ARTS
Museums
Ballad of an ace café
Robin Simon
The exhibition of knitting and needle- point by Kaffe Fassett which finishes this month at the Victoria & Albert Museum has been immensely popular. For once, the V & A had to put up notices warning of delays and overcrowding. Few devotees, however, of this remarkable monument to the art and artifice of man can have expected it to accord the status of a national exhibition to this modish hero of the Women's Institute. Almost any success at the V & A is to be welcomed these days, but the Fassett exhibition (joined by a smaller one of designs for the Sock Shop) marks a new low in the current commer- cialisation of this great museum.
The V & A is fond of excusing this kind of absurdity by pointing to its title, 'National Museum of Art and Design'. But it only adopted this title a couple of years ago and it remains unofficial. In any case, the Fassett show does nothing to stimulate a discussion about art and design: it may be design — at times — but it certainly isn't art. The adoption by the V & A of its new title is characteristic of a belief that slogans and 'image' can supplant the need for radical reorganisation, which is what the museum has been crying out for in the past few decades. Worse, the 'Art and Design' tag has only further burdened this already unwieldy museum with a function it cannot sustain and which would be more approp- riately carried out elsewhere. Modern knit- ting patterns and Renaissance sculpture both have their place, but it is surely not under the aegis of the same national museum. As David Hockney put it at the beginning of his recent Tate exhibition, 'Art is different from design. Art should move you. I suppose design could move you — if it was a well-designed bus.' The fact is that the museum remains overwhelmingly an historical collection. Curiously enough, the present V & A director, Mrs Elizabeth Esteve-Coll, sees that as a snag. In an interview on Channel 4's Signals in December she said, 'One of our problems is that we deal in historical artefacts', an attitude that, on the face of it, would seem to disqualify her from running any museum, let alone the V & A. And whatever one thinks of Fassett — he is much admired by knitting enthusiasts his exhibition forces one to wonder what on earth a national museum is doing when it provides such an obviously commercial opportunity for a modern business like his. The 'sponsors' of the show, Rowan Yarns, Century Hutchinson and Ehrman Ltd, all market Fassett, and their products, along- side the great man's woolly jumpers, were for sale at the shop counter which domin- ated the exhibition space.
The explanation must be that the V & A is now set on realising the strange ambition of former director Sir Roy Strong to turn it into 'a Laura Ashley of the 1990s'. The Fassett and Sock Shop shows are also in keeping with the activities of a new marketing company, V & A Enterprises, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the museum, which exploits designs in the collections for the production of fabrics and wallpaper. These things are sold through the Habitat chain of V & A trustee Sir Terence Conran, and Mrs Esteve-Coll defended such developments in the Channel 4 prog- ramme from behind a cloud of jargon, with much talk of 'massive market penetration', `segments', 'targeting' and 'track surveys'. The Habitat connection, she suggested, was a sound one 'because our [Habitat] collections roughly equate with people's lifestyle', whereas the museum's 'historical artefacts' are inaccessible to a population increasingly unfamiliar with the Christian and Classical traditions.
There is nothing wrong in marketing fabrics to provide for a museum. In the V & A's case, however, it is symptomatic of a general collapse of confidence in the ability of the artistic collections of the place to speak for themselves. In the face of a disastrous drop in attendance at the V & A since 1985 — down by 40 per cent — the director and trustees have put their faith in relentless trivialisation.
The first evidence of this approach was a series of advertisements on the London underground last year which gave a new meaning to the term 'advertising offen- sive'. It was followed by a memorably vulgar television campaign which further extolled the virtues of the 'ace caff with `not a bad museum attached'. The feeble wit might have worked better had such slogans not so closely reflected what many took to be the actual priorities of the museum's new management. Despite these attempts to remedy the position, the num- ber of visitors has hardly increased. The drop in attendance has nothing to do with the fading of the Classical tradition, a dissociation of sensibility or any other fancy theory. It has everything to do with a simpler and more brutal fact — the intro- duction of a 'voluntary' £2 entry charge in November 1985, from which the V & A has never recovered.
Until November 1985, 1.6 million visi- tors a year were willing to endure Christian iconography, perhaps, dare it be said, to learn about it, along with the even more remote traditions of the Near and Far East which are equally a part of this most diverse of museums. But the charges, voluntary or not, turned them away. In 1986 attendance fell to 1.2 million. And then it dropped again — to just 900,000 in 1987, a figure only fractionally improved upon last year. No wonder Mrs Esteve- Coll is so set upon attracting, in her words, `non-traditional museum-goers': many of the V & A's traditional visitors abandoned it in disgust and have not returned.
In an act of supreme impudence, this museum, in charge of a mass of treasures freely bequeathed to the nation by bene- factors for the enjoyment and education of its citizens, has followed up its request for admission fees with the establishment .of a preferential system of access. This latest piece of adman's nonsense is the so-called 'V & A Club'. For £10 per annum and an extra £2 per session you can, the brochure tells you, 'take jive lessons in the Raphael Cartoon Court', rub shoulders with the design elite at Neville Brody's 'seminal retrospective', or listen to Bolivian music (eat your heart out, Museum of Mankind). If you missed out, don't worry: 'The next 12 months look busier still.' All these ludicrously peripheral activities, together with 'candlelit buffets in the restaurant' (that caff again) and 'regular wine tast- ings', are available when hoi polloi are carefully excluded. Each Wednesday even- ing the V & A will be open 'exclusively to Club members'. Include me out.
In this topsy-turvy world it comes as no surprise to hear that there will soon be cuts in the expert curatorial staff. Yet the V & A is advertising vacancies — for staff to collect the admission charge. With those charges the V & A led the way in South Kensington, where all the other museums now charge, with an equally disastrous effect on visitor numbers. They have thus combined to remove themselves from the central role in the life of this country which they have occupied for more than a hun- dred years. The Science Museum is the latest to charge, compulsorily, since last October, a move it made in the cold- blooded expectation that attendance would drop by up to 50 per cent. Now it has announced its own wasteful advertising campaign costing £500,000 in an effort to replace some of the visitors its admission policy has turned away. It is an extraordin- ary pattern to emerge, and a thoroughly unhealthy one, but by all accounts the hitherto thriving Tate Gallery is all set to follow. May I suggest, for a suitably exorbitant fee, 'An ace wine list ...'?
Robin Smith is arts correspondent of the Daily Mail.
'Wine and song.' -
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