A few years ago I was lucky enough to be invited to the opening of the new Slavery galleries at the National Maritime Museum. It was not long after I had returned from a holiday in Florence, which had of course, taken in the Uffizi. The Uffizzi is packed full of goodies but they are rather spoilt by the appalling level of curation that runs throughout the museum that renders most of the works anonymous and therefore frustrating. Many pictures even appear to have had their labels removed. Perhaps the curators imagine themselves living in a kind of Dan Brown world where every visitor is a kind of forensic art historian. Perhaps, more likely, they know that even if they took all the paintings off the wall and secretly flogged them off to dodgy Russians, crowds of the badly dressed would still come in to gawp at the place where space where the Leonardo used to hang. Consequently they realise that they don’t have to try very hard. So they don’t.
I mention this as at the Slavery gallery opening I was introduced to a professor from the Courtauld Institute of Art. Spotting in him someone who could confirm or confound my suspicions of Florentine curatorial standards, I attempted to engage him in discussion. “Don’t talk to me about Italian curation” was his riposte. I took as an indication that he rather shared my own views. This made his reluctance to sally forth on what was clearly a bête noire of his, tantalisingly disappointing.
I was reminded of this incident when I had the misfortune to visit the Rude Britannia exhibition at the Tate Britain yesterday. Museum curators are a little like orchestral conductors. It is very easy to misunderstand what they do. After all any decent orchestra can play the piece through without an egotistical metronome windmilling in front of them. Similarly in an art gallery you go to see the painting not the wall, surely?
Rude Britannia will make you appreciate that a great paintings don’t of themselves make a good exhibition, just as a conductor will decide whether good music gets a great performance. Rude Britannia does this by being appallingly curated.
It is haphazard, random, unstructured, and uninformative. It is not, in the main, rude, nor is rudeness a theme. Indeed there appears to be no theme. True its stated theme is British comic art from 1600 to the present, yet the first four exhibits – on the ones next to the bit on the wall saying ‘British’ - are Dutch. An entire room is given over to Gillray’s Worship of Bacchus, which is a piece of deeply serious moralising and in no way comic. Why is it there? Presumably it was available, and Gillray was a comic artist, wasn’t he? The rest of the exhibition is just as intellectually vacuous. Another room is ‘guest curated’ by Harry Hill. Why?
The Tate curates amazing exhibitions when it chooses; Whistler and Monet, Turner and the Masters and Millais to name but a few recent highlights. Yet seems even the Tate falls victim to the modern misconception that to be popular one must be undemanding. Pursuing this fallacy only ever initiates a self-fulfilling downward spiral. This is why it is worth getting worked up about. Not because it has put on a bad show, but because it legitimises the same attitude elsewhere, and when that attitude becomes orthodox everywhere then our culture and society are impoverished by low expectations feeding into lower provision of information, and in certain areas this is worrying. If you don’t believe me look at the, mediocre and formulaic mish-mash of ill-informed speculation and selected-from-stock platitudes that are nightly served up on the BBC and ITV at 10.00 by people who have the brazen cheek to describe this unwatchable garbage as NEWS!
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