[BCMA] CMA Clip Serv: It's Canada's gallery

Wed May 26 16:07:33 PDT 2010

Good for the NGC management!

Here is half the answer to the VAG dilemma of showing its huge collection within a reasonable budget.

Go online with images and (I'd add) talking curators.

The other half would involve VAG's director openly confessing to decades of unnecessary accession of 3rd and 4th rate pieces that now weigh down the institution. Ship such clutter to cafes, restaurants, bars, arenas, community centres, schools, colleges, and other willing locations across the city. Art for the masses. And with any luck, eventual deterioration and destruction of countless works that never should've entered the VAG's permanent holdings.

Meanwhile, mount the 1st rate art in the galleries, and also put it along with certain pieces of the 2nd rank online.

Dan Gallacher

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Moderated BCMA subscriber listserv. 
  To: bcma at lists.vvv.com 
  Sent: Wednesday, May 26, 2010 9:31 AM
  Subject: [BCMA] CMA Clip Serv: It's Canada's gallery

  It's Canada's gallery 
  The National Gallery belongs to the nation, not just this city -- it has been too focused on Ottawa and too attached to the old ways of doing things 
  Marc Mayer, Ottawa Citizen, Wednesday, May 26, 2010 

  Change is hard. It is also expensive. And, in the case of the National Gallery of Canada, it is overdue. 

  There will always be critics, such as the Citizen's editorial board ("Paint us a picture," May 20), and Public Service Alliance of Canada local president David Bosschaart. 

  We were not established in 1880 to serve a city, but rather to serve the artistic needs of a whole country. 

  After a year as director, I have determined that my first impressions of the National Gallery were correct and that they probably reflect the impressions of our visitors from other parts of the country. We are too focused on local audiences and too attached to the old ways of doing things. 

  This attitude has come at the expense of innovation, of service to new publics, of relevance to new lifestyles. 

  Most dangerous of all, we have neglected Canada's need for educational material about its artistic culture and its national art collection. Canadians have every right to expect us to provide such resources both online and in their National Gallery. We continue to offer excellent programs to visitors of all ages, but we must keep up with the times, and we must also be fiscally responsible. 

  Of the over 400 works in our Canadian galleries, only about 24 have explanatory labels. This means you really should take a guided tour if you want to get more than mere access out of a visit to the National Gallery. But today, people want to visit the galleries unguided and on their own. Less than three per cent of our visitors take guided tours. If they opt for a Bell Audioguide, the commentary is accessible, intelligent and often lively, but it only covers about 10 per cent of the works on view. None of this is good enough. 

  Children are not the audience of tomorrow, as some have claimed. They are the audience of today. 

  That is why we have so many innovative and award-winning programs for them online, and why we have developed more for them to experience during their visits to the gallery than most art museums. 
  But what about the children who don't live in Ottawa and who are visiting us with their families for the first and, in most cases, the only time? Can they benefit from a valuable art experience designed for them? Can the visit be convenient for their parents as well, who have come to the gallery for their own reasons? 

  The children's programs we are now designing will replace the old, to serve the needs of all the children and families who visit the gallery, and not only those who live here. They will be excellent, valuable, and unforgettable and the gallery will be able to afford them. It is too soon to tell you more; we have to plan our new ideas carefully and test them first, but we are definitely on the case. 

  When children get a little older, they want to explore art on their own and develop their own taste, setting a pattern for interaction with art that will continue to enrich the rest of their lives. To do that, they need information about the works in their national collection which almost all of them today expect to find on the web. 

  Not only is there very little art history information on our collection available to our virtual visitors, the vast majority of the works themselves are uncommented beyond the maker, date, title and material. 

  Every work of art has a story, and looking at art is only the beginning of the pleasure a great work has to offer. 

  Less than a quarter of the works on view in the galleries and an infinitesimally smaller amount of the collection as a whole are explained on our site. That is not what I call useful in a world that has been online for many years. 

  Don't get me wrong, it isn't all grim. 

  We are very proud to be widely considered among the finest art museums anywhere. And we are still the largest purveyor of high quality touring art exhibitions in the world, as we have been for generations. The vast majority of those exhibitions serve Canadians from coast to coast. It is vitally important for us to protect our ability to do this work because it is who we are and why we exist. 

  Also, as the national collection feeds this exhibition program, we cannot stop collecting art in order to stay in the black when things get tough for a while. That would be defeating our mission, which explains why the government in its wisdom has protected the acquisition budget by separating it from our operating budget. That 
  is also why the law protects the gifts of money that Canadian benefactors from across the country have made to us in order to keep building your collection. It is wrong to compromise our mission to pay the bills. We have to find other ways. 

  It is precisely in the area of education, both in the gallery and online, that we needed an important reorientation in line with the financial means at our disposal and with the right complement of relevant expertise. We need to do a much better job in serving Canada than we have. Our success as an institution depends on it; our ability to 
  be an excellent employer in the region depends on it; and our ability to serve our local audiences with excellent programs also depends on it. We need to turn this big ship around to face the future, not the past. 

  Realistically, Ottawa would have to be three times bigger than it is to support and to be the first priority of the largest art museum in the country. Interestingly, I have noticed that the organized criticism has not come from our local audience, perhaps the smartest and most generous of any I have ever served, but from the Public Service Alliance of Canada, which is gearing up for a contract negotiation this fall. 

  Courage, Ottawa. It's time to bring out the bad-press decoder. Be consoled, however, that you are always very much on our minds. 

  Marc Mayer is director and CEO of the National Gallery of Canada. 

  ---   30   --- 

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