London’s big public museums and galleries are in crisis. Caught between the aftershocks of the pandemic, the effects of inflation, the cost-of-living crisis and falls in the number of foreign visitors, the capital’s big arts institutions are facing serious financial challenges. In the past two months, the Tate and the Royal Academy have announced serious deficits for their last financial years, of £11 million and £2 million respectively. Insiders are blaming a change in priorities.
Since the pandemic, museum programmes have been characterised by exhibitions that were led by particular social and political agendas. But the question is, are we, the gallery-going public, still interested?
Anyone visiting the nation’s museums over the past few years can’t fail to note that political controversies — call them the “culture wars” — have become tangled up in how cultural institutions now operate. From questions of representation and identity politics, to the continuing debates about “decolonisation” of collections, the wrangling over the Parthenon Sculptures at the British Museum, not to mention the regular antics of Just Stop Oil protesters and others, museums have changed. They seem to have become places more intent on lecturing audiences about how they should think about issues of social justice than inspiring them with the best art of the past and the present.
With their backs against the wall financially, it may be that museum directors need to think about the gallery-going public in terms of what we find most appealing, regardless of what curators and museum directors think we should see. As the Tate and RA were announcing the scale of their financial troubles, there were queues around the block, and extended openings, for the Monet and London exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery, while the National Gallery closed its Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers show with all-night openings. It was the gallery’s most popular ticketed show ever, with more than 334,000 visitors though its four-month run.
More remarkably, in South Kensington, the V&A bounced back to 89 per cent of pre-pandemic levels with 3,323,400 coming through the door — not far off the 3,724,704 in the year before the pandemic. Notably, that shortfall is far less than the 600,000 drop in overseas visits, suggesting that more Brits and Londoners are visiting. By contrast, Tate Modern and Tate Britain are, according to their figures, back to 82 per cent and 79 per cent respectively.
Polarising audiences
The V&A’s relative success in coming back from the lockdowns might be put down to its assiduously popular programming, particularly in its often-barnstorming shows focusing on fashion and pop icons: last year’s Gabrielle Chanel show, for example, clocked up more than 400,000 visitors alone. It’s of course easy to criticise museums for “dumbing down”, or chasing audiences more interested in pop culture than high art — was it right for the V&A to cash in on “Swiftmania” with its Taylor Swift Songbook Trail last July? — but there’s a point where museums meet the interest of their audiences. Where should that point be?
Over the past few years art galleries have been pursuing programming agendas that don’t always resonate with audiences. Often those exhibitions have been the ones taking on the more controversial or polarising debates about museums themselves and their historical roots. The Royal Academy’s Entangled Pasts, 1768–Now was “part of a conversation about art and its role in shaping narratives of empire, enslavement, resistance, abolition and colonialism”. Whatever its merits, only 80,000 visitors turned up. Contrast that with the RA’s buzzy Marina Abramović retrospective, which had more than 170,000 through its doors. And other shows in the Academy’s programme revealed clear differences in what visitors were interested in. In 2023, Souls Grown Deep Like the Rivers, a show of black artists from the American South, who were working during America’s long period of segregation and racism, drew fewer than 40,000. Before it in the same galleries Making Modernism, an all-female show of early 20th-century German modernists, attracted twice that.
Similar stories could be told about shows at Tate. Big, issue-driven historical shows like Life Between Islands — surveying the art of black British and Afro-Caribbean artists — or Aftermath (looking at European art after the First World War) did badly. Women in Revolt!, Tate Britain’s survey of feminist art in Britain since the Seventies, did relatively well, but these shows were eclipsed by the more accessible Sargent and Fashion, while Tate Modern saw 375,000 visitors for Cezanne and 216,000 for Yoko Ono.
The problem with hot button debates
It’s tricky to infer too much from visitor numbers about the motives or preferences of gallery-goers. Are museum visitors, for example, just a more conservative, stuck-in-their-ways, traditional demographic? Liat Rosenthal, a creative producer and previously senior creative producer at Tate Modern, believes that museums’ public programmes and free events have had positive impact on who comes through the door and significantly diversified audiences. “The broader question,” she says, “of how museums then retain and develop these new audiences is a more complex matter.”
