Inside Arts
Brian Ferguson on the City of Discovery relishing its new role as city of the arts
For obvious fire-related reasons, it is rarely mentioned these days. But it wasn’t so long ago that the so-called “Glasgow Miracle” regularly dominated the headlines as the city and its art school celebrated yet another nominee for the Turner Prize.
As Dundee basked in the extended limelight of the launch of its long-awaited V&A museum, it was tempting to wonder if and when it had lost its crown to a Miracle on Tayside.
Future historians may look back on the moment television viewers watched live BBC coverage footage of Primal Scream singer Bobby Gillespie repeatedly chanting “V&A, V&A” to a 10,000-strong crowd before a dramatic sound and light show transformed Kengo Kuma’s architectural masterpiece.
Drawing from several heady days spent in Dundee, for me it was probably the moment when the doors of the city’s new £80.1 million gallery opened and the first public visitors tentatively walked in, in front of a small army of reporters, photographers and camera crews.
The City of Discovery has also certainly never seen anything like the worldwide coverage of the last week or so. The flurry of front pages, round-the-clock broadcast coverage and social media frenzy has been the culmination of an extended build-up of hype, hope and expectation that was somehow surpassed with the first glimpses of the museum interior.
As events unfolded, I wasn’t the only one struggling to recall anything comparable in modern times in Scotland. Not since Glasgow’s reign as European Capital of Culture has there been anything close to it.
It is obviously still early days for V&A Dundee, but there are undoubted comparisons with the impact of 1990, which transformed the whole way Glasgow was perceived in Scotland, across the UK and internationally, gave birth to new venues, inspired a new sense of civic pride and self-confidence among many Glaswegians, and helped foster a grass-roots cultural scene the envy of towns and cities across Britain.
The only other cultural event I can recall making a real global impact is the 25-year-old Edinburgh’s Hogmanay festival.
With Dundee now boasting a building, exhibition spaces and a waterfront events space unlike anything in Glasgow or Edinburgh, its V&A launch should be provoking some hardthinking in those other cities.
There was a cruel irony in V&A Dundee’s unveiling of Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s Glasgow tearoom interior when his home city seems gripped by paralysis over how to respond to the latest art school fire. In Edinburgh, plans to create a new concert arena in Princes Street Gardens seem destined to drag on indefinitely.
Further intrigue is likely to emerge from the villages, towns and cities in Scotland with the nerve, ambition, determination and political will to try to emulate V&A Dundee, which was pursued in the face of the financial crash.
Some of its £80.1m cost will undoubtedly be recouped during the next 12 months alone due to the coverage secured and the extra visitors it will attract. Indeed, the long-term impact of V&A Dundee on the city now surely crowned as Scotland’s third cultural powerhouse undoubtedly holds the most fascination. The one over-riding message I got last week was that the opening of the V&A was the beginning of a chapter in the city’s story rather than the end of one. Dundee may be truly transformed from where it was, even a decade ago, but I have a hunch that the pace of change is about to step up a gear or two again.