Culture: Museums | guardian.co.uk
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Wedgwood Museum closure condemned by Unesco
Museum listed as one of world's top 20 cultural assets due to be sold off to pay £134m pension deficit after high court ruling
The head of a Unesco committee that shortlisted a British museum as one of the world's top 20 cultural assets has condemned a high court judgment that is forcing it to close.
The Wedgwood Museum in Stoke-on-Trent is to be broken up and sold to pay off a £134m pension deficit, following a high court judgment in December.
As well as thousands of ceramics produced by Josiah Wedgwood, one of the world's greatest pottery manufacturers, the museum, which opened in 2008, boasts an archive of more than 100,000 documents and manuscripts, and masterpieces by Stubbs, Romney and Reynolds. Such is the collection's historic significance that questions will be asked in parliament this month.
David Dawson, who was responsible for listing the museum on Unesco's Memory of the World Register, described the collection as "one of the most complete ceramic manufacturing archives in the world".
"The nation cannot afford the loss of this piece of its heritage," he said. "[The Wedgwood collection] was selected as one of just 20 items on the register, along with objects such as the Bill of Rights and a copy of King Charles I's death warrant."
The high court ruled that the collection was an asset of Waterford Wedgwood Potteries, which went bust in 2009, and could therefore be sold to pay off their creditors, the largest of which is the Pension Protection Fund.
The ruling was an unintended consequence of legislation to protect employee pensions after the Robert Maxwell scandal of the 1990s.The museum had not been linked to the company for almost half a century but has been penalised because five of its employees were part of the Pottery Group Pension Plan's member scheme.
An early day motion tabled by Tristram Hunt, the historian and MP for Stoke-on-Trent Central, expresses grave concern. It condemns the legislation as in need of urgent amendment and urges the government to save the collection. The Tory peer Lord Flight has also tabled an question in the Lords for 14 February.
The museum was founded by a family known for its altruism. Simon Wedgwood, one of Josiah's descendants, told the Guardian the museum held unequalled correspondence from Industrial Revolution figures over 250 years.
"The loss to the nation and the world would be incalculable," said Wedgwood. "It is tragic that recent legislation can mean that the assets of a bona fide museum can effectively be seized by the Pension Protection Fund because of such a tenuous link through a handful of employees."
Martin Levy, the London dealer and former member of the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art, said that the collection's sale would plug only a fraction of the £134m black hole: "A small gain for the pensioners will be a long-term loss for the country – no more than a pyrrhic victory."
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Science Museum launches online games about the future of technology
Futurecade features games that ask questions about robotics, space, geo-engineering and synthetic biology
The Science Museum has launched a suite of online games designed to raise questions about the future of medicine, robotics and technology. Developed as part of the Talk Science programme, which was initiated to encourage discussion of science in schools, the 'Futurecade' features four titles exploring areas such as geo-engineering and synthetic biology.
In Batco-Lab, players must engineer E.coli bacteria to make useful products, while ensuring that no harmful mutant bacteria are accidentally unleashed on the world. Cloud Control, meanwhile, allows participants to guide Flettner ships which brighten clouds so they reflect sunlight and lower the Earth's temperature.
The titles have been designed by Bafta-winning studio Preloaded, which has previously worked on educational games for Channel 4 and the Wellcome Trust. The design team worked with scientists and specialists in order to ensure the games raised relevant questions about the technologies and how they may impact on humanity, allowing students to form their own opinions on emerging scientific issues.
"Experts were involved from the outset of the project," says creative director, Phil Stuart. "Our discussions were handled by the Talk Science team at the Science Museum, many of whom are scientists in their own right. They led the content and Preloaded led the game design, which is pretty common on many of our educationally-motivated games.
"There is always a healthy tension between maintaining the scientific accuracy and letting the game design evolve naturally. Game design is extremely hard. Balancing fun, jeopardy, score systems, and controls is a challenge in itself. Add the hard 'n' fast educational objectives – the unchangeable rules in your game system – and it can get very tricky. But the process went very smoothly."
According to Stuart, another key aim has been to highlight both the potential of new scientific endeavours and the risks. "The idea of engineering cells to make stuff for us or to combat diseases and epidemics has huge potential, but it's an untested and experimental technique with unknown consequences. Batco-Lab attempts to capture this sense of excitement but also highlight the possible dangers to provoke further debate."
