The Art Newspaper

Curators need to become truly global

Instead of following the market, curators need to provide leadership

By David Barrie. Opinion, Issue 214, June 2010
Published online: 11 June 2010

Out of Africa: Romuald Hazoumé’s La Bouche du Roi, 1997-2000 (detail), the British Museum

The UK has a long, inglorious history of curatorial insularity when it comes to contemporary art. In the first half of the 20th century our museums and galleries missed countless opportunities to purchase works by the great artists then working in Europe. Even today, few make much effort to acquire works by living artists from outside the UK. And if artists from the European and North American mainstream have often been ignored, those from other parts of the world might just as well not have existed.

The Tate’s announcement of its latest acquisitions outside Europe and North America, including the Middle East, Asia, Latin America and Africa is therefore especially welcome. So is the decision by the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum to build a shared collection of contemporary Middle Eastern photography. But for most UK museums there is still a very long way to go.

Part of the problem is that the UK’s public resources—notably the Heritage Lottery Fund—are still devoted almost entirely to buying “heritage” art: little is available for buying contemporary work of any kind. However, the influence of the commercial art market is probably of even greater significance. It is a decisive factor in the shaping of public and critical taste, especially in the field of contemporary art—and artists who work in the many poorer countries outside its embrace are almost invisible to us.

Expanding the scope of our contemporary art collections to include such “undiscovered” artists poses mind-stretching challenges. Not only does it require a determined change of collecting policies, but it also calls for a sustained investment in research, and in the development of new relationships with artists and communities in the source countries. Instead of following the market, curators will themselves need to provide leadership. A new, open-minded breed of curator is needed—prepared to travel, and travel often, to places that don’t offer all the comforts and conveniences of Paris, New York or Tokyo.

Finding the right people will only take us part of the way. There are complex choices to be made in building the new collections—choices that have ethical and political as well as aesthetic dimensions. The issue of “connectivity” may turn out to be crucial. Curators may well feel more comfortable acquiring works that are connected stylistically or intellectually with our present, Eurocentric collections. Such a cautious approach offers some advantages, but if the emergent collections bear too strong a family resemblance to existing ones, they may simply appear derivative. Of course it is interesting to see how movements such as modernism and conceptualism have found expression in different parts of the developing world. But an ostensibly “global” art collection that edited out indigenous styles that owe few debts to metropolitan influences would be misleadingly incomplete. It might also be vulnerable to the charge of neo-colonialism.

Does any of this really matter? We know that people have been producing art for at least 50,000 years. The making of art often reflects our deepest concerns. If we want to get to know another culture, it is not enough to accumulate statistics, to study the history, or even to learn the language. We need also to explore its expressive life—the language of its art. If we make that effort, one outcome can almost be guaranteed: art helps us to recognise our common humanity.

Religious divisions and economic inequalities lie at the heart of many of the most serious challenges facing us. And yet the inexorable processes of globalisation at the same time make this an increasingly inter-dependent world. If we are going to solve our problems, we must learn to work together. Art has a part to play in this crucial process—but only if we can see it.

If our museums and galleries are to offer a more generous, cosmopolitan view of today’s art world, they will have to devote far more energy and more resources to establishing links with those parts of it they have for so long largely ignored. If this means that we cannot do so much to preserve what we’ve already got, so be it. I would happily trade yet another old master costing tens of millions of pounds for the chance to find out what the many “undiscovered” artists around the world are doing—right now.

The writer is an independent consultant and former director of the Art Fund. This article is based on the Arthur Bachelor lecture, for full text see www.cdobarrie.wordpress.com