Examination of Witnesses (Questions 268
- 279)
TUESDAY 9 JANUARY 2007
THE ART
FUND
Chairman: Can I welcome to our third
session this morning David Barrie, the Director of the Art Fund,
and invite Adrian Sanders to begin.
Q268 Mr Sanders: Given that a high
proportion of museum collections are not on display and are actually
in storage, what confidence do you have that further acquisitions
are needed?
Mr Barrie: The position at the
moment is that roughly 80% of museum collections are not on view,
but I think it is important to recognise that that figure of 80%
embraces a very, very wide range of different kinds of material.
For example, there are large volumes of archaeological materials
kept primarily for research and scholarly purposes. There are
things that cannot be displayed all the time, for example works
on paper, textiles, light-sensitive material. The volume within
the 80% that might be of great interest to the public is probably
relatively small. Having said that, I think the Art Fund is concerned
that better use should be made of the material that is not currently
on regular display and we would certainly want to encourage museums
in any way we can to find ways of getting that material out so
that the public can have access to it.
Q269 Mr Sanders: If museums have
got acquisitions that they are not displaying, how would you put
a higher priority on that and how would you encourage them to
display what they are not?
Mr Barrie: Well, it is not something
that the Art Fund can do by itself. I think what is needed here
is a much more open public debate about the problem of reserve
collections. The problem we often encounter in our own fund-raising
efforts (because of course we are entirely independent and we
have to raise the money we spend to help museums) is that there
is a lot of ignorance and misunderstanding about the issue that
you raised. I think we need to encourage museums and galleries
to be more open in discussing this. We need to find ways of developing
policies that involve not only us but also the Government, the
Heritage Lottery Fund, and so on. There is no simple solution.
Q270 Mr Sanders: What about disposals;
at what point does it become defensible for an institution to
dispose of items, including items with whose acquisition the Art
Fund may have had something to do?
Mr Barrie: To deal with the last
part of that question first, we have conditions that are attached
to the grants, gifts and bequests that we are associated with
and we would certainly be very resistant to the notion that any
of those should be disposed of. We would certainly insist on being
very closely consulted before any such decision was taken. I do
think that we are increasingly uneasy about the current presumption
against disposal in pretty well any circumstances. As you will
know, the Museums Association are currently engaged in a consultation
exercise and the results of that are expected to emerge in the
spring. We are certainly involved in that process and there certainly
will be occasions when it will make sense to look at the possibility
of disposing of material, but in the first instance one would
want to ensure that material that was surplus to the requirements
of a particular museum or gallery was offered free to another
museum or gallery and disposal on the open market would certainly
be a last resort. We would be very, very concerned to ensure that
the proceeds of any such disposal were ring-fenced and used only
for the development of museum collections and not used for other
purposes.
Q271 Chairman: Can I ask you perhaps
just to comment very briefly on some of the things you have heard
this morning. Are you convinced by the assurances of the HLF that
they are giving the same priority to acquisitions that they have
in the past and they are not constrained by DCMS guidelines?
Mr Barrie: We have a close working
relationship with the Heritage Lottery Fund. We have co-funded
with them something like 200 different museums and gallery acquisitions.
We certainly have been concerned in the past that the volume of
money spent by the Heritage Lottery Fund on museum acquisitions
appeared to be reducing but I am happy to say that over the last
year, as a result of discussions that have taken place with us
and with some of the national museums in particular, the HLF has
I think recognised that something does need to be done. You have
heard just now from Liz Forgan about this new £3 million
scheme to promote collecting in the regional museums. That is
definitely a step in the right direction. It is in fact mirrored
by a scheme that we have just launched ourselves on a more modest
level in the West and East Midlands and the East of England, which
were the three areas identified in our survey earlier this year
as being the ones that were poorest in terms of their ability
to build their collections. That kind of active intervention is
going to be increasingly important because crucially morale, particularly
in regional museums and also increasingly in national museums
is very, very low indeed. There is also a big issue around the
shortage of curatorial skills. Renaissance in the Regions is a
very valuable initiative and the subject specialist networks that
are being promoted within that will certainly help but the damage
that has been done by the corrosive effect over the years of inadequate
funding and inadequate investment in the curatorial substructures,
if you like, will take a long time to reverse. This is going to
take a long time.
Q272 Chairman: But it is in the process
of being reversed?
Mr Barrie: Some steps are being
taken but I have to say that the scale of the problem is so great
that we really do need a lot more investment and for that I think
we do have to look to central government.
Q273 Chairman: And you have also
expressed some concern about the effectiveness of the export control
system which we again took evidence on earlier. We were told by
the Reviewing Committee they thought the Waverley criteria were
working well. Do you share that view?
Mr Barrie: The Waverley criteria
are there and the Export Reviewing Committee has to work within
those parameters. I think we do have quite serious misgivings
about the system. Obviously the primary problem is funding. There
simply is not enough money around. The figures are very distressing
indeed. Last year alone of 17 objects that were deferred, only
nine were saved and those were only worth £8.3 million, and
£6 million of that came from Sir Peter Moores. It was a private
owner, admittedly a man who very generously runs a museum, the
Compton Verney, but had he not been there to step in, it would
have been a truly parlous outcome and the pattern has been repeated
year on year now for many, many years. The system is effectively
coming into disrepute. I do not think we can get away from that.
