Priced out
Museums and galleries are finding it tough to buy and commission contemporary art when their budgets are shrinking and prices are rising. Working together is one of the solutions, as Gareth Harris finds out
“We’ve got to find other ways of raising money so that we can spend more on commissioning new work,” says Jonathan Watkins, the director of Ikon in Birmingham, a gallery celebrating its 50th anniversary this year with a lively roster of shows.
Leading contemporary artists from abroad such as Jamal Penjweny from Kurdistan and Lee Bul of South Korea as well as those who have been involved with the gallery in the past, such as Cornelia Parker, Yinka Shonibare and Julian Opie, will be on display.
How museums and galleries prioritise acquiring and displaying contemporary art in the face of a sustained spending squeeze is a challenge for the sector.
In 2010, the chancellor George Osborne announced that local authority budgets would be reduced by 7.1% each year for the next four years. In the spending review for 2015-16 announced last year, national museums and Arts Council England (ACE) took further cuts of 5%.
Watkins is determined that his non-collecting gallery stays solvent in the age of austerity, and is organising an auction next year, drawing works from high-profile contemporary artists who have shown at Ikon. Sale proceeds will go towards establishing an endowment for new commissions.
Plans to build Ikon 2, a new museum of contemporary art, in the Eastside area of the city have been abandoned because the plot of land will now be occupied by the expanding terminus for the pending HS2 railway project. However, Watkins is considering siting a second gallery in the city’s Southside area.
Ikon also needs to raise £100,000 for A Real Birmingham Family, a sculpture by Gillian Wearing, which will be placed outside the Library of Birmingham later this year. The gallery hired a booth at the recent Art14 fair (28 February-2 March), offering 20 limited edition miniature versions of the Wearing statue priced at £5,000 each.
“We attract a number of sponsors, but it’s difficult with the art market being so detached from everything else,” Watkins says. “Only a few museums, mainly in London, enjoy significant corporate support.”
Meagre acquisition funds
However, Stephen Deuchar, the director of the Art Fund, a charity that raises money to help institutions buy artworks, says that the booming art market is not the sole reason that UK museums and galleries are struggling more than ever.
“Their acquisition funds have always been on the meagre side and regular funding cuts have all but eroded museums’ internal acquisition budgets,” Deuchar says. “I don’t think they have been permanently priced out but there is a need to rally together.”
Deuchar highlights an increase in joint acquisitions as a sign of the times: for example in 2012 the Arts Council Collection and British Council jointly acquired Grayson Perry’s The Vanity of Small Differences, a series of six tapestries.
The Art Fund International scheme, which ended in 2012, was a lifeline for UK museums struggling to acquire contemporary art as market prices continued to climb.
The five-year initiative allocated £1m each to five partnerships between UK museums and contemporary art organisations. “Over the five years, we gave around £4.1m for 239 works by 99 artists across the five museum partnerships,” Deuchar says.
The New Art Gallery Walsall, which collaborated with Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery and Ikon as part of Art Fund International, has continued to collect art since the end of the scheme using its own acquisition budget, a fairly slim £32,000 a year.
“I have maintained the momentum and retained the acquisitions budget,” says Stephen Snoddy, the gallery’s director.
In Scotland, the National Collecting Scheme for Scotland (NCSS) has proved an effective impetus. The scheme, a Scottish Arts Council initiative founded in 2003, encompasses seven regional museum partners, including Orkney’s Pier Arts Centre.
“The NCSS helped us identify the core elements of the collection, and focus on works which are more analytical and abstract,” says Andrew Parkinson, the centre’s curator.
An exhibition at the Pier Arts Centre, New Readings (until 21 April), shows how Scottish institutions have leveraged funds for contemporary art collecting.
“Funding from NCSS, alongside the National Fund for Acquisitions, the Art Fund, the Contemporary Art Society, and the Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Charitable Trust has enabled the Pier to match works by Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson with works by 21st-century masters, including Sean Scully and Anish Kapoor,” says a Pier Arts Centre spokeswoman.
Scottish picture
The NCSS is now in its third phase (2013-15), and is “focused on creating affiliations and research relationships across the collections involved”, according to the scheme’s research associate Tina Fiske. However, this phase does not cover acquisitions and Fiske warns that she is not sure whether it will get funding beyond 2015.
Significantly, more than 50 Scottish venues will take part in a celebration of contemporary art this summer as part of the Generation initiative, a partnership between the National Galleries of Scotland and Glasgow Museums.
The programme is supported by Creative Scotland, and is part of Culture 2014, the Glasgow 2014 Cultural Programme for the forthcoming Commonwealth Games.