The games can be played at the dedicated Futurecade site.
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Six hundred people needed to be part of a Tyneside work of art
After covering themselves with glory at the 2011 Turner Prize-giving, the people of Newcastle and Gateshead can be exhibits themselves. And this time they get to keep their clothes on.
For the third time in its ten-year history, the Baltic in Gateshead is appealing for members of the public to take part in one of its projects. For the first time, the participants will not be required to strip off in the name of art – previously 285 volunteers took part in Antony Gormley's Domain Field in 2003 and 1,700 in Spencer Tunick's mass nude photograph in 2005.
This time the gallery needs up to 600 people to perform in On Kawara's epic One Million Years. The work consists of 20 volumes of typewritten dates, divided between Past and Future. Past is a list of years from 998,031 BC up to 1969 AD. Future starts with 1993 AD and ends with 1,000,992 AD. Two volunteers are needed for an hour and a half at a time to read aloud from each of the volumes over tenhours a day for the 60 days between March 1st and April 29th. The two volunteers will sit and read the work in the ground floor gallery of the Baltic. People wanting to volunteer should email onemillionyears@avfestival.co.uk
Kawara was born near Tokyo in 1933, but measures his age in days rather than years, so he's now not far from his 29,000th day. For many of those days, several thousand times since 1966, he has added to his Today Series of Date paintings - each one consisting of the date on which it was made, painted in white on a plain coloured or black background.
"One Million Years" is part of the North East's biennale AV Festival of art, technology, music and film, which this year has the theme As Slow As Possible. The programme includes 22 exhibitions in venues from the Tees to the Tyne, with 34 film screenings, 15 concerts, six walks and Radio Boredcast, a 744 hour continuous on-line radio broadcast. Included in the programme will be Locus+ working with artist Jonathan Schipper to create a slow-motion car crash (with the car moving at 7 millimetres an hour over the 31 days) while the opening ceremony includes Leif Inge's 9 Beet Stretch – a live performance of Beethoven's 9th symphony stretched over 24 hours with, apparently, no pitch distortion - at Newcastle's Star and Shadow cinema, and the festival closes with a Slowalk from the disused Spiller's factory in Byker led by Hamish Fulton.
Anybody wanting to take part in "One Million Years" should email onemillionyears@avfestival.co.uk Here's a YouTube clip of 9 Beet Stretch to get you in the volunteering mood:
One Million Years by On Kawara: Baltic, Gateshead, March 1-April 29
AV Festival: venues in Middlesbrough, Sunderland, Newcastle, Gateshead and others across the North East, March 1-31guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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The Rodin figures that inspired Russell Maliphant's hip-hop dance – in pictures
Choreographer Russell Maliphant talks us through the exhibits at the Rodin museum in Paris that inspired his new hip-hop dance show, The Rodin Project, at London's Sadler's Wells
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Preston showcases the treasures of private northern art collectors
You don't have to be rich, but knowledge and a good eye help. One of the Harris Museum's generous contributors buys art instead of holidays or a new car. Alan Sykes admires.
Art is fashionable and, as well as the huge numbers whose go to public galleries, many people enjoy collecting works to hang on their own walls at home. All of our major public collections, too, have works which have been given or were left to them by enlightened and generous private collectors.
The Harris Museum & Art Gallery in Preston is a prime example of how private philanthrophy can benefit the public for generations. The jaw-droppingly grand museum was partly established with the proceeds of a £300,000 legacy in 1877 from local lawyer Edmund Harris. The Harris was an early and remains a regular beneficiary of the Contemporary Art Society's generosity – a charming oil by Lucien Pissarro of the Eden Valley was given by the society in 1924.
The Contemporary Art Society has been giving museums throughout the UK works of contemporary art for over 100 years. Set up in 1910, it is justifiably proud of the fact that the first works in our public collections by Picasso, Bacon, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth and Damien Hirst were among the 8000 gifts they have made in the last century.
