At last I've managed to find some moment to Blog...(it's been a bit manic this semester...) anyway, it appears that at the heart of Rebecca's post on 'Bigger Splash' (and Hattie's reflective comment) is the suggestion of a kind of ambivalence (I liked the arm wrestling your dad analogy) towards critique...it's rather like the museum (or in this case the RA) was openly inviting critique only in the acknowledgment that such critique merely acts to reinforce its own position and authority? There's a distinct connection here with the stuff that Banksy and Bristol Art Gallery did a few weeks ago (did you go Rebecca?)...thousands of people queued round the block to see a metaphorical stoning of their grandmother...the stones turned out to be sponges (and they weren't even wet ones!), so no damage was done.....I'm sure there's more to be said on this thread?
mark
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'Now look, no one is going to stone anyone until I blow this whistle'
ReplyDeleteNo, I didn't end up braving the queues. Did you notice the comment piece on the Banksy exhibition in this month's Museums Journal? I wonder if the museum really thought they were 'giving up control', it read as quite disingenuous.
Perhaps these artists that we're discussing don't have critical teeth, if the Bristol Museum and the RA could talk, I'm sure the worst they'd say would be 'oh stop it you're tickling me'.
Life of Brian?
ReplyDeleteI saw the piece on Bansky in the MJ...it seemed to be about visitor figures mostly?.....there was something on the Bansky Exh in the Art Newspaper as I remember...I'll look it up and post a link....
mark
Quite right, Life of Brian.
ReplyDeleteThe MJ comment did mention the success of the exhibition in relation to the number of visitors (300,000 over 3 months, almost exactly the same my beloved Leeds Public Exhibition managed in 1839 coincidently) but what I took exception to was the cultivation of the appearance of risk and disorder:
'We took the risk and managed it, we prepared the ground by developing values that stressed new approaches and doing things differently. This meant we were able to give up control [...] Giving up control is an anathema for an organisation such as ours. Museums have built their reputations on their reliability and authority [...] The rewards for giving up control were that we had a lots of new visitors'
I'm sure this is relative to the institution, contemporary art galleries are perhaps more familiar with the language and process of intervention and pseudo-critique by artists. It'll be interesting to see if this exercise changes their curatorial agenda in the future.