Look carefully at the poster for the Royal Academy's latest exhibition. Not
the one for Byzantium with its handsome silver incense burner. Look instead
at the poster for the GSK Contemporary season, which opens at the academy's
Burlington Gardens address on Friday. It is just a block of words in
fluorescent shades of yellow, green and pink, but it captures a significant
moment in the evolution of our museums and galleries. The words that would
normally be the point of the exhibition - “installation”, “video”,
“sculpture” and “painting” - share equal billing with fun-sounding add-ons -
“bar”, “music”, “performance” and “restaurant”.
The poster amounts to a declaration that the entertainment, the catering and
the atmosphere will be as important as the art. Not long ago this would have
looked like heresy - there was uproar among museum staff in 1988 when
Saatchi & Saatchi advertised the Victoria and Albert Museum as “an ace
caff with quite a nice museum attached”. Now it looks like the future. Over
the past ten years British museums and galleries have let their hair down as
that campaign forecast, morphing into social spaces that often feel like
bars, nightclubs or adventure playgrounds rather than sober repositories of
high culture.
It is no longer unusual to see 35,000 people pile into Tate Modern for an
activity day, as happened at the FluxOlympiad Long Weekend in May, to listen
to live music, compete in strange sports and eat a giant salad as part of an
art work. Every first Thursday of the month, when the art galleries of East
London open late, it is hard to tell whether the crowds of drinkers on the
pavements are spilling out of a gallery or a bar.
According to Andrew Brown, the senior strategy officer for visual arts at the
Arts Council: “In the past five years the art world has become the centre of
fashionable London, and that has had a spill-out effect across the country.”
He suggests that just as most young people's social lives revolved around the
pop scene in the 1980s and clubbing in the 1990s, “now the art world has in
many respects taken over from that”.
Roy Clare, the chief executive of the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council,
is more cautious. “The stubborn truth is that 60 per cent of the population
still don't visit museums. However, a substantial proportion of them say
they would come if they thought it would be amusing and interesting, and
that's what these off-beat events can do. There is a really big change going
on here in terms of audience expectation.”
Regular late openings, singles nights and even fancy-dress balls have become
familiar ploys for art galleries and museums to suck in new audiences. In
November the restored Bluecoat in Liverpool is holding three weekends of
live art. In May thousands of institutions across Europe opened their doors
for the Museums at Night weekend. British highlights ranged from late shows
that pulled in 12,000 visitors in Newcastle Gateshead to a Wallace and
Gromit-themed fancy-dress disco at Wollaton Hall in Nottingham.
The V&A's Friday Lates programme was one of the first to explore this
terrain. After eight years it receives around 3,000 visitors for each event,
most of them under 34. “It's about doing something groovier than just
looking, making it more of a social event,” says Damien Whitmore, the
museum's director of public affairs and programming.
Now, with GSK Contemporary, the Royal Academy is taking this much farther and
the rest of the museum world is watching closely. There will be plenty of
art on display but it will be woven into and around a pop-up restaurant (run
by Bistrotheque, the unofficial canteen of the East London art world), a bar
that is also an installation, theatre (partly organised by Complicite), DJs,
films, gigs, debates, cabaret, performances and happenings. In addition the
exhibition space will be open until midnight three nights a week and until
10pm on Sundays and Mondays, opening up the possibility of the post-pub
contemporary art piss-up.
Planning for the exhibition was already under way when Charles Saumarez-Smith,
the academy's chief executive, arrived from the National Gallery last year.
He says that the chance to develop 6 Burlington Gardens for an alternative,
younger audience was one of the things that attracted him to the job. It is,
he says, an “attempt to reflect the change in cultural activity from
traditional genres to a diversity of different art forms, a melting-down of
categories, which is a phenomenon of contemporary culture”. He sees an
opportunity to breathe fresh air into the Royal Academy.
“I've never made any secret of the fact that I am interested in how to make
changes within organisations from being exclusively traditional to extending
out to younger and new audiences.” There are no plans to redesign the main
Piccadilly building along similar lines just yet though.
“I view this building [the main one] as facing south towards Fortnum &
Mason, and that building as facing north towards Abercrombie & Fitch,”
Saumarez-Smith says.
David Thorp, the season's curator, says that the concept “doesn't deviate from
the RA's founding principles”, but it's hard to imagine what Sir Joshua
Reynolds, the first president, would have made of it all. When the academy
was founded in 1768 there were no public art galleries in Britain. The
cultural landscape was transformed in the 19th century by a wave of gallery
and museum building, partly paid for by philanthropists enriched by the
Industrial Revolution.According to Giles Waterfield, author of Palaces of
Art, the idea of the gallery as a place to undergo a “quasimystical
experience” was imported directly from the German Romantics, and the
Victorians added their own worthy spin: museums, increasingly built in grim
urban locations such as Whitechapel, would offer the locals “a glimpse of a
more sensitive existence than the one to which they were condemned”.