Despite all these initiatives, the UK as a whole still lacks a coherent, collaborative national strategy for collecting contemporary art that could tackle the issue of prohibitively high prices by effectively pooling resources.
In 2008, the creation of a national strategy was put on the agenda as ACE and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) attempted to address some of the problems surrounding the issue.
The thrust of an ACE report, written by Andrew Brown, then acting head of visual arts at the arts council, was that public collections of contemporary art were becoming impoverished.
The document made a number of suggestions, including the creation of a national endowment fund and better use of national collections such as the Arts Council Collection, the Government Art Collection and the British Council Collection.
But the initiative failed to get off the ground. Deuchar says there’s still a challenge in this area: “Remember that the Heritage Lottery Fund cannot support acquisitions of work less than 10 years old, and ACE does not generally support acquisitions apart from through the V&A Purchase Grant Fund.”
Simon Wallis, the director of the Hepworth Wakefield, believes that a joined-up strategy would be valuable. “A more collective way of thinking that accounts for the strength of the visual arts infrastructure in the regions is very important,” he says.
ACE administers the Cultural Gifts Scheme on behalf of the government. The venture, launched early 2013, enables UK taxpayers to donate works of art and other heritage objects to be held for the benefit of the public or the nation.
In return, donors receive a tax reduction. The initiative is a key strand of the government’s drive to encourage philanthropic giving.
Wallis says that developing a widespread philanthropic culture takes time but believes a tradition of public spiritedness will prevail.
The exhibition and education programme of the Hepworth and its new contemporary art space, The Calder, is funded through a number of charitable trusts, businesses and private individuals; all new donations will be match-funded through the arts council’s Catalyst Arts programme until June 2015.
“Having no money does not mean that your gallery has to be collection poor,” says Godfrey Worsdale, the director of the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead.
Works by emerging artists are often more affordable, he says. “Taking the time to seek out such works, and general expertise, is as important as trying to secure funding.”
Worsdale says that developing relationships with private patrons is vital for museums and galleries. “Negotiations around receiving works have a long tradition: a significant number of the greatest works in British public collections were donated.”
But Worsdale strikes a note of caution, saying that there are many more opportunities for philanthropic giving in and around London and “it is crucial… that works of the highest quality continue to be donated to regional collections”.
Reasons to be cheerful
Deuchar says that despite the cuts there are reasons to be cheerful, citing initiatives such as the national tour of artist Jeremy Deller’s English Magic exhibition.
The exhibition, supported by the Art Fund, was originally commissioned by the British Council for the 2013 Venice Biennale. It started its tour at the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow, east London, and its next stop is Bristol Museum & Art Gallery (12 April-21 September). English Magic will then go to the Turner Contemporary in Margate.
“We’re seeing more applications coming to us for acquisitions combined with a touring/sharing/display programme over a number of years. Museums are thinking harder about how they will use and share new acquisitions so they reach a broader public. That, in turn, can open up new avenues for funding,” says Deuchar.
The Contemporary Art Society (CAS), meanwhile, continues to support public collections by raising funds to buy works by new artists which it gives to museums and galleries. It collaborates with small groups of museums, purchasing contemporary works for up to 15 institutions annually.
Caroline Douglas, the director of the CAS, says that close dialogue with the museums’ curators underpins this process. “This is very targeted, taking into account their priorities and acquisition policies,” she says.
Overall, Douglas is concerned that museums and galleries will continue to be hit by local authority funding cuts. But the CAS, which already runs the £40,000 Annual Award for a regional museum to commission an artwork for its permanent collection, is to announce new schemes later this year that will offer further help to cash-strapped institutions.
“One project will focus on gaps in regional collections, while another initiative will look at the market for artists that has moved so fast, museums have been left behind,” Douglas says, adding: “We are in a position to take a national view.”
Gareth Harris is a freelance journalist
Collecting schemes
The purchase of David Batchelor’s large installation, Waldella, Dundee, by the McManus in Dundee was supported by the National Collecting Scheme for Scotland.
Joint acquisitions
The Adoration of the Cage Fighters is one of six tapestries in Grayson Perry’s series, The Vanity of Small Differences. It was the first joint acquisition, made in 2012, by the Arts Council Collection and the British Council Collection, with support from Channel 4 Television, the Art Fund, and Sfumato Foundation.
Touring shows
We Sit Starving Amidst Our Gold by Jeremy Deller was commissioned for the 2013 Venice Biennale and is now on a UK tour.
Regional galleries
I Am What I Am, a site-specific installation by the Mexican art collective Tercerunquinto at Birmingham’s Ikon Eastside in 2008. Right: Martin Creed’s Work No 960 at the Ikon Gallery. Regional venues such as Ikon are responding creatively to funding cuts.