The Contemporary Art Society is particularly busy in the north, with offices in Newcastle and Manchester actively encouraging new private members and collectors. Mark Doyle, their head of collector development in the North West, has worked with the Harris Museum to put on "A Private Affair", an exhibition of works from 11 very different private collectors all based in the north of England.
Tim Dickson mainly goes for the big names of the last 20 years. His Sheffield home has works by Tracey Emin, Chris Ofili, Peter Doig and Mat Collishaw. Among the younger generation of artists, he also bought Haroon Mirza's "Featuring Love" last year, when the rising Sheffield artist won both the Northern Art Prize and a medal at the Venice Biennale. His Grayson Perry embroidery tells us there is "no hell below, no heaven above, live life now and act with love". Tim says he doesn't have much money, but buys art instead of holidays or a new car, and has a collection of around 100 works.
Sezgin Ismail, from Cheshire, has only been buying recently – she "doesn't consider herself to be a collector; she buys art that she wants to live with", which has to be the most sensible reason for buying. Included in her collection is Alison Stolwood's video animation "Wasp Nest" of 2010 and a work by the Japanese artist Kounosuke Kawakami. Mark Turner, a GP from near Preston, is another fan of Kawakami – his "Satellite" is a restful canvas of horses and other figures in an impressionistic parkland setting – but he also collects works by conceptual artists like Jamie Shovlin. Mark has over 300 works in his collection, and describes his passion for collecting as "an addiction".
Greville Worthington is a scion of the family that brought us Worthington E and other kegged offerings from the wide vale of Trent. He lives in North Yorkshire in a converted church where he keeps part of his extensive collection. He was a student in Edinburgh in the 1980s when he got bitten by the collecting bug, meeting and collecting works by artists such as Ian Hamilton-Finlay, whose "A, E, I, O, Blue" print is on show here. Hamilton-Finlay's sculpture "The Golden Aircraft Carrier" can be seen in the collection of West Yorkshire-based Ronnie Duncan. Ronnie also has an impressive collection of modern, mainly abstract, paintings, with works by Patrick Heron, Roger Hilton, Callum Ines and a beguiling suite of net-like silver gratings on paper by Rachel Whiteread. His advice to collectors is "look and look and look again, buy what you like in the hope you go on liking it and don't be put off if you think you can't afford it." – many collectors regret works they haven't bought, very few regret, other than for the temporary lack of money, works they have bought. And, of course, by using the Arts Council's interest free "Own Art" loan scheme, it's possible to spread the cost of purchases.
Although the collectors showing their works here have hugely different tastes and amounts of money available, they'd probably all agree with Bob Miller from Manchester, who "collects because he likes looking at art, living with it on a day-to-day basis and feels it enriches his quality of life."
"A Private Affair: personal collections of contemporary art", is at the Harris Museum & Art Gallery, Preston, until May 5.guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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Brontë museum faces closure because of council budget cuts
Supporters launch appeal to save the Red House in West Yorkshire, home of one of Charlotte Brontë's closest friends
One of the major shrines to the Brontë family is facing closure and sale because of budget cuts and recession – a combination that almost did for its wealthy owner in the days of Charlotte, Emily and Anne.
The Red House in Gomersal, in West Yorkshire's "heavy woollen district", is targeted in provisional savings drawn up by Kirklees district council, which is having to find savings of £64m in what councillors describe as "the most difficult financial landscape in living memory".
The proposal has triggered uproar led by the Brontë Society which is appealing for supporters to lobby the council to change its mind. The Red House, a handsome early Georgian mansion built of brick in the largely millstone grit area between Huddersfield, Dewsbury and Bradford, played a significant part in Charlotte Brontë's youth.
She described visits to the rich but radical family of Joshua Taylor as "one of the most rousing pleasures I have ever known", and modelled her classic Yorkshireman Hiram Yorke in Shirley on the textile manufacturer and banker. Taylor's daughter Mary was one of her closest friends and a robustly feminist critic. When Charlotte became famous and appeared to argue that only unmarried women should seek work, Mary, who had emigrated to run a successful shop in New Zealand, rounded on her as "a coward and a traitor".
The director of the Brontë Parsonage at Haworth, Andrew McCarthy, said the proposal had come as a shock, along with other suggested cuts including reduced hours at Oakwell Hall, another Kirklees museum that plays an important part in Shirley.
