In general, if someone mentions the words Citizen’s Assembly, just assume the worst. Whatever it is, it will be a buck-passing, backside-covering, partisan and annoying exercise in an institution – usually a government – trying to get through whatever measures it had in mind to begin with, only with the supposed sanction of the public.
But now we’ve got something even worse – a non-government public body doing exactly the same thing.
The National Gallery, which is one of the most respected cultural institutions in the country, has announced it is going to engage with the public by way of something called NG Citizens, a representative panel, initially of 50 people, which will advise it on its future policy and direction. Or as they put it, “NG Citizens represents a bold step toward public participation, cementing the Gallery as a pioneer in audience inclusion and setting a new standard for how national cultural institutions engage with the people they serve.”
What it means in practice is that, sometime next month, the Gallery’s partners in this exercise will be sending out invitations to 15,000 households across the country, “ with the final group reflecting the wide diversity of the UK - including individuals who have never engaged with the Gallery before”. So, not quite a random lottery, but an initial random invitation followed by a selection to ensure diversity and inclusion.
In other words, its composition will be determined by the political and social choices of those making the selection. By November, the lucky 50 individuals “will be invited to reflect on the Gallery’s purpose, priorities and public value, drawing on evidence from a wide range of experts and perspective and perspectives.” What’s more, 20 of them will be embedded in the Gallery’s decision making for the next five years.
This is an awful idea, both in itself and in where it might lead. I do not want the National Gallery to be asking a selection of individuals including those with no knowledge of art or who lack cultural formation of any kind to be deciding on the exhibitions I go to or on acquisitions.
If you don’t agree yet, just picture me on a panel deciding on how National Lottery money should be spent on sport
I want the Gallery’s direction to be decided – as it has been for the best part of two centuries, since Sir Charles Eastlake was appointed its first director – by individuals, led by the Director, who know and care about art and who know what it is they want the rest of us to engage with: the best and most beautiful work of the Western European tradition. That’s why we have curators.
The real problem with Citizens’ Assemblies and other notionally representative bodies is not just that they may not have a clue about the subject – picture me on a panel deciding on how National Lottery money should be spent on sport – but that they are susceptible to the noisiest person in the room.
The people who will want to be part of this exercise will almost by definition be those with strong views and time on their hands. Many will be selected specifically because they represent some community or other – the disabled, ethnic minorities, the usual – and will want to put that community’s views into the mix.
And while these factors may be useful for political focus groups, a DEI approach is really a rubbish way to approach the curation of the country’s most important gallery. Of course, the National Gallery is publicly funded, but so are lots of other activities which don’t use Citizens’ Assemblies – sporting bodies, for instance.
The Gallery backs up its proposal with the example of other places which have taken this approach, notably Birmingham Museums, which engaged 28 members of the public to advise it on its future direction of travel. The two major conclusions of this little group were both unsurprising and unhelpful, viz, that ““museums should be spaces for a variety of experiences” and “should enable experiences that are educational and improve knowledge and experiences that are fun and entertaining and offer escapism”.
You can see just how these conclusions might have come about when people who don’t know much about art or anything about museums are prompted for their thoughts. But this is precisely how I don’t want the National Gallery to work.
I do not want it offering “experiences that are fun and offer escapism”, though I’m the very first to acknowledge that the Gallery’s permanent collection provides both these things. I want people who know what they are about showing us works of art that are beautiful and significant, with both criteria decided by experts.
Exhibitions shouldn’t just be determined by what’s fun and popular
I want exhibitions determined not just by what’s fun and popular – we’d have non-stop Van Gogh Sunflowers on that basis or endless bloody Frida Kahlo – but by criteria such as artists or artistic movements that are important or are little-understood or were, in their day, highly influential or enabling comparisons between movements we might not have thought of.
You don’t, frankly, need to recruit members of the public to tell us that they want a gallery or museum to “enable experiences that are educational and improve knowledge”; that’s part of the remit of the Gallery already.
Neither does it need a consultation to tell it that visitors may want to be entertained. If it wants these banal observations, it could perfectly well ask a random selection of its existing visitors – and it has over four million a year – what they think.
The point of the Gallery is not to solicit the opinions of an uninformed public; it is to engage the public by displaying its wonderful permanent exhibition as well as it can – and the recent rehanging at the Sainsbury Wing shows how it’s done – and to stimulate engagement with art through exhibitions. All these things the Gallery does remarkably well already, as can be seen from its visitor numbers.
What it could usefully do is exhibit more of its permanent collection, much of which is in storage, in other locations, as should other national collections. (That observation comes gratis, by the way, without the trouble and expense of a citizen panel). Apart from practical matters, such as the price of exhibition tickets, about which the public will have quite strong views, there is nothing a Citizens’ Assembly can offer the Director of the National Gallery that he doesn’t know already.
This is not to say that the Gallery shouldn’t be consulting the public. For instance, it did consult with children and children’s groups for its Roden Centre for Creative Learning. And that’s because the children and their teachers knew what the users required from the centre; they were, in this respect, the experts. If you want to know how to engage children, ask teachers and children. If you want to know what should go on display in a gallery, ask curators.
Of course, it’s quite possible for galleries to get things disastrously wrong without any help from consultative groups. Take the Tate, which has an unerring ability to annoy visitors by its intrusive politicisation of almost any exhibition – the very mention of its Hogarth and Europe exhibition can inflame art critics, years after the event – but that is top-down fatuity.
The whole notion of embedding people who don’t know much about art in the business of purchasing and displaying art and educating the public about it, would be risible if it didn’t also have the potential to be damaging.
And when you’ve got a Director as good as Gabriele Finaldi, does the Gallery really need to go through this exercise? Also, does government or its functionary, the Arts Council, have anything to do with this? It would be very interesting to know.
Melanie McDonagh is a columnist at The London Standard
