What happened to the provincial art gallery?

Frith, A Private View at the Royal Academy, 1881

What could be more pleasurable than the discovery of a new art gallery, especially if they have a café attached, so you can indulge yourself in a fantasy world of coffee, cakes and fine art, utterly shut off from the reality outside?

It wasn’t always like this. Outside of the UK, few galleries had cafes, and galleries have not until recently been pleasurable spaces to visit. 

Nor was I aware that they formed the subject of academic studies. I wasn’t aware of studies of art galleries, for example, the ideas behind their foundation, typically in Victorian times, until I came across a review of a book by Giles Waterfield, The People’s Galleries: art museums and exhibitions in Britain, 1800-1914 (2016). Sadly, this book is only available at crazy prices, so I have no chance of getting to a copy of it. But a TLS review, by Susan Owens, raises many points and makes it clear how the world in which these galleries were founded is very different to today’s world. And it’s not just the absence of a café.  

What factors led to the mass of local art galleries that we see today? The rise of an urban middle class, no doubt, the existence of learned societies perhaps less so, since there is no municipal art gallery in Spalding or Saffron Walden, despite those places having societies. The 1851 Great Exhibition was undoubtedly a spur, followed in 1857 by the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition.  Waterfield himself states “It was on the foundations of such exhibitions – entrepreneurial, commercial, entertaining, accessible – that many provincial galleries were built.” 

How many of those adjectives apply to today’s public galleries? The provincial gallery has no hope of running a full commercial operation; it would not be possible to cover their running costs. I would guess that every public art gallery is subsidised from various sources. So if at all “entrepreneurial”, the gallery typically focuses on obtaining more funding wherever possible, rather than going all out to charge the visitor. 

Some initiatives are visible. The museum café, a bookshop and giftshop, and paid exhibitions are the most obvious initiatives. Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum had a vast extension built, partly to enable the museum to mount paid exhibitions – but whether those have generated substantial revenue is, I think, unlikely. One or two of their exhibitions might have made money, but that success has to compared to other exhibitions with only a tiny attendance, as far as I could see. London and Paris have a substantial gallery-going public who think nothing of paying hefty fees to see an exhibition if they think it is culturally important. Does a similar audience exist outside London?

 

But there are other, more fundamental differences from the art galleries founded in the 19th century and the gallery of today.  Susan Owen writes: 

When the Atkinson Art Gallery – a gift to Southport from the cotton manufacturer William Atkinson – opened in 1878, it had not a single work of art. Undeterred, the gallery sent out a circular to residents requesting loans for an inaugural exhibition, which turned out to be triumphantly successful, with over a thousand works lent to the gallery. 

Would the same thing happen today? I think not. The general public has abnegated any belief that they can arbitrate in the common taste. Nobody would dare offer the pictures from their living room to the Fitzwilliam; for the most part, that’s not the kind of thing the Fitzwilliam shows. Since 1878, we have lost (or at least we suppress) the feeling that we can participate in choosing the works that enter a gallery. 

Yet we may (sometimes) pay to participate in the cultural good of the collection. In the USA, payment is the norm, even if admission to the major collections is free for certain groups, such as army veterans. I didn’t see many veterans in the Boston Museum of Fine Art the day I was there. Denmark, the Aarhus Gallery, Aros, is a stunningly successful example of a paid gallery. It would appear the Danes have an insatiable appetite for a stylish art collection. When I last checked the figures, it had double the number of visitors of the Fitzwilliam per year, even if I am rather dubious about the claim on its website to be the most visited art museum in Scandinavia. Most of the publicly funded galleries in the UK are free; there would be an outcry if they introduced a charge. 

However, having free admission does not mean that the galleries provide equally for all classes. Early galleries tried for inclusiveness through extended opening hours into the evening, “to accommodate working men and women” (from the TLS review). Although the modern UK art galleries are largely free to access, I don’t see much sign of the working men and women. 

Is there a difference in what the galleries buy today with the Victorian heyday? Of course, the cash-strapped state of Britain today means that few galleries are buying art, tasteful or otherwise. And the 19th-century solution of art presented to the galleries by rich patrons seems non-existent. “More controversial works of art were being bought by Northern Industrialists … whose eye for detail and craftsmanship was amply rewarded by Pre-Raphaelite paintings.” Precious little sign of either the taste, or the purchasing, today. What industrialists like, and what galleries want to show, are a long way apart. Perhaps it is similar to the process of gentrification of inner cities: the museum remains, but no longer addressing the locality it serves. 

So is that it? Apart from the coffee shop, are the provincial galleries out of touch with their catchment area and their locality? Has culture drifted apart so much that what people want to see differs fundamentally to what the gallery wants to show? The present-day provincial art gallery inhabits a world of great uncertainty. Few museums seem to match the ability of the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, both to genuinely engage with their local population, and also serve great coffee.

How to make a comedy fall flat

 

Judy Holliday, Broderick Crawford and William Holden in Born Yesterday (1950)

This film appeared on a BBC-curated list of the top 100 comedy films of all time. Given that recommendation, perhaps you would expect the film to be full of jokes from end to end. But the humour became rather subdued as the story proceeded, and by the end, few viewers would have called this a comedy. Unless you describe a monster hitting his girlfriend entertaining.

