinguish between cause and effect, and such policy statements as have been made by either the Museum or its Trustees have done little to reduce the general bewilderment. Indeed, to date (mid-July 1989), there has been a growing confusion between principles and personalities, and the onlooker might be forgiven for wondering whether the personality conflicts have not been consciously elevated to a prominence which serves to deflect attention away from the proper scrutiny of those principles. Thus it is very important to maintain the distinction and distance oneself from the personality conflicts, even if individual personalities have loomed large, in order to achieve a balanced assessment of the institutional issues at stake.

The past and present treatment of individual members of staff is of great importance to those directly involved, and its impact on the Museum’s working environment cannot but have an importance for future productivity. On the other hand, the institutional issues at stake are much more difficult to grasp, particularly in circumstances when no particular premium has been placed on openness and clarity of expression. Even experienced outsiders, such as long-established members of the museum profession and former trustees, have watched the saga develop without any real understanding of the issues and their relative importance. Furthermore, the specific organizational decisions taken since January 1989, not least the number of new posts created and filled, have effectively undermined the earlier claim that impending financial disaster had been the driving force behind the forced redundancy of senior curatorial staff and the reorganization of the Museum, and although there is no doubt that the financial crisis is real, much closer attention has begun to be directed at the intellectual foundations of both the reorganization plan and its detailed implementation.

Lord Armstrong, the Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Museum, made in his speech to the House of Lords (22 March 1989) a very serious allegation when he said of its staff: ‘It was clear that there was no prospect of agreement on matters of organisation between those who were deeply and sincerely attached to the status quo and those who accepted that some change was a necessary condition for dealing with the problems and achieving the objectives’. The nature of that status quo at the Museum, in terms of its collections and the intellectual environment in which they are held, has been the subject of many articles opposing the plan to separate the scholarly activities of the Museum from responsibility for the management of its collections. Indeed, for almost all observers of the crisis, the logic of the changes is almost impossible to follow if control of collections is to be separated from those persons with the specialist scholarly and technical knowledge which they gained from administering them!

However, in an interview with the New York Times (25 February 1989) another Trustee of the Museum, Christopher Frayling, who is Professor of Cultural History at the Royal College of Art, is quoted as saying: ‘The changes had caused such heated discussion in the art world because they raised questions about such basic issues as what museums are, who should visit them and who should run them’. He then went on to say: ‘Two different ideologies of museums are confronting each other here, and those on both sides believe passionately that they are right’.

The two different museum ideologies confronting each other, to which Professor

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Frayling refers with obvious relish, are basically the object-based disciplines represented by the status quo of the Victoria and Albert Museum and the various cultural history approaches which are becoming increasingly fashionable in some reaches of themuseum world - often called the people-based approach. Not dissimilar to the vogue for structuralism in certain circles of literary critics, the latter approach is more concerned with social context and the mass-produced consumer products which they see as representative artefacts. In this context the supreme creations of exceptional craftsmen tend to be dismissed as elitist and irrelevant to the real concerns of the people. If these exceptional objects and the craftsmen who created them are peripheral to the main thrust of the Museum as now adopted there can be no justification for more than a minimum of the institution’s resources being allocated to researching them or purchasing further examples.

By adopting the people-based cultural history model, instead of the object-based model, various admirable social themes - like the role of working women in contemporary society, or black revolutionary movements - can be put across by the museum educators using objects from the collections, but little needs to be known or said about those objects themselves. They are merely the carriers of a message, and not the message itself. Consequently, in the brave new Museum, a small group of tame scholars, overwhelmed by administrative work for Government departments and quasi- governmental bodies, may be maintained for appearances and to keep the educationalists well supplied with a variety of eye-catching objects and snippets of information for an unending stream of hyped cultural history displays and exhibitions, whilst a diminishing cadre of generalists occupy themselves with collections management.

Structuralism and semiotics are major motivating forces in many of the British polytechnics and newer universities, in contrast to the object-based approaches favoured by most of the older university departments of art history, including the Courtauld Institute of Art. Nicholas Penny, of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, writing in the London Review of Books (4 May 1989) rightly registered his alarm at ‘the theories of “communications experts” which the Director of the Victoria and Albert Museum seems to have in mind’, and then went on to emphasize that for him ‘Galleries should be places where people are able to educate themselves, not places where educators “put themes across”‘. Indeed, Nick Bernstein (The Guardian, 17 February 1989) earned the ire of Professor Frayling when he had the temerity to suggest that: ‘What Mrs Esteve-Co11 and her Trustees dislike most about the V. & A. is the fact . . . that it is a museum’. he further developed the theme, writing: ‘For Mr Frayling the objectives and activities of museums and universities are clearly interchangeable. The fact is that museums exist to contain and display the art and artefacts of the past is regarded by the Frayling school as an encumbrance restricting the true activities of museum life . . ..’

Elizabeth Esteve-Co11 spent nine years as a librarian at Kingston Polytechnic where she developed her ideas on learning resources, and in her own admission, the experiences of these years have been of fundamental importance in shaping her plans for the Museum and developing her inclination towards radical solutions. In an interview she gave to the Sunday Express (26 March 1989) she is reported as stating: ‘I am determined to change this cultural elitism and concentrate far more on popular appeal . . . The Museum will become a primary educational resource available to the whole nation as it never has before.’ However, it was Katharine Crouan, the Vice Principal of Winchester School of Art, who in a letter to The Sunday Times (26 February 1989) expressed in the crispest terms the intellectual background to the reorganization plans: ‘The professional training of the art historian 20 years ago involved the suppression of any cultural identity other

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than that of the white, male, upper-middle-class academics who developed art history in Britain between 1935 and 1960. Small wonder that this inert discipline became dynamic only in the newer universities and in polytechnics - the educational background of Mrs Esteve-Coil.

