A new chair of trustees has been announced for London's struggling ICA, taking over from Alan Yentob. Alison Myners has sat on plenty of visual arts boards, including the Royal Academy of Arts Trust, and she has chaired the board of the Contemporary Art Society. Having received an arts council bail-out of £1.2m earlier this year and cut its staff count drastically, the ICA has been through some rocky times. However, I've seen organisations come back from worse: who would have thought that English National Opera would be such a flourishing company today when, eight or nine years ago, it seemed to have pressed the self-destruct button?
Myners's most important job by far will be to appoint a successor to Ekow Eshun, the artistic director of the ICA, who announced his resignation in August: finding the right person to give the organisation a sense of identity will be the life-or-death move. She also needs to keep an eagle eye on those balance sheets – part of the reason the ICA needed such a large cash injection was a fast-growing deficit. One imagines that family pillow-talk will be to the purpose: her husband is Paul Myners, chair of the Tate until he was hoisted out of the arts to become financial services secretary under Gordon Brown.
