Proposed changes to the V&A would be catastrophic
Last week, it was revealed that the V&A is considering proposals for a drastic restructuring. Along with a 20 per cent cut in staff, the plans aim to rearrange the museum’s behind-the-scenes curatorial and research departments, a move that threatens to fundamentally change the character of the institution, favouring generalism over specialist expertise, and wasting precious labour and resources at a time when staff are already overstretched.
The pandemic has been disastrous for cultural organisations. More than 4,000 redundancies have already been announced across the country, including at the National Trust, Tate, the Royal Academy and York
Museums Trust. The £408million set aside for museums, theatres and galleries in Rishi Sunak’s latest Budget is a welcome intervention, if unlikely to prevent the cuts that now seem inevitable even at the country’s bestloved institutions. But at a time when the focus should be on steadying the ship, the proposed restructuring of the V&A goes beyond a regrettable necessity, representing an impractical and ideologically-driven intervention that strikes at the heart of its identity as a design museum.
The curatorial and conservation departments in the V&A are currently organised along thematic and material lines (metalwork; ceramics and glass; theatre and performance; word and image; etc) and by geographical area (Middle East; South and South-east Asia; etc). This structure reflects the museum’s founding principles: when it opened as a Museum of Manufactures in 1852, it was intended to stimulate and inspire British designers, and over the intervening 170 years has evolved into a world-class museum of art and design. As an art historian of the Tudor period, my research is deeply indebted both to the museum’s collections and to the expert knowledge that it nourishes. The current structure privileges material expertise, allowing specialist curators and conservators to look beyond the artificial boundaries of time periods, revealing insights that would not otherwise be available. Its collections are chosen not on the basis of historical interest alone, but for what they reveal about the global history of design specifically.
The restructure proposes to change all this, merging the European and American collections into three vast chronological departments: medieval to late 18th-century; 19th-century to 1918; and modern and contemporary. While this attempt to cover eight tumultuous centuries (and myriad display galleries) in one department seems impractical enough, the thinness of coverage that will result seems to pave the way for further redundancies. In a blog post about the proposals, published on Tuesday, the V&A’S director, Tristram Hunt, justified the plans by referring to the curators’ “responsibility to work together, beyond departmental boundaries and intellectual silos”: a shockingly pejorative spin on the specialist expertise for which the V&A is internationally admired. In fact the new arrangement would privilege generalism, potentially jeopardising specialist collections care, and allowing specific objects and periods to fall through the cracks.
Meanwhile, additional departments have been proposed to cover the entirety of African and Africandiaspora art, plus (separately) Asian art. Set alongside the chronological “Europe and America” departments, this division comes worryingly close to an outdated, ahistorical “othering” of anything non-western, diametrically opposed to the intentions expressed in the museum’s Race and Equality statement, released last year during the Black Lives Matter protests. Hunt acknowledges that the curators will
The plan would swap a thematic structure for three vast chronological sections
be “more stretched” in the new-look museum, but the reorganisation itself will create further work for already overworked staff. Materials-based departments and libraries will have to be split up and moved into new offices; objects currently catalogued by material in storage will need to be reassigned to “periods” and rearranged. Who will undertake this work of rearranging, recategorising, recataloguing? Then there are the museum’s ambitions to further its multi-site set-up, with the impending opening of V&A East at the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. If Tristram Hunt is serious about making V&A East a success, he will need staff with the time and energy to make it as sharp and exciting as possible. An unnecessary overhaul of departments will only be a distraction, and a drain on resources that are already strained.
A V&A spokeswoman told The Art Newspaper that “the proposals will enable new, collaborative ways of working”. Anyone who has spent a few moments in the astonishingly diverse Renaissance Galleries (to name just one key space) will know that curators were already doing just that – working across periods, between departments, while losing none of the long-view insights that a materials-based structure can give. Hunt promises that the proposals will “not change our gallery spaces or visitor experience”: but how could they fail to? Over the years, the V&A has seen many wrong-headed attempts to reposition itself, not least the tone-deaf Saatchi advertising campaign of 1988 that promoted “an ace café with quite a nice museum attached”. Tristram Hunt is in danger of becoming the director who found the V&A marble and left it brick. Once an institution is gutted of its expertise like this, it’s gone for good, and no PR guru can bring it back.