"We appreciate the challenges faced by local authorities in terms of balancing the budgets at the moment but this does seem a pretty drastic step that can be made in haste and repented at leisure," he said. "There are very few buildings which combine Brontë history and Brontë fiction in the way Red House does. It would be a huge loss."
A petition has also been launched to present to the council, which is not controlled by any one party and has seen cross-party negotiations over the coming budget. Kirklees's wellbeing and communities directorate, whose portfolio includes museums, has to make 19% savings from £129m spent last year to £105m. Councillors will decide the issue on 22 February.
Closure of the Red House in September would make a full-year saving of £116,000 with sale of the site an additional, one-off capital receipt, probably of around £750,000. The museum has won a raft of prizes, from Sandford educational awards to Loo of the Year, but drew only 28,602 visitors last year and fewer than 1,000 children in school parties.
Taylor almost lost the house himself in 1826 when his private bank went under without any hope of a government buyout to help it. He recovered by dint of his own efforts and a reputation, also ascribed to Yorke in Shirley, for helping his own workers find alternatives when his mill was forced into lay-offs during a recession.
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£20 for an exhibition – are museums fooling the public, or themselves? | Charles Saatchi
There's no point in museums being free if the cost of special exhibitions is prohibitively and unnecessarily expensive
It's lovely to stroll around our museums for free. Not so nice to find that, once you have been sucked in with no admission charge, the exhibition you want to see costs a tenner or more to enter. It's irritating for the visitor, and perplexing.
Are museums being elitist, and feel that only people who are prepared to pay the £10, £12 or £14 admission fee are worthy of seeing shows by their selected artists?
No, no, museum directors would argue, we have to charge for admission to exhibitions in order to finance the running costs of the museum, the transportation and insurance of the exhibited works, the cost of installing the show and so on.
But even London's leading museums, admirable in so many ways, only earn about 7% of their annual costs from ticket sales – the rest being provided by the public purse, and sponsorship. For example one of the museums I love visiting, the Tate, raises just £6.9m from admission charges across all four of its galleries, set against its running costs of £98.5m.
Why bother fleecing the public for such a piddling contribution when the taxpayer is already funding the great bulk of your costs? It's simply double taxation on paying visitors.
I may not know much about finance, with a Fail in GCSE maths, but I do know that attendance at our own gallery could drop by 50% if we charged admission. Perhaps this is because our audience is often young, and not always affluent. Being free-entry for all exhibitions has allowed us to offer five of the six most-visited shows in London over the last two years, according to the Art Newspaper's survey of museum attendance.
I may be a full-blown egocentric, and deeply self-serving, but I do not believe that this is because people flock to share my taste in art. Neither do I believe that more people are interested in seeing our shows of new art from India, or the Middle East, or Germany, or even the UK, than they are seeing a Rothko retrospective at the Tate Modern. Or Picasso at the National Gallery. Or David Hockney at the National Portrait Gallery. We attract many visitors because people don't wish to fork out the whacking entry charges to these important shows. It is a generally held view that had these spectacular exhibitions been free, attendance would have probably quadrupled.
If, for example, the Rothko retrospective had open admission, sales of catalogues, posters, keyrings, notepads, calendars, tea towels and other knick-knacks, would surely have doubled, tripled, or even quadrupled – there is a good chance that the income produced could have been as great as that raised by charging for entry. It's an estimate that is shared by a number of managers of the vast retail outlets at our leading museums.
It may also be true that if museums weren't featherbedded by state funding, and instead focused on maximising their public appeal, they would discover income from sponsors would be easier to attract. Sponsors like to back popular, well-attended exhibitions; the promotional budgets they hand over to museums then offer greater, more tangible value.
Of course one of the drawbacks of heavily attended exhibitions is that visitors feel short-changed by the crowds; the experience of viewing a big-name show is often unpleasant, claustrophobic, and destroys any hope of experiencing the works in any thoughtful way.
Museums would find that if they stay open until 10pm, a lot of overcrowding evaporates and people are able to enjoy the works at times that suit them; we use after-hours to give our 500,000 gallery members, Facebook and Twitter followers, their own late nights.
