The Great Gallery Gamble
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Date 13 November 2016 Page 44,45,46,47,49 THE GREAT GALLERY GAMBLE They called it the Bilbao effect — hire a “starchitect”, build a gleaming new art gallery and then just watch your town rise out of the doldrums. The problem is, it doesn’t always work. As a world-class £21m gallery in Walsall faces closure, Rosie Millard asks if art alone can save a city t all started with Bilbao, the down-on-its-luck that had been sitting up the river at the original port in northern Spain. In 1997 , Juan Carlos I Tate in Millbank. opened the Guggenheim Bilbao, a world-class Tate Modern has become the most visited, the museum designed by the lauded architect most successful and arguably most infl uential Frank Gehry . It looked like a giant, swirling, modern art gallery in the world, and a key part of fl oating spaceship and was hailed as a London’s regeneration. The magic worked. However, I modern wonder of the world. Bilbao was there have been many others all trying for the same transformed into a tourist town overnight. “Bilbao eff ect”, with varying success. In its fi rst three years alone, the Guggenheim As the BBC’s arts correspondent during those heady generated about €500m in economic activity in the days, I became used to reporting on pretty much the region. Suddenly, every other decaying city around same story with dizzying regularity across the country. the world wanted to achieve the same alchemy. It always kicked off in the same way : high hopes, Britain’s cities, freshly awash with lottery money and artists’ impressions and a visionary interview with boasting a breed of fashionable young artists known a “name” architect. A year later there would be the as the YBAs, seemed better placed to replicate obligatory shot with earth diggers, then the hard-hat Bilbao’s success than most. There was cash available, walkabout, usually in the company of a local MP, or and art was going to get it because, as the millennial Peter Mandelson . Eighteen months later came the mantra went, art can change the fortunes of cities. opening reception, usually alongside a YBA such as The apotheosis of this policy was the mothballed Tracey Emin . That’s where the fun stopped. After that power station at Bankside , on the south bank of the was the often painful enterprise of seeing how the Thames in London, which in 2000 was transformed newly created institution fared in the real world. Tate Modern may have been an unqualifi ed into the iconic Tate Modern . At the time it was thought the museum might welcome a couple of success, but what about The Public , the architect million visitors a year. The actual fi gure is now Will Alsop ’s infamous £72m digital creative centre in more like 5.7m, which is astonishing for a collection West Bromwich ? Opened two years late and to Copyright NLA Media Access. For internal use only. Not for reproduction. Date 13 November 2016 Page 44,45,46,47,49 MISS HIT Tate Modern, London | Cost: £134m National Centre for Popular Music, Sheffield | Cost: £15m Opened: 2000 | Visitors a year: 5.7m Opened: 1999. Closed: 2000 | Visitors a year: 150,000 MISS HIT Guggenheim, Bilbao | Cost: £71m New Art Gallery, Walsall | Cost: £21m Opened: 2000. Future in the balance | Visitors a year: 172,000 Opened: 1997 | Visitors a year: 1.1m GO HERE CREDIT TO PICTURE GO HERE CREDIT TO PICTURE Copyright NLA Media Access. For internal use only. Not for reproduction. Date 13 November 2016 Page 44,45,46,47,49 much fanfare in 2008 , it closed in 2013 and was It is diffi cult to fi nd fault with the physical presence dubbed “a monument to ill-conceived ambition ”. of the New Art Gallery. The individual rooms lead one Or the National Centre for Popular Music in in a subtle rhythm, themselves things of careful beauty. Sheffi eld, with its electronic dance fl oors? That is Perfectly proportioned, top-lit, lined with wooden now a students’ union. And then there were panels and fl oored with blond wood, they have wide, numerous art galleries up and down the country, comfy benches on which visitors can sit and survey each heralded as the new Bilbao. masterpieces. Only, nobody is sitting on them. Why The story has not been one of unmitigated aren’t these galleries packed? They should be. The art success. Far from it. They include the Hepworth here is an uncompromising roll call of the greats : Wakefi eld , designed by David Chipperfi eld at a cost Picasso, Matisse, Manet, C ézanne, Titian, Freud, of £35m , which lost its entire senior management