Maybe the average museum visitor isn’t really that interested in the hot button debates about colonialism, or race, or climate change that may be big among curators? “Understandably,” says Rosenthal, “curators are very driven to shine a light on untold art histories. However, it’s a delicate balancing act, with senior leaders consistently considering the opportunity for revenue, reputation and reach with each programming decision. And it’s hard for curators, leading specialists in their field, to sit with the fact that for many visitors, the art experience is secondary to the museum as a social space.”
While diversifying audiences has been a positive goal, what people see when they get there is another matter. Museums have been increasingly preoccupied with the current agendas of identity politics and environmentalism, which have radically changed the way our museums engage with the public.
It’s why, for example, Tate focused a string of shows on the place of particular groups in art history; of LGBTQ+ artists in Queer British Art, of black artists in Life Between Islands in 2022, and the history of women artists in Britain, in Tate Britain’s recent Now You See Us. Underpinning this approach is a belief that such shows engage with particular demographics and audience groups who might not otherwise visit, not seeing themselves “represented” in the programme.
The risk with agenda-led approaches is that by shaping exhibitions around what museums think of as particular identity groups or social agendas, shows end up addressing audiences as different “niches”, while alienating those who are less interested, or even antagonistic to, issues such as climate change. Denise Fahmy, who worked for Arts Council England and now heads up the campaign group Freedom in the Arts, is sceptical of the impact of these. “The limited research into audience appetite for politicised exhibitions is distinctly ambivalent,” she says, pointing to a recent survey by the Audience Agency which found that only 35 per cent of visitors under 45 years of age thought venues should demonstrate a strong position on social and climate change. “That means 65 per cent of young people aren’t interested, and this figure increases to 78 per cent among oldies over 45,” Fahmy notes.
She cites recent polling by More in Common, which found that “museums were a particular target for public irritation with equality and diversity issues — only 22 per cent of over 1,000 people surveyed felt museums should spend more time on the subject”. Fahmy worries that, “faced with multiple reasons why not to go to a show, including the cost, lack of time and the weather, political alienation could be the final straw for cash strapped venues”.
Museums should enthusiastically promote their shows to all groups and demographics, but if shows are pitched to particular groups, the flip-side is that other groups loose interest. Vicky Richardson, an architectural curator and former head of architecture at the RA, thinks that many institutions have recently become “embarrassed about their audiences”. Our museums, she says, “don’t like that their audience is what it is — they want to change us. But if institutions tried to find out where their audience is at — finding out what’s going on and connecting with audiences, rather than trying to preach at them — they would have a better chance of discovering what we all really want to see.”
If museums tried connecting with audiences rather than preaching to them, they might discover what we want to see
It’s absurd, after all, to try to determine which “identity” those paintings by Van Gogh should appeal to. Some may worry that by having to programme more popular shows, museums will retreat to tried-and-tested “blockbuster” shows. Perhaps they shouldn’t worry so much. If Tate’s programme for 2025 is anything to go by, visitors will find a wide range of punchy, monographic shows — from post-punk icon Leigh Bowery, to Korean installation-art legend Do Ho Suh, to the pairing of foundational British painters JMW Turner and John Constable, to the fearless postwar photographer Lee Miller. Notably, though, the big, art-historical survey shows are limited to Nigerian Modernism, exploring art in the African nation after its independence.
Any of these could be “blockbusters” if the art is inspiring and connects with people. But as Will Gompertz, former director of arts at the Barbican, now director of Sir John Soane’s Museum, puts it, “you can never tell if an exhibition will be a blockbuster”. What you must do, he says, is “bet on talent”.
Conditions are indeed tough, and for institutions like Tate and the RA, the situation is serious. But having tried to make museums into platforms for progressive agendas, now might be a good time for them to rethink which agendas really work, have the courage to experiment, try out new ways to bring many different audiences together and get people excited about art again. It’s possible we might all want to buy a ticket.