Much of this was cheerfully disregarded by the punters. The new museums were
open on Sundays so that working people could use them and they drew crowds
in their thousands, bent on having a good time. In the 1890s there was
nothing unusual or contradictory in presenting an art gallery as a buzzing
social hub - a place to see and be seen and often pay no attention
whatsoever to the artwork. But then, there were rather fewer leisure options
a century ago.
As these increased, predictably attendances fell, picking up only with the
reintroduction of free museum entry in 1997. Chris Smith's grand gesture
coincided with the influx of National Lottery cash to the regions, where it
funded new arts centres or revived old ones, and with the rise of a new kind
of curator - one more comfortable working with living artists. Most
important though was the change in the audience.
Whether they like it or not, most people in the country now have a view on
contemporary art thanks to Charles Saatchi, Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Tate
Modern and the annual Turner Prize furore. More than at any point in recent
history, and more than in almost any other country, art has a place in the
British cultural mainstream today.
Will Gompertz, who organises the Long Weekends at the Tate, thinks that the
change runs deeper than simple awareness. “There has been a cultural shift,”
he says. “People are much more into the experiential. They want liveness.
They want to be part of something and that's reflected in everything from
the live music boom to the huge crowds who came to see The Sultan's Elephant
[a piece of street theatre] in 2006.”
There will be some traditionalist regulars at the academy who are horrified at
the idea of so many apparent distractions from the art itself. But Thorp
does not believe that visitors will lose sight of the work simply because
they are allowed to wander round with a drink in their hand, listening to
music. The world is full of distractions, he says. “All this stuff is going
on around us and it doesn't confuse us.”
His chief concern is that critics and visitors will prejudge the show as a
frivolous experiment rather than a serious project. Actually, he says, it
has artistic points to make. The work has been selected partly as a
corrective to the market-led commercial art world, where “things that are
easily bought and sold dominate”, and partly to begin establishing the
building as the major contemporary art space in central London - the RA is
leasing the building to the Haunch of Venison gallery from February, though
it will be given over to the GSK Contemporary season for at least the next
three winters. But it will also be a great place for drink, won't it? For a
moment Thorp looks very mildly affronted. “It's not just intended to be a
big party.”
GSK Contemporary runs at the Royal Academy, W1 (www.royalacademy.org.uk; 08716
204020), from Fri to Jan 19
NIGHTS AT THE MUSEUM
Tate Social The artist and DJ Squirrelhead hosts a club night of roots
music, from Appalachian mountain banjos to deep Mississippi blues. Tate St
Ives (01736 796226; www.tate.org.uk/stives), Fri, 7-11pm
Late at Tate St Ives Free club night with an open bar and a chance to
view the shows and collections at night. Tate St Ives (as above), Nov 28,
7-11pm
Friday Late Evening that takes its theme from the Cold War Modern
exhibition, with design workshops, bar and other fun things. V&A, London
(020-7942 2503; www.vam.ac.uk), Fri, until 9.50pm
Future of Sound 2008 The electronic artists and the Human League's
Martyn Ware create an audiovisual spectacular. De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill
(01424 229111; www.delawarrpavilion.com), Nov 22, 7pm
Liverpool Live '08 Experimental art event transforms the art centre
over three weekends. The Bluecoat, Liverpool (0151-702 5324;
www.thebluecoat.org.uk), Nov 8/9, 15, 29
Wednesday Lates Live music, bar, exhibition viewings and talks from 6pm
on works in the collection. National Gallery, London (020-7747 2885; www.
nationalgallery.org), every Wed
After hours at the Natural History Museum Live music and drinks plus
ticketed viewing of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition without
the crowds. Natural History Museum, London (020-7942 5000; www.nhm.ac.uk),
last Fri of every month
Art 2 Heart Dating nights in major UK galleries and museums for
150-plus people. For venues and dates, visit the website
(www.art2heart.biz),
Sing Live - Back to the Musicals No auditions, anyone can just turn up
and belt out songs from your favourite musicals. The Sage, Gateshead
(0191-443 4661; www.singliveuk.com), Sun, 3:30pm
Fright Night Hallowe'en club night with DJs and artists. Fancy dress
essential. For ages 14 to 25. Tate Liverpool (0845 6001354; www.tate.org.uk/
liverpool), Fri, 6-9pm
Lates A season of late night events and openings at galleries, arts
centres and museums across the capital. See the website for details of
individual events. Various venues, London (www.lates.org), until Nov 17
Late at Tate Britain Half-price entry to the Francis Bacon and Turner
Prize shows, drinks, tours, music and film. Tate Britain, London (020-7887
8888; www.tate.org.uk/britain), first Fri of every month