Funding support
Grazia Toderi’s two- channel video projection Orbite Rosse (Red Orbits) was bought through Art Fund International for the New Art Gallery Walsall and the Birmingham Museums Trust in 2010.
Leading contemporary artists from abroad such as Jamal Penjweny from Kurdistan and Lee Bul of South Korea as well as those who have been involved with the gallery in the past, such as Cornelia Parker, Yinka Shonibare and Julian Opie, will be on display.
How museums and galleries prioritise acquiring and displaying contemporary art in the face of a sustained spending squeeze is a challenge for the sector.
In 2010, the chancellor George Osborne announced that local authority budgets would be reduced by 7.1% each year for the next four years. In the spending review for 2015-16 announced last year, national museums and Arts Council England (ACE) took further cuts of 5%.
Watkins is determined that his non-collecting gallery stays solvent in the age of austerity, and is organising an auction next year, drawing works from high-profile contemporary artists who have shown at Ikon. Sale proceeds will go towards establishing an endowment for new commissions.
Plans to build Ikon 2, a new museum of contemporary art, in the Eastside area of the city have been abandoned because the plot of land will now be occupied by the expanding terminus for the pending HS2 railway project. However, Watkins is considering siting a second gallery in the city’s Southside area.
Ikon also needs to raise £100,000 for A Real Birmingham Family, a sculpture by Gillian Wearing, which will be placed outside the Library of Birmingham later this year. The gallery hired a booth at the recent Art14 fair (28 February-2 March), offering 20 limited edition miniature versions of the Wearing statue priced at £5,000 each.
“We attract a number of sponsors, but it’s difficult with the art market being so detached from everything else,” Watkins says. “Only a few museums, mainly in London, enjoy significant corporate support.”
Meagre acquisition funds
However, Stephen Deuchar, the director of the Art Fund, a charity that raises money to help institutions buy artworks, says that the booming art market is not the sole reason that UK museums and galleries are struggling more than ever.
“Their acquisition funds have always been on the meagre side and regular funding cuts have all but eroded museums’ internal acquisition budgets,” Deuchar says. “I don’t think they have been permanently priced out but there is a need to rally together.”
Deuchar highlights an increase in joint acquisitions as a sign of the times: for example in 2012 the Arts Council Collection and British Council jointly acquired Grayson Perry’s The Vanity of Small Differences, a series of six tapestries.
The Art Fund International scheme, which ended in 2012, was a lifeline for UK museums struggling to acquire contemporary art as market prices continued to climb.
The five-year initiative allocated £1m each to five partnerships between UK museums and contemporary art organisations. “Over the five years, we gave around £4.1m for 239 works by 99 artists across the five museum partnerships,” Deuchar says.
The New Art Gallery Walsall, which collaborated with Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery and Ikon as part of Art Fund International, has continued to collect art since the end of the scheme using its own acquisition budget, a fairly slim £32,000 a year.
“I have maintained the momentum and retained the acquisitions budget,” says Stephen Snoddy, the gallery’s director.
In Scotland, the National Collecting Scheme for Scotland (NCSS) has proved an effective impetus. The scheme, a Scottish Arts Council initiative founded in 2003, encompasses seven regional museum partners, including Orkney’s Pier Arts Centre.
“The NCSS helped us identify the core elements of the collection, and focus on works which are more analytical and abstract,” says Andrew Parkinson, the centre’s curator.
An exhibition at the Pier Arts Centre, New Readings (until 21 April), shows how Scottish institutions have leveraged funds for contemporary art collecting.
“Funding from NCSS, alongside the National Fund for Acquisitions, the Art Fund, the Contemporary Art Society, and the Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Charitable Trust has enabled the Pier to match works by Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson with works by 21st-century masters, including Sean Scully and Anish Kapoor,” says a Pier Arts Centre spokeswoman.
Scottish picture
The NCSS is now in its third phase (2013-15), and is “focused on creating affiliations and research relationships across the collections involved”, according to the scheme’s research associate Tina Fiske. However, this phase does not cover acquisitions and Fiske warns that she is not sure whether it will get funding beyond 2015.
Significantly, more than 50 Scottish venues will take part in a celebration of contemporary art this summer as part of the Generation initiative, a partnership between the National Galleries of Scotland and Glasgow Museums.
The programme is supported by Creative Scotland, and is part of Culture 2014, the Glasgow 2014 Cultural Programme for the forthcoming Commonwealth Games.
Despite all these initiatives, the UK as a whole still lacks a coherent, collaborative national strategy for collecting contemporary art that could tackle the issue of prohibitively high prices by effectively pooling resources.
In 2008, the creation of a national strategy was put on the agenda as ACE and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) attempted to address some of the problems surrounding the issue.