Sickert , Ruskin . Floors of it. Room after room of it. team last year. The Middlesb rough Institute of Everything screams quality, not hung in some weary Modern Art , which cost £14.2m, is well below its chronology, but in a ferociously intelligent manner, annual target of 120,000 visitors. Only the Turner allowing one to bounce off the other. It is surely one Contemporary , in Margate , has really borne fruit. of the greatest collections in the country. There’s more : Another Chipperfi eld building , it cost £17.5m, but a Chinese bowl from the 10th century, 14th-century is a roaring success. Five years on from its opening French sculpture, Egyptian artefacts. The gallery has with Tracey Emin and a subsequent visit from the no entrance fee ; it is a treasure trove accessible to all. Queen, it is attracting more than 350,000 visitors. Is But nobody is here. If current plans go ahead, very there an algorithm for why some of these institutions soon nobody will be here even if they wanted to be. have failed and some have not? If so, it is clearly a This month, Walsall council is poised to axe its hard one for funders and artistic directors to fathom. £470,000 annual subsidy to the New Art Gallery over The biggest casualty of them all could be the New four years. This will, in eff ect, kill it. The gallery depends Art Gallery, in Walsall , which was opened by the upon council funding — plus a matching amount from Queen in May 2000 . It cost some £21m and was the Arts Council England . ACE can’t make good the designed by the fashionable architectural practice loss; it doesn’t replace funding removed by local Caruso St John not only as an urban catalyst for authorities. It would be a fatal blow. Julie Fitzpatrick , a Walsall, but also as a triumphant showcase for the councillor and the portfolio holder for community, town’s peerless Garman Ryan Collection. Copyright NLA Media Access. For internal use only. Not for reproduction. Date 13 November 2016 Page 44,45,46,47,49 leisure and culture, sends me an uncompromising about it around the world. It was nominated for the email on the issue. “It is not nice to ‘think the Stirling prize , it won the R iba West Midlands award unthinkable ’, ” she states. But that’s the state of play. and the Interpret Britain award. It won Gallery of the I walk up the beautifully curved staircase, whose Year. Jenkinson’s acknowledged panache and leather-covered handrail is a nod to Walsall’s famous charisma seemed to be leading the world to the history as a town of tanners . I go past the library, doors of the New Art Gallery. which is locked. There is nobody in the activity room, However, the buzz slowly but surely subsided. In 2005, Jenkinson, who had persuaded the local celebrity although this is a weekday morning and one might Noddy Holder to record the announcements in the lift have expected hordes of excited children ready to explore the delights of the Garman Ryan Collection, and whose motto was “ champagne for all ”, left. His which is at the heart of the building and its reason replacement as director was the equally energetic for being. Comprising 365 important works, it was Stephen Snoddy , who had his work cut out : by 2006, gifted to the city in 1973 by Kathleen Garman , the visitor fi gures had halved, down to just 106,000 a year. widow of the sculptor Jacob Epstein , and his pupil Snoddy responded with enterprise . He brought in a Costa coff ee franchise on the ground fl oor and planned Sally Ryan. Garman had grown up in the Black a lively programme of events, which saw fi gures slowly Country and wanted to bequeath something to her childhood home. She insisted upon three caveats : the increase. The gallery now attracts 172,000 visitors a year collection must never be sold off , it must be kept ( includ ing visitors to the caf e, who do not necessarily together and it must be cared for. go upstairs to see the art). Snoddy has also had to In those millennium days when building was going cope with losing £500,000 from his council grant and on across the UK and art was on everyone’s lips, it was 30% of his staff . Yet at least he kept the gallery open. Now, astounding though it seems, after only 16 deemed fi t that the peerless collection must come out years of life, this trophy of the millennium might of dusty igno miny in the city library , where it was actually close. “The council is having to make formerly perched, and fl ourish in its own bespoke savings of £86m . We are having to consider all space. Accordingly, £21m of public money, most of it options ..