The plot is simple: this is a Pygmalion tale updated to the United States of the 1940s. A fabulously wealthy self-made man is visiting Washington to ensure greater market domination for his business. He is accompanied by his girlfriend, who is the focus of the story.  Like him, she lacks education and social breeding, but unlike him, she cannot even appear to be polite for a moment, and her lack of any experience in upper-class company is wonderfully entertaining as she tries to make conversation with a congressman and his wife. The plot is her partner’s attempt to educate her, a task he delegates to the wonderfully elegant and urbane journalist (William Holden) who has come to interview him.

So far, so good. The couple’s boorish behaviour (they shout at each other, and he mistreats the servants) is initially entertaining. The journalist, Paul Verrall, shows her the sights of Washington: he takes her to museums, to the Capitol, gives her books, and helps her read the daily paper. Suddenly she acquires an enormous dictionary, and starts to read all the papers placed in front of her, and starts to question her relationship with her abusive partner.

With an astonishing tour-de-force interpretation by Judy Holliday, the film could not fail to be funny. But, as mentioned above, the comedy starts to wear thin at this point. The film fails to maintain its light-hearted view of the couple. As Billy Dawn looks more closely at her partner, she doesn’t like what she sees. Nor do we respond very comfortably to a polished journalist trying to teach Billie how to live. She was inferior in her relationship to the bully, and she remains inferior to the journalist, who holds all the trump cards. This is not a relationship that will work, except in film (La-La) land.

The remaining 30 minutes or so are disastrous for the film. Unlike films such as Some Like It Hot, where the comic tone is maintained throughout, despite gangsters killing each other in full view, Born Yesterday feels the need to get sentimental about the American system, and to abandon the comedy to start telling the truth. Except that the American system is described so lovingly, and so falsely:

Paul: The whole history of the world is a story of a struggle between the selfish and the unselfish.

Billie: I can hear you.

Paul: All that's bad around us is bred by selfishness. Sometimes selfishness can even get to be a cause, an organized force, even a government. And then it's called fascism. Can you understand that?

Billie: Sort of.

In any case, the scenes set in the Capitol building have been changed forever by the sight earlier this year (2021) of marauding rioters occupying the Capitol. We don’t believe the lies (did anyone, ever?) told us about the US democratic system, and we feel uncomfortable that this comedy has suddenly turned very serious. So, while we can live with such lines as Billie, discovering herself: 

Billie: I don't know if it's good to find out so much so quick. 

We wince at the complacent, smug attitude that writes off corruption as “one bad apple”.

But, hell, in the end, I can’t deny there are lines in the script that are unforgettable: 

Harry Brock: Listen, cutie, don't get nervous just 'cause you read a book. You're as dumb as you ever were.

Harry is a monster, and the plot doesn't have to lose all the jokes to convince us that he is a monster. If only the plot had remained on this level, we would still be watching the film today. As it is, the tone of the last 20 minutes of the film is simply an embarrassment.

Does dumping really exist?

 

Photo by John Nyberg at FreePhoto.org

Dumping, in economics, means the selling of goods or produce cheaply in another market from the one in which it was produced.  It is a common claim by politicians that another country is dumping goods or materials in the home market. 

Dumping forms the subject of the recent, widely praised book, Trade Wars are Class Wars (Matthew Klein and Michael Pettis, Yale, 2020). It is used to explain much of the malaise of the modern world.

But does dumping actually happen? My feeble attempts to learn economics don’t seem to have said much about dumping – or perhaps I just wasn’t listening for that lesson. Let’s start by seeing what the orthodox theory is and then how it might be applied.

 Here’s what the Economist Dictionary of Economics says by way of definition:

 Selling something for less than the cost of producing it. this may be used by a dominant firm to attack rivals, a strategy known to antitrust authorities as predatory pricing. Participants in international trade are often accused of dumping by domestic firms charging more than rival imports. Countries can slap duties on cheap imports that they judge are being dumped in their markets. Often this amounts to thinly disguised protectionism. In practice, genuine predatory pricing is rare - certainly much rarer than anti-dumping actions - because it relies on the unlikely ability of a single producer to dominate a world market.  

So, according to the economist, you would need to dominate a world market to create predatory pricing.  

Here is the website Economics Classroom definition:

The practice of producers in one nation selling their output at a price lower than their costs of production in another nation. Considered a justification for protectionism by the World Trade Organization.

 I still don’t get it. Which country can afford to sell off its products for less than the cost of production?

 According to the book Trade Wars are Class Wars, dumping dates back to J A Hobson’s book Imperialism (1902). Hobson’s idea was that British mine owners made great efforts to sell manufactured goods in the colonies such as South Africa, while neglecting investment and living standards at home.

Now, I can understand the business practice of would-be monopolists such as Standard Oil (in the early 20th century) and Uber (in the 21st century). Both of them reduced prices in target markets to drive out competition, in the expectation that they could raise prices subsequently. But could any Chinese company (say) afford to flood the European market with such cheap steel that all the European producers went out of business? Or, perhaps more likely, if the European producers are not as cost-effective as Asian companies, it would be economically better for them to cease producing steel, as long as the resulting market left competition available – and steel is produced in Korea, China, Australia, and many other countries.

In short, I am not convinced by the dumping argument as practised by a nation state, although I can believe it if practised by a corporation.