Invaluable? The value of museums in a world of prices
A summary of the Art Fund Prize for Museum of the Year 2014 Museums Summit Art Fund Prize for Museum of the Year 2014 Museum Summit
On 7 July 2014, prior to the announcement that Yorkshire Sculpture Park had been awarded the Art Fund Prize for Museum of the Year 2014, 200 representatives of the cultural sector across the UK came together with national and international speakers for a half-day conference considering the political, social and economic impact of museums on the world of 2014.
The event was run by the Art Fund, hosted by the National Gallery and sponsored by Farrer & Co. It was made possible thanks to the generosity of the fifteen speakers who came together to discuss the value of museums.
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1 Why consider the value of museums?
During the past decade, the Art Fund has enabled over 28,000 works of art and objects of historical significance of a total value of £370m to enter into the collection of 350 museums around the country. The idea that museums and their collections are ‘valuable’ clearly underpins all the work of the Art Fund; there is a guiding belief that access to great art for everyone is something worth paying and fighting for.
Ten years ago, in Capturing Cultural Value, Demos associate John Holden argued that ‘we need a clearer understanding of what Cultural Value might be’. A decade later that need is still clearly present: there is currently a broader climate of projects seeking to identify the value of culture – from the DCMS’s own work to the AHRC’s Cultural Value project and the Warwick Commission on the Future of Cultural Value. We can use many mechanisms to demonstrate the value of museums in specific areas, but often these fall short of a true measure of why museums matter. The Museums Summit sought to frame this debate and consider value in its broadest possible sense.
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2 Contents
The value of museums 4 Museums as instruments and consequences of economic change 7 Museums, identity and authority 10 Attendees 12 Museums and social change 14 Museum value 17 Appendix: speaker biographies 19
‘When it comes to justifying public investment, funding decisions, satisfying funding bodies, you can measure numbers, footfall, spend, you can provide lots of facts and figures about those, but what you cannot do is measure the smile on a child’s face who has encountered a rather wonderful painting for the first time. But that is value, every bit as much as footfall and spend are value, and we do need to remember that.‘ Lord Smith of Finsbury
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David Verey, outgoing Chairman of the Art Fund, set the tone for the discussions of the day. He noted the truism that museums are greater than the sum of their parts: “works of art hold a value beyond their immediate market price when they are gathered together and set in the context of other works within a museum or gallery”. Drawing on the Economist special report on museums (circulated to all delegates) showing the number of museums doubling globally to 55,000 in the last 20 years and last year’s record numbers of visitors to national collections in the UK, Verey pointed to a clear appetite for museums amongst the public and governments internationally.
Despite this, he noted that “museums continually need to find ways, old and new, to demonstrate to all of their funders that they are of value and worthy of support.” For Verey, as in the UK a large part of these services are state- or local authority- funded, the tax payer who funds them “involuntarily, and often unwittingly” needs to be reassured most of all.
Verey raised a particular concern that the value of reserve collections not on display and with limited public access is not well shown or understood, and that as such they are seen as a drain on resources rather than a valuable asset. He ended with a call to arms to museums “to put far greater effort into reversing the decline of funding and capacity in the UK for teaching, conservation, care and curatorship to students, scholars and museums, museum professionals across the world, and to be much more active in promoting access to reserve collections in their care” to ensure that items not on display “at least pay their way in the world”.
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4 Keynote: The value of museums
‘We must not, and cannot, confine our definitions of museum value.’
Lord Smith, incoming chair of the Art Fund and former secretary of state for Culture, Media and Sport drew on the quotation carved into the front of the Horniman Museum: “This building and its contents […] are dedicated to the public forever as a free museum for their recreation, instruction and enjoyment”, to illustrate the value of museums, by describing what they should be for.
Lord Smith listed the seven key attributes of museums (described overleaf), which he stated to be the source of their value. Lord Smith emphasised that there should be no distinction at all between the intrinsic value of the arts and their instrumental value. He stressed, echoing David Verey, that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts; in describing the value of museums, it is vital not to focus on only one or two aspects:
‘The truth of course is museums are all of these things […] if we try and part these things, we will diminish the argument about what museums are all about.’
