There’s more than a grain of truth in the popular caricature of a curator as a mother hen clucking frantically if anyone gets too near her nest – not that her eggs are about to hatch, let alone run. The recent threat of the British Council to ‘deaccession’ – to put it more bluntly, sell – its 9,000-strong collection of British art has caused a predictable flurry in the curatorial world. Doesn’t the British Council know that public art collections are sacrosanct and must be preserved for all time?
When I was director of Glasgow’s museums and art galleries, I remember talking to my committee about my long-term plans for the city’s great permanent collection when the leader of the council, Pat Lally, commented drily that there was no such thing as ‘permanent’. He wasn’t proposing to sell it all. Quite the reverse. He was the most imaginative politician I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with and wanted this massive asset to be used as much as it could. He encouraged and enabled me to create Glasgow’s Gallery of Modern Art, the St Mungo’s Museum of Religious Art and Life, and to convert the beautiful McLellan Galleries into a major international exhibition venue. All he was doing was reminding us of a fact of life.
His comment made me think. Of course everything changes, and our so-called ‘permanent’ collections are in themselves records of such changes. Museums have collected coins to chart the rise and fall of kingdoms, not just to accumulate comprehensive collections of metallic cash. Had Darwin not collected every type of barnacle, he might not have been able to prove his theory of evolution.
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