Shock as £33m museum shuts
Nottingham Castle museum closes due to very poor visitor numbers
Also in this issue:
New wing coming to London’s National Portrait Gallery
‘Festival of Brexit’ limps over the finishing line
The King loves Hockney’s Crocs
Happy Friday!
Did you get a bargain on Black Friday? No, me neither.
It’s December next week, so naturally I’m starting to look at what 2023 has in store for the world of museums, galleries, art and heritage. I’m pleased to say it’s looking pretty stellar — and that’s not just in the UK. This week I was lucky enough to go to Paris to meet the curators of some the biggest exhibitions coming to the Netherlands next year (yes it was in the French capital, yes there was wine). I’ll be writing and sharing more about all the Dutch blockbusters very soon, but suffice to say, if you’re not booking tickets to the Rijksmuseum’s once-in-a-lifetime Vermeer exhibition then you’re already doing 2023 wrong.
For now though, let’s return to the here and now and get onto this week’s news!
Maxwell
News from the UK
Major news landed on Monday when Nottingham Castle museum went into liquidation. It was shuttered with immediate effect. The museum — which is housed in a huge historic building overlooking the city of Nottingham in England’s East Midlands — closed just over a year after it unveiled a major £33 million revamp. Low visitor numbers were blamed, thought to be “significantly below” the 300,000 a year projections post-renovation. The charitable trust that had run it was dissolved, and it is thought the building and collection will return to the possession of the local council. Nottingham City Council leader promised the castle would reopen at some point, but he said he doubted any of the authority's £2.68m of recent loans would be paid back. The local paper called it a “dark day” for the city, but that the closure was “not something that has come as a surprise.” There had been numerous scandals around the organisation since it was overhauled — Chief Executive Sara Blair-Manning handed in her notice just weeks after the grand re-opening, vowing to take her former employer to an employment tribunal. Online, the closure was met with much dismay, with many people highlighting that the combination of the dire economic climate and chronic underfunding of regional museums was the perfect storm that led to the museum being axed. One art critic even unfavourably highlighted the Castle’s downfall is at the same time as the National Gallery is moving forward with a £30 million revamp to its ‘front door’. FWIW, I’m not sure any of these points really apply here. It’s clearly not the lack of investment that did it for the Trust, who WERE given major cash. More in fact than the National Gallery’s revamp. You don’t get a much bigger investment (or vote of confidence) in a regional museum than 30 million big ones. (In comparison, Manchester Museum is currently being overhauled for half the price.) The issue clearly seems to be that the business model failed. Either the visitor targets were always pie in the sky, or people simply voted with their feet. Probably both are true. There is a huge issue with the financial sustainability of regional museums in the UK, but this ain’t it. Something has gone woefully wrong with a museum’s management if £30 million of investment — public money no less — is such a rapid failure.
A huge street-art exhibition is coming to Saatchi Gallery next year. Beyond the Streets London, an ambitious, 150-artist survey of graffiti and guerilla art tactics, will open in February, and is the London leg of a show which has already been seen in New York and LA. Read more
The National Portrait Gallery in London will reopen after its own major revamp next year with a huge new wing. It’s been made possible by a £10 million gift from The Blavatnik Family Foundation, and is the most significant gift in the gallery’s history. Proceeds from the donation have enabled the purchase of a disused structure opposite the Gallery’s new entrance, and the nine galleries within the new Blavatnik Wing will display the portraits of Charles Darwin, Prime Ministers Gladstone and Disraeli, Mary Seacole, the Brontë sisters, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Emmeline Pankhurst, and Oscar Wilde. Read more
Following last week’s news that the National Gallery was stunned to learn it had been left a huge multi-million pound gift in a will, a smaller but no-less transformative legacy has surprised another London museum. The Handel and Hendrix museum — which was once home to both musical greats, albeit centuries apart — had had to pause its redevelopment while it struggled to secure the necessary funds. However, a harpsichord expert who tuned and cared for antique instruments at the house, has left a surprise £1 million bequest. Mark Ransom died in 2019 aged 85, but left the huge sum of cash to the museum so they now have the £3 million needed to complete the “Hallelujah Project.” The project will totally refurbish the house to make it look as it would in Handel's lifetime, with new displays, plans for classical concerts inside the building, and private events with food prepared in what used to be the composer’s private kitchens. Read more
The curtain has come down on the year-long Unboxed festival. (Don’t worry if you didn’t notice, no one really noticed the curtain ever went up in the first place.) The Festival was announced in 2018 by the then Prime Minister Theresa May to celebrate British creativity. It was quickly dubbed the Festival of Brexit because of the timing. Organisers raised many an eye brow when they announced this week final audience numbers of 18 million. It then transpired that actually only 2.8 million saw events in person — the rest were via online and, er, an episode of Countryfile on BBC One. The chair of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee called it a "very poor return indeed," with the total cost of £120 million meaning it was £40 per IRL person. No wonder Unboxed's chief creative officer — who originally suggested it would attract 66 million people (!) — didn’t see it through to the end. He left recently to run next year’s Eurovision Song Contest for the BBC. Probs best to chalk this one up to experience. Read more
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News from around the world
Terrible news from Germany, as thieves have stolen a hoard of Celtic gold coins. The stolen coins were discovered in 1999 and are thought to date from the first century BC. The hoard is worth around £1.4 million. Hundreds of the coins were taken from the museum in Manching, Bavaria, in the middle of the night in a nine-minute raid, police said, and that the thieves may have sabotaged the museum's alarm system. Just before the break-in, nearby internet cables were cut causing widespread outages. Read more
In other grim news, Ukraine has reported the looting of Kherson’s museums by Russian troops. Before leaving the liberated city, the occupiers allegedly loaded valuable works for relocation. Of the 14,000 catalogued artworks at the Kherson Art Museum, 10,000 have been sent to the Central Museum of Tavrida in Simferopol, Crimea which is under Russian control. Read more
A $20 million commitment from New York State means that the Buffalo AKG Art Museum has completed its huge $260 million transformation and will reopen in May 2023. Throughout its history, the museum has been early to acquire works by living artists, and it will now double its exhibition space to 50,000 square feet to display more of them. Read more
And finally
Hew Locke’s hugely successful Tate Britain commission The Procession will be moving up to Gateshead in the new year.
Apollo magazine’s 2022 awards shortlists have been revealed. The Courtauld and Oslo’s National Museum are up for Museum Opening of the Year, while the National Gallery’s Raphael will fight it out with the Royal Academy’s William Kentridge show for Exhibition of the Year.
Applications are now open for Art Fund Museum of the Year 2023 - and the prize money has gone up. Professor Dame Mary Beard will be one of the judges.
A sentence I never thought I’d write: HM the King has praised David Hockney’s bright yellow Crocs.
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