The thrust of an ACE report, written by Andrew Brown, then acting head of visual arts at the arts council, was that public collections of contemporary art were becoming impoverished.
The document made a number of suggestions, including the creation of a national endowment fund and better use of national collections such as the Arts Council Collection, the Government Art Collection and the British Council Collection.
But the initiative failed to get off the ground. Deuchar says there’s still a challenge in this area: “Remember that the Heritage Lottery Fund cannot support acquisitions of work less than 10 years old, and ACE does not generally support acquisitions apart from through the V&A Purchase Grant Fund.”
Simon Wallis, the director of the Hepworth Wakefield, believes that a joined-up strategy would be valuable. “A more collective way of thinking that accounts for the strength of the visual arts infrastructure in the regions is very important,” he says.
ACE administers the Cultural Gifts Scheme on behalf of the government. The venture, launched early 2013, enables UK taxpayers to donate works of art and other heritage objects to be held for the benefit of the public or the nation.
In return, donors receive a tax reduction. The initiative is a key strand of the government’s drive to encourage philanthropic giving.
Wallis says that developing a widespread philanthropic culture takes time but believes a tradition of public spiritedness will prevail.
The exhibition and education programme of the Hepworth and its new contemporary art space, The Calder, is funded through a number of charitable trusts, businesses and private individuals; all new donations will be match-funded through the arts council’s Catalyst Arts programme until June 2015.
“Having no money does not mean that your gallery has to be collection poor,” says Godfrey Worsdale, the director of the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead.
Works by emerging artists are often more affordable, he says. “Taking the time to seek out such works, and general expertise, is as important as trying to secure funding.”
Worsdale says that developing relationships with private patrons is vital for museums and galleries. “Negotiations around receiving works have a long tradition: a significant number of the greatest works in British public collections were donated.”
But Worsdale strikes a note of caution, saying that there are many more opportunities for philanthropic giving in and around London and “it is crucial… that works of the highest quality continue to be donated to regional collections”.
Reasons to be cheerful
Deuchar says that despite the cuts there are reasons to be cheerful, citing initiatives such as the national tour of artist Jeremy Deller’s English Magic exhibition.
The exhibition, supported by the Art Fund, was originally commissioned by the British Council for the 2013 Venice Biennale. It started its tour at the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow, east London, and its next stop is Bristol Museum & Art Gallery (12 April-21 September). English Magic will then go to the Turner Contemporary in Margate.
“We’re seeing more applications coming to us for acquisitions combined with a touring/sharing/display programme over a number of years. Museums are thinking harder about how they will use and share new acquisitions so they reach a broader public. That, in turn, can open up new avenues for funding,” says Deuchar.
The Contemporary Art Society (CAS), meanwhile, continues to support public collections by raising funds to buy works by new artists which it gives to museums and galleries. It collaborates with small groups of museums, purchasing contemporary works for up to 15 institutions annually.
Caroline Douglas, the director of the CAS, says that close dialogue with the museums’ curators underpins this process. “This is very targeted, taking into account their priorities and acquisition policies,” she says.
Overall, Douglas is concerned that museums and galleries will continue to be hit by local authority funding cuts. But the CAS, which already runs the £40,000 Annual Award for a regional museum to commission an artwork for its permanent collection, is to announce new schemes later this year that will offer further help to cash-strapped institutions.
“One project will focus on gaps in regional collections, while another initiative will look at the market for artists that has moved so fast, museums have been left behind,” Douglas says, adding: “We are in a position to take a national view.”
Gareth Harris is a freelance journalist
Collecting schemes
The purchase of David Batchelor’s large installation, Waldella, Dundee, by the McManus in Dundee was supported by the National Collecting Scheme for Scotland.
Joint acquisitions
The Adoration of the Cage Fighters is one of six tapestries in Grayson Perry’s series, The Vanity of Small Differences. It was the first joint acquisition, made in 2012, by the Arts Council Collection and the British Council Collection, with support from Channel 4 Television, the Art Fund, and Sfumato Foundation.
Touring shows
We Sit Starving Amidst Our Gold by Jeremy Deller was commissioned for the 2013 Venice Biennale and is now on a UK tour.
Regional galleries
I Am What I Am, a site-specific installation by the Mexican art collective Tercerunquinto at Birmingham’s Ikon Eastside in 2008. Right: Martin Creed’s Work No 960 at the Ikon Gallery. Regional venues such as Ikon are responding creatively to funding cuts.
Funding support
Grazia Toderi’s two- channel video projection Orbite Rosse (Red Orbits) was bought through Art Fund International for the New Art Gallery Walsall and the Birmingham Museums Trust in 2010.