Calum Colvin: Museography

The Mcmanus, Dundee

The new V&A, looking like a stranded ship on the shorefront in Dundee, follows the success of DCA. The city has invested hope and resources in both. But the deeper motivation of such projects is usually not art but economics: the hope that art will bring people and people will bring money.

One hundred and fifty years ago, the Mcmanus, the city’s historic gallery and museum, was founded according to a different equation. Then art was not tourist bait, but good in itself, the flower of the plant that was a city’s culture, a vehicle of education and promoting a higher vision.

Too often now the legacy of those ideals loses out in collision with economic demands, but to show that Dundee’s investment in the arts is not only brute economics, the city has also invested in improving the Mcmanus.

The result is impressive. Where before it was cramped and crowded, the revamped