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5 Keynote: The value of museums – the seven sources of museum value
1. Stewardship of collections for the future to help us understand ourselves
‘Museums contain within their walls the best that we have created and thought as societies over many centuries. They hold a lot of human knowledge and value and culture and aspiration, and they look after it for us. That is a fundamental purpose that we should never, ever get away from. They enable us, as a result, to develop an understanding of where we have come from as people, what our values are as a society and what we have thought and do think.’
2. Routes to education and learning for all, not just for pupils and students.
3. Enjoyment – something the sector has got better at delivering to visitors over the last two decades.
4. Creating the character of a place – museums add to what makes somewhere special and unique.
5. The spiritual, emotional and intellectual uplift that museums provide for all of us – which is, of course, almost impossible to measure.
6. economic impact: footfall and spend – museums provide a key reason for tourists to visit a city, town or area. Further, the universality of free entry to the national collections acts as “a fundamental calling card” to tourists:
‘one of the signals of our welcome is that we say, ‘come in and see our national collections and our heritage and the patrimony that we have had from previous generations. Come in and see it and you do not have to pay.’
7. soft power – the power of museums to forge and cement international relationships.
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6 Museums as instruments and consequences of economic change
Museums can change a region’s economic fortunes through tourism and new investment. However, cultural assets can be vulnerable when times get tight, and reducing museum budgets and increasing art prices mean museum collections risk being seen as assets which can be sold on for financial gains. The first session of the Museums Summit, chaired by John Kampfner, director of the Creative Industries Federation and a trustee of Turner Contemporary, sought to understand how we can make the argument to protect and develop collections and museums for the public of the future as well as of the present. The speakers were Graham W. J. Beal, director of the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA), and Dame Liz Forgan, who spoke particularly from her viewpoint as a trustee of the British Museum. The panel took place in the context of a broader discussion about the future of the collection of the DIA, with complex negotiations taking place to ensure its long-term security despite the city of Detroit’s bankrupt status.
Models of support The panel began by exploring the Detroit Institute of Arts, (DIA)’s unusual funding model, which shows the extent to which the museum is valued by the local community. Some other American museums – including those in Minneapolis and Chicago – are supported by pre-existing local taxes. In Detroit’s case the residents of the three surrounding counties voted to support the museum directly by paying an additional tax which provides two thirds of the museum’s budget. This millage tax is intended to allow the museum to build enough funds to create an endowment, making it robust in the face of economic change: in Beal’s words, it “would permanently free the DIA from the vacillations of politics, national and local politics.”
Liz Forgan echoed these risks of non-diverse funding streams, comparing the British model to that of continental Europe and America:
‘I think it is terribly helpful to have three strands, essentially three income streams: public funding, private funding and what you might call box office, because that is protection in two ways: if one of them falls over, the other two will keep you going [and] plural funding means plural culture and it stops any one of them dominating the scene’
Beal described how museums must connect with individuals to survive. The DIA’s future rests on local support as it is a museum where only 6% of visitors are from outside the state and 1% from outside the USA. Previously conceived of as ‘superfluous’ to the lives of local residents, the DIA moved actively to a programme of visitor engagement – a For more information project undertaken in different ways across the USA, for instance in Dallas Museum artfund.org/summit of Art’s rewards-based Friends scheme – as it understood that to survive it needed #museumssummit repeat visits from local residents.
7 Museums as instruments and consequences of economic change
‘We moved away from art history – it is still there in the background – but we focused on the human need for this work of art, what is the human purpose, what is the common shared experience that gave rise to this work of art…We put a huge amount of effort into making this a museum that a significant number of people genuinely felt was their museum, that the museum did indeed belong to them and that they belonged there.’
Value to a specific area Examining the instrumental economic value of museums, though disliking the term, Liz Forgan noted how museums assist with tourism (10% of tourists to the UK visit the British Museum), a labour intensive industry with many entry-level roles. She noted that museums’ value to tourists and other groups is deeper than their role as a large public building, rather stemming from their collections, as evidenced by sales of Rosetta Stone branded goods in the British Museum’s shops outweighing the museum’s profit from catering. Beal added a note of caution that for a museum costing $35m a year to run (the DIA) profits from such commercial activities are insignificant. Forgan felt that private donors were more easily able to understand the limitations of describing a museum in terms of economic impact than government.