One of the immediate concerns of both the staff of the Museum and those who love it is the significance this newly politicized environment may have on the appointment of staff to the Museum, or any further redundancies. At the fateful Trustees’ Board Meeting held on 26 January 1989, a group of Trustees forced a change in plan, not least that both Assistant Director posts were to be advertised. Professor Martin Kemp has confirmed (The Burlington Magazine, May 1989) that at no time was it indicated to the Trustees present that the post of Assistant Director (Administration) had already been offered to an existing member of staff. Nevertheless, soon afterwards, it was revealed that the current head of administration, Jim Close, had been appointed Assistant Director (Administration) without the post being advertised, and, it is claimed, without a board and contrary to the Civil Service Rules.

According to The Times (31 March 1989): ‘. . . it is thought that there had been opposition among the Trustees to the original intention of making both appointments without advertising’ and the Assistant Director (Collections) post was advertised in due course. Undue administrative competence was not particularly in evidence during this exercise, and the application forms sent out were clearly designed for youthful candidates applying for more humble posts - asking inter alia for the name and address of the candidate’s last headmaster! - and insufficient time was allowed between the closing date and that set for the interviews to obtain any reports from referees outside the United Kingdom. This time there was a board, with an external assessor, and no appointment was made. The post was re-advertised - without any change in either the job description or the woefully inappropriate application form - and although no appointment could be made at the second board, John Murdoch (Keeper of Designs, Prints and Drawings, and a previously unsuccessful shortlisted candidate) was appointed at the third attempt after what had been described as some rather strange manoeuvrings.

What then has been going on? And what is the relationship between the imposition of the new structure and the alarming number of new posts being filled without their being advertised? The sum total of the recent developments in the Museum have created an atmosphere of deep suspicion in the minds of the surviving curatorial staff as they face the destruction of their careers as scholar-curators and the uncertainties of capricious reselection processes. Given the radical nature of the restructuring of the staff which is being imposed, it is not entirely surprising that appointments to the most senior posts will be limited to those in sympathy with the reorganization plan and thus its intellectual foundations. What has, however, escaped public attention is the inevitable corollary - that for the first time in the history of the Victoria and Albert Museum the shortlisting appears to have been undertaken on the basis of ideology and not on proven intellectual stature and technical competence. The implications are alarming.

The legacy of excessive secrecy and administrative guile at the Museum has been summed up memorably by Michael Conforti, the Chief Curator of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, when he observed recently: ‘One cannot help smiling at the curious irony of this situation in which a Marxist derived populism and anti-institutionalism (which have incubated in English universities for many decades) is supported by the policies of the Thatcher Government - the conservative fiscal perspectives of the latter catalyzing the social agenda of the former. The political convenience of this current amalgamation continues because one side remains ignorant of the goals of the other.

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Those goals, if achieved, will do their part in the ongoing subversion of England’s national pride and international respect.’

P.C.-B.

Progress in Wales

In the Editorial to the March 1987 issue of this Journal (VI, pp. 5-18) attention was drawn to the unhappy situation in which that institution found itself by the end of 1986. The seven much-publicized ‘voluntary’ redundancies imposed by the Victoria and Albert Museum during the first quarter of 1989 have been paralleled in Wales by the loss of 38 jobs at the National Museum of Wales between January and April 1989. This cut in staffing levels, which excludes warding staff and nevertheless amounts to almost 10 per cent of the total staff complement, was imposed in order to avoid a projected deficit of !2800,000 in the financial year 1988-89, and the redundancies have been imposed with the close cooperation of the Welsh Office. Subsequently the Welsh Office raised the operating budget for 1989-90 by 10 percent, to f7.1 million, whilst an entry charge of 21.00 has been introduced for the main building in Cathays Park, Cardiff (raised to s3.00 at the Welsh Folk Museum, St Fagans) since 1 December 1988. The initial resonse was a drop in attendance of some 60 percent on the overall figures for 1988, but it is understood that these are improving. Meanwhile, the Welsh Office has activated the massive grant (221.2 million) it promised for extending the building in Cathays Park by infilling the courtyard, thereby bringing in modern environmental controls and security systems for the entire building. According to Ian Rutherford, Head of Public Services at the National Museum, this grant was not unconnected with the redundancies: ‘I think probably one could say that the Welsh Office sees that the Museum has got its house in order and obviously had confidence we were getting matters sorted out’ (Museums Journal, June 1989, p. 8).

P.C.-B.

Publication of the Fondo Cicognara

Count Leopold0 Cicognara (1767-1834) is justly famous as one of the founding fathers of art history, and his Storia della schwa da1 sue risorgimento in Italia fine al secola di Canova (Venice, 1815-18) remains a key work. The library he assembled on art and related subjects was one of the largest and most judiciously selected ever brought together, and totalling some five thousand items it was acquired in its entirety by the Vatican Library in 1824. Cicognara’s annotated catalogue to his library, Catalog0 ragionato dei libri d’arte e d’antichitci posseduti da1 Come Cicognara (Pisa, 1821), has long been a standard guide to primary sources in the history of art from antiquity to his own time. In addition to the art historical material, there is a large collection of books and pamphlets on museums and private collections, and since Cicognara reconstituted the Accademia delle Belle Arti in Venice-both the school and the art gallery-the Fonda Cicognara is also an important museological source.