V&A Bowie Bonanza
80,000 items from David Bowie archive are acquired by V&A for east London site
Also in this edition
National Portrait Gallery races to raise £50m
Beijing’s museum building boom
Kelly Rowland is a curator now
Happy Friday.
There must be dancing in the street in South Kensington. Or maybe a magic dance down Exhibition Road, as the V&A’s huge David Bowie announcement went Hunky Dory this week (and if you’re one of the 11 people still to learn the news, you can find out below). I don’t think it’s any exaggeration to say this is one of the biggest and most wide-reaching museum news stories I’ve ever seen. Every outlet you care to name covered it, from the Times and the BBC, to the Washington Post, New York Times, ABC News, CNN, Pitchfork, Variety and beyond. It made the front page of three national newspapers in Britain, including the Financial Times, which doesn’t normally swap money for museums on its front page. Perhaps the only tiny mishap was that the usual release of the front pages of the next day’s editions — which happens about 10pm each night — meant that the story broke before it’s midnight embargo. But I think that’s what we would call in the PR world A Nice Problem To Have.
A massive well done from maxwell museums to Laura Mitchell and the press team at the V&A. Heroes. I genuinely can’t think what story might ever go bigger. Maybe if the British Museum gives the Parthenon Sculptures to Greece? Or the Smithsonian finds life on Mars?
Now read on for the news!
Maxwell
News from the UK
The National Portrait Gallery is in a desperate bid to save one of Britain’s greatest historical paintings — with just two weeks left to raise an eye-watering sum of money to prevent it from being sold abroad. The price tag on Portrait of Omai by Sir Joshua Reynolds is £50m, and they so far only have half the cash. The race to raise the money for the artwork — which is one of the earliest great portraits of a person of colour — has meant the NPG has begun secret negotiations with the J Paul Getty Museum in the US to propose an unprecedented joint purchase. If successful, it would be the first time a major British artwork has been jointly owned and shared with a museum abroad. The painting would then spend half its time in California, and half its time in the UK where the Portrait Gallery promises to tour it across the country. The ownership of the painting has been controversial for nearly two decades. This weekend’s Financial Times Magazine takes a deep dive into the 20-year bitter row between billionaire Irish business magnate John Magnier and the British art establishment over the work. The low-point was a public dispute with then-Tate Director Nicholas Serota which resulted in Magnier refusing to sell the work to the gallery, even though Tate had found a donor to meet the much more palatable price of £12.5 million. But the current deal with the Getty is on a knife-edge, with the American museum staying silent on the plans, and a £10 million donation from the National Heritage Memorial Foundation being far from secure due to the reduction in access to British audiences the joint ownership plan would involve. The clock is ticking. And if the funds aren’t secured and the painting is lost abroad for good, it would likely mean calling time on the current system that tries to save these works as there are questions of whether they remain fit-for-purpose.
*
In what is quite possibly one of the biggest acquisition coups of recent times, the V&A announced that it has secured the archive of the legendary David Bowie. The
vast collection of personal items — including flamboyant Ziggy Stardust costumes, handwritten lyrics and the Stylophone used in “Space Oddity” — has been donated by the late rock artist’s estate, and they will go on public display for the very first time in 2025, at the new V&A East Storehouse in east London. They are even creating a David Bowie Centre for the Study of Performing Arts at the venue to house it. The centre will be funded with £10 million donation by record label Warner Music Group, which owns Bowie’s songbook, and the Blavatnik Family Foundation. 80,000 items have been donated, and they’ll be regularly switched around.
Ghana-born artist El Anatsui has been chosen to take on this year’s Hyundai Commission in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. He made his name using recycled material to create his work which has been shown around the world, and his work has also seen him use everything from old nails to milk tins, driftwood and railway sleepers to highlight issues of consumerism and history. Tate Modern Director Frances Morris said: “El Anatsui is responsible for some of the most unique and unforgettable sculptures in recent times.” We’ll discover what he does with the vast hall this October.
*
Liverpool loves a mobile museum. Residents of Merseyside and beyond will have Tate Liverpool drive into their communities, as a new initiative sees their recent Radical Landscapes exhibition loaded onto a lorry to tour the local area. The the Art Explora Mobile Museum will see work from artists including JMW Turner, Constable, John Nash and this year's Turner Prize winner Veronica Nash toured to neighbourhoods so that schools, care homes and the community can enjoy them. Residents of St Helens, Knowsley, Wirral, Sefton, Halton and Liverpool will have the chance to see the 21 artworks on display in the truck, which expands once parked.
*
Cardiff hates a mobile museum. Campaigners have welcomed a decision by the city’s council to drop plans to turn the Museum of Cardiff into a mobile attraction, which some feared would amount to “closure by stealth”. They had originally proposed moving the museum out of its current building and making most of its staff redundant, which it said would save £266,000 a year. While the plans to make the museum mobile were supported by 57% of residents, museum and heritage sector bodies strongly opposed the move. The council will now look to relocating the museum to a permanent home. (Good - the plan was terrible FWIW).
News from around the world
Which city would you consider to be the world ‘capital’ of museums? London? New York? Paris? Well, if the authorities in China have their way, Beijing is likely to soon top that list. The Beijing Municipal Cultural Heritage Bureau has announced plans to increase museum construction in the city, vowing to build nearly 250 new museum over the next 12 years. It will take the total number of museums in the Chinese capital to 460 — one for every 50,000 residents. This comes as a new report predicts that Beijing will soon overtake Paris as the world’s biggest tourism destination.
*
The United States has repatriated 77 looted artifacts to Yemen, including dozens of ancient funerary stones linked to a disgraced New York art dealer. But as part of a landmark agreement announced Tuesday, the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art in Washington, DC will care for and store the items for at least two years as Yemen remains engulfed in a bitter civil war. U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the Justice Department seized the items after they were illegally transported into the United States. Some are likely to be publicly exhibited at the museum. Yemen's government will have the option to extend the partnership after two years, depending on the state of unrest in the country.
*
D’oh of the Week. An art collector shattered a $42,000 Jeff Koons sculpture at an art fair in Miami after she tapped it to see if it was a balloon. The shiny, electric blue sculpture of a dog was smashed into hundreds of pieces, and onlookers were horrified as they captured the aftermath on their phones. It was then swept up with a dustpan and brush (which some might say is the best place for a Koons).
And finally
Sotheby’s has recruited Kelly Rowland (yes from Destiny’s Child) to curate an upcoming sale.
The Independent loved the new immersive David Hockney ‘experience’ that’s opened in London. The Guardian did not.
This newsletter lands in your inbox every week. You can support it by donating £3 by clicking the button below