Beal and Forgan also both stressed a museum’s instrumental importance in creating a rich cultural life in an area which encourages businesses to locate there and develop. In response to questions in this area, Kampfner and Forgan debated whether arts and culture should be “geographically blind” or whether it required a true sense of place – Kampner took issue with the term “regional”, feeling it suggested a hierarchy between nationally important art, often located in the capital, and nationally important art, located in a regional gallery. Forgan felt improvement was dependent on local authorities being confident and culturally aware enough to develop their own collections to create “great national centres of art.” Forgan described how the role of museums (for example the new developments in Abu Dhabi) follow a natural timeline, moving from demonstrating an area’s wealth and power to genuinely considering its roots.
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8 Museums as instruments and consequences of economic change
No such thing as a free museum? In response to a question from Bill Ferris, CEO of the Historic Dockyard at Chatham, the panel discussed the merits of free admission to museums, and whether museums could ever truly be described as ‘free’. Ferris’ concern was creation of the “perception in the public’s mind that museums should be free and are not very expensive to operate” which makes it difficult for charging museums to compete and show their value. For Forgan, this is the “one good case” against free admission. Ultimately though she stated that the risks of free admission – that it is used by “the same middle class, educated people coming back again” rather than increasing the diversity of audiences – are outweighed by the benefits: specifically that an individual can experience great collections over time rather than “in one sitting”. Kampfner noted that charging is not always cost-effective, and that in the case of Turner Contemporary the drop in footfall, in ‘civic financial engagement’ created by charging would have outweighed “the value of admission fees.
‘Forget all the issues around civic, spiritual, public good; the argument for charging, from our experience, is not necessarily as convincing as it otherwise might be.’
The panel agreed that no museum is free to enter in reality, but the value to an individual is immense. Beal noted that it costs the DIA (where admission is free for locals and otherwise $8) $50 per visitor per year to operate. Comparing museum funding with military funding, Beal suggested that museums should be subsidised as a public good.
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9 Museums, identity and authority
The afternoon’s second session, chaired by Fiammetta Rocco, books and arts editor of The Economist, considered the value of museums in shaping a sense of belonging and citizenship; how museums can reflect or at times create a sense of national identity. Discussion was between Wim Pijbes, general director of Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum and Jack Persekian, director and head curator of the Palestinian Museum in Ramallah. It was a debate therefore that brought together the directors of a museum first founded in1800 and reopened in April 2013 after ten years of renovation to worldwide acclaim; and a museum that does not have a yet have a building or collection, but is full of ideas.
National monuments? Neither a royal collection nor a state museum, for Fiammetta Rocco the Rijksmuseum can be best considered as a national collection brought together by ordinary citizens. Wim Pijbes described the museum as a space to learn what society is about today, by utilising objects from Dutch history. This end is aided by the fact that much of the fine art of display, even including the “national altar” of Rembrandt’s The Night Watch, represents everyday Dutch citizens and scenes. Pijbes, echoing Liz Forgan, stated his belief that this is part of a broader trend: national museums have moved away from a triumphalism showing off or display of power to a more considered space for reflection. This identity shift presents difficulties:
‘It is a very tricky thing to combine a museum, a sacred place for culture…with nationalism, because nationalism, mostly, is regarded as a very dangerous aspect of human activity.’
This difficulty was highlighted by Jack Persekian. He stressed that the Palestinian Museum, rather than creating a sense or story of a nation or community, aims to be a space which enables people to suggest and explore their own cultural identity outside the normal limits of the positioning of Palestinian identity. For this reason it is vital that the museum follows, in Rocco’s words, “a public model for a museum”, but is privately, rather than governmentally, funded. The museum is also able to assert its independence by discussing, rather than displaying, cultural values, fulfilling its slogan as “a safe place for unsafe ideas”.
‘It gives us a protection from being connected to any of the already tainted entities or political factions. It also takes us outside – even though nothing is outside of politics – this polarised positioning.’
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10 Museums, identity and authority
Museums without walls Persekian noted that in trying to create a museum accessible to a group of people where fewer than half of the population live inside Palestine it is essential not to treat the museum’s central building in Ramallah as a museum, but as a hub for a broader network. The museum will undertake its work through a network of partnerships with physical centres in worldwide communities, but also through connections with individuals.