The worst of all museum sins, in my view, is to charge schools for their pupils to see their shows. From our own experiences, state schools have no budget to pay for their students' entry. Only private schools can manage it, often by asking parents to cover the cost of school trips.
The Tate's standard rate for school pupils is £5 a head for groups of 10 or more, and the National Portrait Gallery charges £9 a head for pupils in groups of 20.
I'm not trying to pick a fight with the Art Gods. I simply think something got screwed up with a policy of keeping museums free – and then frustrating visitors by charging them for entry to the shows they most wish to see.
I like to think that museum directors are not elitist, would like to attract the widest possible audience and are up to the challenge of managing their museum's affairs so that the widest number of us can benefit. Of course I could be wrong; perhaps they are just snooty types, who don't want a lot of riffraff around. Or, worse, they could be so removed from reality that they can't quite follow that £20 is a bit much even for a professional couple to part with every time they want to take in a show.
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Photographers' Gallery in London to reopen in May after £8.9m facelift
Work by Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky to feature in initial shows at seven floor West End site
More than 18 months after closing its doors to the public for an £8.9m facelift, the Photographers' Gallery in London will on Monday announce its plans for reopening and future ambitions.
It is a little late, admitted the gallery director, Brett Rogers, "but still on budget. It is such an exciting milestone in the gallery's history".
The publicly funded gallery, which first opened in 1971, will reopen on 19 May after closing for redevelopment in autumn 2010. The first shows will include a solo exhibition of photographs by Edward Burtynsky from his 10-year investigation into oil, and works by the New Delhi Raqs Media Collective.
The reopening marks the culmination of a fundraising campaign which gathered £3.6m from Arts Council England, £2.4m from the sale of its previous building and £2.5m from foundations, trusts, corporate sponsors and an auction.
"Raising money in this climate has been difficult," said Rogers. "But people at the time told me it was going to be impossible. What I've found is that as soon as you get the first people on board, others want to jump on to a successful fundraising campaign.
"We just got it in on time really, I wouldn't want to be starting it now."
The gallery's original location was in Great Newport Street, Soho, where it stayed from 1971 to 2009. It moved the half mile to its new location in Ramillies Street near Oxford Circus and stayed open for 18 months to establish the fact it had moved.
The new location is just off Oxford Street but in a little-travelled street – it's more an escape route from the shopping throngs.
"Don't worry," said Rogers. "We're going to grab people in. I've already got the buses saying our name."
Rogers has ambitious plans to develop the immediate area into a new cultural destination. "We want the gallery to seep into the street, to be a kind of photography alley," she said.
That includes making the outside a space for specific photography commissions. "There is no other public gallery anywhere near us and we see ourselves as a cultural oasis in the heart of the shopping area."
Before it closed, the gallery had about 400,000 visitors a year – a figure Rogers expects to rise. "It is not just location, it's that photography is the most democratic of all the art forms and people are not intimidated by it. With the rise of digital technology and camera phones, everyone feels they're a photographer now."
People are now deluged with images, not least on their computers, and the gallery's role is to try to make sense of them, to act as a kind of filter, according to Rogers.
With that in mind, the gallery will have a digital curator and the first thing visitors see will be a digital wall.
The newly transformed building, designed by Irish architects O'Donnell+Tuomey, will have two new floors with four-metre-high ceilings, a lift that previously was not there and a floor for education so schoolchildren will be able to visit for workshops.
The Burtynsky show will have more than 30 images from his series Oil, for which the Canadian photographer has travelled the world over the past decade.
The Raqs Media Collection show, meanwhile, will include a silent looped video entitled An Afternoon Unregistered on the Richter Scale (2011), which involves a series of subtle alterations to a 1911 photograph of a surveyors' room in colonial Kolkata.
Edward Burtynsky – Oil will be at the Photographers' Gallery, London, from 19 May to 1 July. www.photonet.org.uk
• This article was corrected on 2 February 2012 because the original at one point referred to Brett Rogers as "he".
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National Gallery assistants escalate their dispute over staffing cuts
Policy of 'doubling up' leads to second strike and further discontent from staff who say security is at risk
In room 34 of the National Gallery, under the forbidding eye of Reynolds's Lord Heathfield, visitors are informed that among the mists and swirls of a Turner lurks the tiniest wisp of a hare.
