Museums and Critique

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

Bansky and the Bristol Museum ?(sell out)?

In a belated response to Rebecca's comments on the Banksy Exhibition at Bristol Museum (have you seen it yet Rebecca?...what's it like?) I thought I'd add some further ingredients into the discussion. I noticed a report in The Art Newspaper on the exhibition (appropriately in the 'Art Market' sections), stating; 'all of the 100 works exhibited are for sale, and The Art Newspaper understands that a work showing a policeman on a child's rocking horse sold for £140,000.'.....

Kate Brindley, the museum's director, is reported to say that Bristol Museum would not get a cut of the proceeds, but "it was usual practice" for living artists (excuse the obviousness there) to sell work shown in public galleries. Did I miss something here? When did this become 'usual practice'? (Saatchi, perhaps, but you can't actually 'buy' the things off the wall at the Duke of York's Headquarters (can you?)...and I'm aware of 19th century precedents - I'm a museum historian! (of sorts...). It is clear that public museums play a significant, and synchronic, role in the art market - but surely Bristol Museum is not (should not be?) Gagosian?

Or is it another subtle subversive move by Banksy?
Mark

I tried not writing about Banksy at Bristol Museum, but failed.

I might as well qualify this right at the start by admitting that I've got a soft spot for Banksy. There, I've said it. It's interesting that an insidious inverse snobbery starts to operate alongside increasing success and mainstream visibility. Waldemar Januszczak's piece in the Sunday Times typifies the lazy sentiment that he was clever and subversive on the streets, but boring, dumb and repetitive now that his work is shown in a 'legitimate', 'establishment' context. For one thing, this fudges the artist's trajectory; following this logic, Banksy 'sold-out' at least seven years ago when books of his graffiti became available to bourgeois art school posers like me. Perhaps I just have juvenile taste, but I think it is possible to be both funny and clever. What is perhaps less clever is the way in which Bristol Museum has sought to market this exhibition, this viral advert could only have been made by a provincial museum, it's the same impulse that led Gordon Brown to pretend he likes the Arctic Monkeys. And the bit of mythologising about the director of the museum not having been informed about this exhibition was just not believable. However, what I think this exhibition will do is draw a huge and varied audience who will to some extent re-negotiate the museum's collection in order to discern the embedded (and sometimes subtle, yes, subtle!) interventions made by the artist. I can't wait to go and see it.