‘our constituency… will become basically part and parcel of the infrastructure of this museum, not in the physical sense of a building or of a branch, but more in this kind of emotional connection where they feel that this museum belongs to them and they are a part of it and they can participate actively in making it part of how Palestine will be represented in the future’
For Pijbes likewise, a museum is also more than a building but is ‘a place in the heart of many people’:
‘Heritage is not only objects or buildings; it is also a matter of values: how to behave? What does the society stand for?’
This thinking has affected the Palestinian Museum’s approach to developing its collection: instead of creating it and then opening, the collection will be formed from a series of exhibitions and programmes which allow public engagement. It is the engagement, Persekian explained, which will manifest itself as part of the final collection.
This is also the reason Pijbes gave for the radical move to build an exceptional website, to create more open searches beyond the art historical and to allow anyone to download for free any image from the collection. Pijbes picked up on Graham Beal’s assertion that an art historical approach is insufficient, and a museum must also respond to society – and play with ideas of nationalism. This is also why having Dutch art outside of Holland, far from being a frustration to building a national collection, is essential: such paintings, Pijbes stated, “are our best ambassadors”.
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11 Attendees
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12 Attendees
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13 Museums and social change
The penultimate session considered the impact of museums on those who visit them, and how that can be measured. Chaired by Jane Morris, editor of The Art Newspaper, the panel consisted of: Peter Wienand, a partner at Farrer & Co and expert in charity law; Maria Balshaw, director of the Manchester City Galleries and Whitworth Art Gallery; and Munira Mirza, London’s deputy mayor for Education and Culture.
What price social change?
‘The phrase ‘public benefit’ is the nearest that the law gets to a concept of social value’ Peter Wienand
Jane Morris, Maria Balshaw and Munira Mirza began the session by reflecting on how much museums have changed and grown in popularity over the past 20 years in response to changes in funding (particularly from the National Lottery) and changed government emphasis on what museums are for. There was a shared sense that there had been a move to a more instrumental view.
‘It is a given these days that galleries and museums have a tangible and measurable social impact.’ Maria Balshaw
Mirza celebrated the fact that museums are much more serious about engaging the public and engaging in political discourse and social change, but expressed a note of concern that concentrating on creating social impact risked moving museums’ priorities away from their core mission as places of knowledge, learning and enjoyment. Peter Wienand noted similarly that the core charitable nature of most museums is fundamentally educational. As such the premise of public benefit acts “like a sort of anchor”, ensuring museums are not too greatly “swayed by particular social or political agendas.”
‘I do not think museums and the cultural sector more generally should lose confidence in the value of what they do and try so hard to please their paymasters… museums cannot compete with other types of economic intervention. They cannot deliver on certain social and economic goals… you do not want museums to be competing with new airports or housing. On those kinds of measures, politicians will inevitably choose something else. Museums have to go with their USP.’ For more information Munira Mirza artfund.org/summit #museumssummit
14 Museums and social change
For Balshaw, that USP – increasingly important in an unequal, aging society – is contributing to wellbeing, rather than dealing with societal malaise. The latter, Balshaw stated, reflected an important but small area of museums’ work, while the former generates financial benefits: “happiness does equal economic benefit as well as social impact because societal happiness equals less strain on the public purse.” Mirza echoed Lord Smith, noting that this sense of happiness or wonder in a museum is essential and important, but difficult to quantify.
A gathering of strangers Both Mirza and Balshaw stressed the importance of museums as diverse but unifying spaces, effectively captured in the Nathan Coley neon planned to sit over the entrance of the expanded Whitworth Gallery, called A Gathering of Strangers.
‘I think our social work, our natural social work, is to bring the kinds of people together who would not otherwise meet and allow them to see and find things that they would not otherwise encounter’. Munira Mirza
Wienand was careful to note that there are no limitations in charitable law to the definition of public, so strangers can be international as well as local. As such, a museum must appeal globally: Mirza and Balshaw stressed the importance of a museum’s impact on tourism as a way of demonstrating its wider public value.
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15 Museums and social change
The place of authority Wienand also reminded the audience that public benefit demands a collection of sufficient merit, which suggests a need for authority. The panel repeatedly examined the role of the museum as authoritative voice, which Mirza noted had become a more difficult notion across the cultural sector in the last 40 years, with an academic discourse which is essential to scholarship but difficult to penetrate contrasting with a desire to democratise knowledge.