It is not necessarily that the Waverley criteria are wrong, although
it is certainly the case that the Waverley criteria do not match
very closely for example the criteria operated by the National
Heritage Memorial Fund; I think there is a difficulty there in
terms of public perceptions. Things get export-stopped that the
NHMF and indeed the HLF quite frequently step back and say, "It
does not really match our criteria," and I think that is
awkward.
Q274 Chairman: Changing the export
control system is not going to in itself produce more money.
Mr Barrie: No, it is not. There
are aspects of its operation though that do give cause for concern.
I am sure you will aware of the case of the Reynolds' Portrait
of Omai a few years ago which was export-stopped at a value
of £12 million. The Art Fund got together with the Tate to
launch a public appeal to save it and then, as if by magic, a
private donor came forward with the whole sum of £12 million
so the Tate was in a position immediately to make a matching offer.
The overseas buyer declined to part with the painting, saying
that he would rather keep it in a vault in London. It has now
gone on display in Ireland but that plainly was an absurd waste
of time and energy on the part of the institutions concerned.
A similar problem arose recently in relation to an extraordinarily
important group of Blake watercolours, Illustrations to Blair's
Grave. It was a long and complicated saga but essentially
the Tate was all geared up, with the Art Fund's help, to acquire
this precious group of works and was gazumped at the last minute
when an offer was made for a much larger sum of money for this
group of works. They were then subsequently sold in New York.
The group was broken up and the sum raised was actually much,
much smaller than the amount for which they were export-stopped.
It was a very frustrating occasion. We would love to find a way,
and we are indeed in discussion with the DCMS and the export committee,
about ways in which the system could be made more contractually
binding. This is all quite technical but we do believe it could
be improved.
Q275 Chairman: The suggestion that
has been made is that an application for a licence should also
contain an undertaking that if matching funding is obtained then
the sale goes through to an institution. You would like something
of that kind?
Mr Barrie: It may be that the
right thing to do is to think in terms of having a licence issued
at the outset of the process but subject to very strict contractually
binding terms, rather than the present system which involves the
issue of a licence at the end of the process so that prior to
that point there is no binding contract. I think we and the national
museums feel quite strongly that something of that kind is desirable.
It is a legal matter and we are exploring the technicalities at
the moment.
Q276 Chairman: Going back to the
Reynolds' case, it seems an extraordinarily perverse decision
of the owner; do you have any idea why he decided that he would
rather leave it in a vault?
Mr Barrie: I can only speculate,
I do not know.
Q277 Chairman: You would not like
to speculate?
Mr Barrie: It is probably better
not to.
Q278 Helen Southworth: We have had
a very concurrent theme throughout the morning of philanthropy
and promoting philanthropy. Although we do not have any target
for what we could achieve by promoting philanthropy, a number
of other people have commented that there does not seem to be
a lot of leadership being shown at the moment in terms of moving
this on, there is goodwill but not a lot of action?
Mr Barrie: Yes.
Q279 Helen Southworth: What do you
think could be done and who do you think should be doing it?
Mr Barrie: To give you a little
bit of history, the Art Fund has been pressing for the introduction
of an income tax relief on gifts of works of art for at least
15 years. The Goodison Review obviously brought this issue into
high definition and into sharp focus. In parallel with that we
developed a proposal called Living and Giving which actually set
out in some detail a proposal that we believed, and which the
museums and galleries sector as a whole agreed, would be extremely
beneficial. The model that we developed was based on the Australian
cultural gift scheme. It was less generous in terms of the relief
that it offered than the American system because we understand
that that was a non-starter as far as the Treasury was concerned.
We engaged in, I would say, 18 months or two years of trench warfare
with Treasury officials and special advisers and ultimately got
to the point at which they seemed to acknowledge that the proposal
really did make sense, we had satisfied their concerns and we
were told that it was being recommended to ministers. We were
therefore obviously very disappointed when a year or more ago
it was turned down, not least because, as Sir Nicholas Goodison
pointed out earlier, we had succeeded in getting the Labour Party
manifesto to include a commitment to such a proposal. We have
never been given an explanation formally for why it was turned
down. We are obviously very disappointed. We have not given up
and we will certainly continue to push for it. There is absolutely
no question that at a time when public expenditure is under intense
pressure and the likelihood of additional government funds being
made available for these purposes is remote, that the introduction
of tax incentives of this kind is critically important. If you
ask for evidence of how such things work, I can only really point
I suppose to the United States, which admittedly is a rather extreme
case because there is a 100% income tax write-off available there,
but for example in 2004-05 the Metropolitan Museum spent about
£53.5 million cash on acquisitions and 54% of that came in
the form of cash donations which would have benefited from this
kind of relief. It is also very striking that the largest sums
of money coming to our own national museums and galleries from
the survey that we conducted in the autumn came from their American
donors.
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