For them, it is a point of intrigue; for the assistant on duty, says Neville Maguire, it is a potential hazard. "It's a tiny sliver of paint and people are always getting up close to it – pointing and actually touching it."
He and his colleagues all have their stories to tell: of the woman who fell in front of a painting, or the man who tried to punch one.
Maguire's personal favourite is of the visitor who, trying to steady himself during a talk, grabbed hold of the nearest thing to him. It just happened to be a Constable.
Used to standing quietly in the shadows while the spotlight shines on a Leonardo or Caravaggio or Velázquez, the National Gallery's warders – or assistants, as they are known these days – do not tend to draw attention to themselves. But, at the moment, that is exactly what they are doing.
Last week's two-hour stoppage, which saw between 30 and 40 assistants walk off the job, forced the temporary closure of around 35 rooms, though not the blockbuster Leonardo exhibition. Another strike is due to take place between 3pm and 6pm on Saturday.
The Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union, which counts 150 gallery assistants as members, has warned that more could be on the way if nothing changes.
At the heart of the dispute is the question of staffing: whereas traditionally assistants used to have one room to guard, they now, increasingly, have two.
The National insists it took the decision to implement this new invigilation method – which the assistants call "doubling up" – out of a desire to enhance security.
It had, it says, made up its mind about it before the government announced in 2010 that it was cutting funding to the museum by 15%.
But the PCS, which says the National has had to cut £1.5m from its staffing costs because of the cut, has leapt on the new measures as evidence of the impact of austerity on the arts.
Regardless of the reason for the changes, the assistants taking part in the industrial action are agreed that the measures will do nothing to improve security.
On the contrary, they say, "doubling up" leaves them less able to help visitors and – crucially – less able to protect the art.
"If they don't want us to guard the paintings, be open about it," protested John Kennedy, a 49-year-old assistant, who has done the job for nearly 13 years. "It's going to end up with one of us going round on a Boris bike," he joked. No one laughed.
Another assistant, who did not want to give his name, said in whispers: "We have 20 million visitors a year. Now we have the Leonardo. This year we have the Olympics. I don't know what they're thinking."
As part security guard, part museum guide, the National's assistants occupy a vaguely defined yet crucial role in keeping the gallery running.
It is their job to monitor rooms and give directions, to look out for threats and, if they wish, to give information about the art.
"In the past many of the people who took the role on may have been from an ex-services background and they may have seen themselves more as muscle power or prevention," said one assistant, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
"But as time goes on people are more interested in talking to people more. There's more people with arts degrees … Staff try where they can to engage, to help where they can, speak other languages. It gives us more job satisfaction as well to be available so people can ask us questions."
The PCS claims that last year, when a man walked into the gallery and threw red paint over Poussin's The Adoration of the Golden Calf, the assistant on duty was in the adjoining room. Had he been there, the union says, the attack "would not have happened".
The National disputes this version of events: it insists the assistant was shown on CCTV to have been in the doorway of the room during the attack.
It says the new invigilation method has already been adopted by museums across Europe and the US. But the assistants are fuming at this comparison.
"Guarding two rooms may be part of what other galleries are doing," said one, "but this is matched with tighter controls on what can be brought into the gallery in terms of luggage for the cloakrooms and also rules on photography, size of bags, use of mobiles, drinks and food."
For the assistants, many of whom have worked at the gallery for years on a wage of up to £17,000 a year, the row is a smack in the face.
Many of them say they have striven to get away from the timeworn image of assistants snoozing in the corner and to set an example as welcoming, informative and – above all – alert.
They talk of the pleasure of working in, as one assistant put it, a "treasure of the nation". But that can only go so far.
"It is a privilege to be in this building and see the paintings," said Maguire, a retired English teacher. "It is spoiled by the fact that we are treated and denigrated in such a manner."
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Maori heads returned to New Zealand after 200 years - video
Twenty tattooed Maori heads have been repatriated from France to New Zealand after more than 200 years. A team from Wellington's Te Papa museum plans to trace the origin of the heads and return them to their communities. More than 500 heads of Maori ancestors remain in collections around the world
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