Mirza and Balshaw agreed that expertise is valued by the public, and that should not be ignored. For Balshaw, it was crucial to note that enjoyment of a museum does not mean a dumbing down: she explained that the Manchester Art Gallery’s most successful exhibition had been Jeremy Deller’s recent All That is Solid Mounts Into Air, a deeply political and thought-provoking show.
However, for Balshaw, museums need to be places of conversation rather than instruction: “it is not a curator’s collection, it is the public’s collection”, and noted the importance in this of taking objects beyond a museum context and into shopping centres and other civic buildings, expanding the collection and conversation outside museum walls. Further, Wienand noted the relevance of the developments in copyright law in Europe: digitising and removing restrictions to images, as the Rijksmuseum have done, increases access to a museum’s collections, including those objects that are not normally on show. However, he noted that this needs to be balanced against the financial value to an institution of commercial reproductions of images.
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16 Museum value
The Museums Summit closed with Diane Lees, chair of the National Museum Directors’ Council and director of IWM in conversation with Will Gompertz, the BBC’s arts editor, responding to the points raised throughout the afternoon.
Managing collections, building stories Will Gompertz asked when – or whether – it was appropriate to sell valuable items from our collections. In response, Diane Lees noted that effective management of collections and in particular reserve collections is vital, but crucially distinct from selling particular items for financial gain.
‘The day of the museum being able to hold a comprehensive collection is over. We do not have the money to keep it or curate it and I have a great belief that decomposition is not a form of de-accessioning.’
Because value to all audiences is not the same, Lees noted that curators need to consider carefully what they do – and don’t – collect for the future now, as well as managing what we have inherited from previous keepers who may have been trying to be comprehensive in scope.
Further, because narratives change over time, items may need to be kept in store – which is cheaper than having them on display – to allow different stories to be told at different points in time. Lees and Gompertz discussed the role that museums and their collections play in developing a sense of place and a national narrative, and Gompertz voiced a note of caution.
‘Anything to do with culture and art is profoundly powerful and not remotely harmless. If [objects] are harmless, what are they doing in our museums?’
While Gompertz suggested that museums offer important platforms for speech and developing narratives, Lees stressed that such stories can only be told with respect to the items in collections, and museums therefore dismiss their rootedness in the objects they contain at their peril. Similarly, where Gompertz wondered whether museums could do more to support the nurturing of creative industries, Lees stressed the strength of existing museum education programmes but noted that these were essentially linked to museum collections.
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17 Museum value
No such thing as a free museum Discussing the notion that there is no such thing as a ‘free’ museum, Lees noted that people don’t value what is given freely, and Gompertz suggested that the public might readily voice their happiness at subsiding museums if they were aware of the extent to which they did so and the value that museums offer.
However, Gompertz closed the session – and the afternoon – by warning of the dangers of overvaluing museums: if a museum became too popular, it would no longer be possible to see the objects on view for the crowds of people wanting to see them.
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18 Appendix: speaker biographies
David Verey chairman, the Art Fund David Verey CBE has been chairman of the Art Fund since 2004 and reaches the end of his term this summer. In his ten years overseeing the Art Fund, the charity has ensured that over 28,000 works of art and objects of historical significance worth over £370m have been added to the collections of more than 350 museums. David is a senior adviser at Lazard & Co., chairman of the board of Sofina, and a director of Bank Gutmann in Vienna. David is an active supporter of the arts, and was chairman of Tate from 1998 to 2004. He has recently taken up the position of chair of the Government Art Collection Advisory Committee and is lead non-executive director at the Department of Culture, Media and Sport. He was a Fellow of Eton College from 1997 until 2012 and is an honorary fellow of St. Hugh’s College, Oxford.
Lord Smith of Finsbury former secretary of state for Culture, Media and Sport Chris Smith entered parliament in 1983 as an MP for the Labour Party. Before his appointment as the UK’s first secretary of state for Culture, Media and Sport (1997–2001), Smith held positions as the shadow treasury minister from 1987 to 1992, and shadowed the environment, heritage, pensions and health portfolios between 1992 and 1997. During his time in cabinet, Smith secured additional funding and a tax rebate in order to restore free admission to all of Britain’s national museums and galleries. He also began the Renaissance in the Regions programme for regional museums, and brought in major changes to the acceptance-in-lieu scheme. Since his retirement from politics in 2005, Smith has served as chair of the London Cultural Consortium (2005–2008), and was the founding director of the Clore Leadership Programme. He is chairman of the Wordsworth Trust and an honorary fellow of Pembroke College Cambridge, and chaired the judging panel for the Art Fund Prize for Museum of the Year 2012.
John Kampfner director, Creative Industries Federation John Kampfner is director of the Creative Industries Federation. The new membership organisation, which began its work in March 2014, aims to become a leading independent voice for the cultural sector. He is also chair of Turner Contemporary, one of the UK’s most successful new art galleries. A journalist of long standing, he was a foreign correspondent for the Daily Telegraph in Berlin and Moscow, where he covered the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Communism. As editor of the New Statesman from 2005-2008, he took the magazine to 30-year circulation highs and won a string of awards. He is the author of many books, notably the best-selling Blair’s Wars and the forthcoming The Rich, A 2000-Year History. John has been the chief executive of Index on Censorship and a global adviser to Google on freedom of expression. He is a member of the Council of King’s College, London.
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19 Appendix: speaker biographies
Dame Liz Forgan trustee, the Art Fund Dame Liz Forgan spent her early career in journalism on the Tehran Journal, the Hampstead and Highgate Express, the London Evening Standard and the Guardian. She was part of the founding team at Channel 4 TV, later becoming director of programmes. She moved to the BBC as managing director, network radio. She has filled several roles in public life including chair of the Heritage Lottery Fund and of Arts Council England. She is currently chair of the Scott Trust (owner of the Guardian and Observer), the National Youth Orchestra and the Bristol Old Vic and a deputy chair of the British Museum. She is a trustee of the Art Fund and a patron of the St Giles Trust, the Schola Cantorum of Oxford, the Churches Conservation Trust and the Pier Arts Centre, Stromness. She is an honorary fellow of St Hugh’s College, Oxford and Girton College, Cambridge.
Graham W. J. Beal director, Detroit Institute of Arts Graham W. J. Beal has been director, president and CEO of the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) since 1999. Since joining the DIA’s leadership, Beal has overseen two major capital campaigns and the renovation and expansion of the facility, as well as guiding the reinstallation of the museum’s stellar collection. Under Beal’s leadership, the DIA has organised outstanding exhibitions such as ’Van Gogh: Face to Face’ in 2000 and ’Magnificenza! The Medici, Michelangelo and the Art of Late Renaissance Florence’ in 2003. Prior to his tenure at the DIA, Beal served as director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art from 1996 to 1999. He held the position of director of the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska, from 1989 to 1996 and served as chief curator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art from 1984 to 1989. He was a member of the board of trustees of the Association of Art Museum Directors and chair of its Art Issues committee from 2002 to 2005, and served on the board of trustees of the American Association of Museums from 2004 to 2007.
Fiammetta Rocco books and arts editor, The Economist Fiammetta Rocco has been books and arts editor of The Economist since 2003. She was born in Kenya of French-Italian parents and read Arabic at Oxford. Her journalism has won awards on both sides of the Atlantic and she has been named British Feature Writer of the Year. Her book about malaria and the discovery of quinine, The Miraculous Fever Tree, is out with HarperCollins. In December 2013 The Economist published Temples of Delight, her ten-page special report on the future of museums.
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20 Appendix: speaker biographies
Jack Persekian director and head curator, Palestinian Museum, Ramallah Curator and producer Jack Persekian is the director and head curator of the Palestinian Museum and the founder and director of Anadiel Gallery and the Al-Ma’mal Foundation for Contemporary Art in Jerusalem. He was previously director of the Sharjah Art Foundation (2009–2011); artistic director of the Sharjah Biennial (2007–2011); head curator of the Sharjah Biennial (2004–2007); and founder and artistic director of The Jerusalem Show, Al-Ma’mal Foundation, Jerusalem (2007 to date) and Qalandiya International (2012). Persekian has curated exhibitions across the world, and in addition he directed The Palestinian Cultural Evening at the World Economic Forum in the Dead Sea, Jordan (2004), and the Millennium Celebrations in Bethlehem – Bethlehem 2000 (1999–2000).
Wim Pijbes general director, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam Wim has been the general director of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam since 2008. He began his career at Theater Lantaren/Venster in Rotterdam and in 1994 founded Art Support, a company that organised Dutch design exhibitions in Milan, Cologne and Frankfurt. In 1996, he joined the Kunsthal Rotterdam as an exhibition coordinator, and was its director from 2000 to 2008. He has written two children’s books about art appreciation and contributes to various publications, including Form, Arts of Asia and The Art Newspaper.
Jane Morris editor, The Art Newspaper Jane Morris has been the editor of The Art Newspaper since 2008, overseeing its monthly print editions, website, daily art fair papers, app and other publications, after three years working with The Art Newspaper on a freelance basis on its museums and art market sections and on numerous special projects. During this period she was also an editor of Art World magazine. She was the editor of Museums Journal/head of publications at the Museums Association from 1999 to 2005 and was closely involved in the re-launch of Museum Practice magazine. A former judge of the European Museum of the Year Award, she studied fine art at Central St Martin’s College of Art and Design, followed by postgraduate study in journalism at City University.
Peter Wienand partner, Farrer & Co
Peter Wienand, who read history at university before training as a lawyer, has been advising cultural organisations on intellectual property and commercial matters for over 20 years. His recent work includes major digitisation projects, international partnerships, information strategy and brand development. He is a trustee of the Henry Moore Foundation; a member of the advisory board of the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) in Science and Engineering in Arts Heritage and Archaeology (SEAHA); a member of the advisory board to the Transforming Tate Britain: Archives & Access Project; a founder member of the Museums Copyright Group; a former member of the Board of Collections Trust; and co-author and editor of A Guide to Copyright for Museums and Galleries (Routledge, 2000). He was also until 2013 an expert member For more information artfund.org/summit and deputy chair of the Advisory Panel on Public Sector Information (APPSI), which #museumssummit advises ministers on re-use of information held in the public sector.
21 Appendix: speaker biographies
Maria Balshaw director, Manchester City Galleries and Whitworth Art Gallery Maria Balshaw is director of Whitworth Art Gallery, part of the University of Manchester, and Manchester City Galleries. As director of these two major institutions, holding internationally important collections of fine and decorative art of more than 80,000 objects, she is responsible for the artistic and strategic vision for each gallery. An academic by training, she has worked as a director within the cultural sector for the past 10 years. Maria has also recently taken on the role of strategic lead for culture for Manchester City Council.
Munira Mirza deputy mayor, Education and Culture, London Munira Mirza advises the Mayor of London on his priorities for culture and education and leads the delivery of key programmes. Munira has worked for a range of cultural and charitable organisations including the Royal Society of Arts, the independent thinktank Policy Exchange and Tate. In 2009 she completed her PhD at the University of Kent and her book, The Politics of Culture: The Case for Universalism, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2011. Munira is a member of Arts Council England, London Area Council; the Royal College of Music Council; and the board of the Institute of Contemporary Art.
Diane Lees chair, National Museum Directors’ Council
Since October 2008, Diane Lees has served as director-general of Imperial War Museums, which is the cultural lead for the centenary of the First World War. Before leading IWM’s five branches and 600 staff, Diane was director of the V&A Museum of Childhood at Bethnal Green and chaired the V&A’s UK Steering Group. Diane began her career as a historic buildings researcher and then moved into exhibitions, education, and interpretation, project-managing the creation of the UK standard for the recording of information about museum collections (SPECTRUM). In April 2013, Diane was appointed chair of the National Museum Directors’ Council (NMDC). She is a member of South Bank and Bankside Cultural Quarter Directors forum, Women Leaders in Museums Network (WLMN), the Arts Council’s external advice panel and a judge on the Museums + Heritage Awards.
Will Gompertz arts editor, BBC Will has been BBC arts editor since 2009. Before that, he was a director at Tate for seven years, where he was responsible for the award-winning Tate Online, the UK’s most popular art website, and Tate Etc., the UK’s highest circulation art magazine. The author of What Are You Looking At?: 150 Years of Modern Art in the Blink of an Eye, he has been voted one of the world’s top 50 creative thinkers by the New York-based Creativity Magazine and has written about the arts for The Times and the Guardian for over 20 years. Probably the world’s first art history stand-up comedian, in 2009 Will wrote and performed Double Art History, a sell-out one-man show at the Edinburgh Fringe.
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