(subtitle: I don't know art, but I know what I like)

The Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery (CMAG) is currently hosting a touring exhibition from the National Gallery, entitled "Love". I spent the afternoon down there today, along with a quick look at the new "exciting" Egypt Gallery. In both cases, although individual works and pieces in the collection were wonderful, the overall presentation and concept left me a bit depressed, and rather disappointed with the quality of Bristol's archivists.

Both the city's own gallery and the touring show have three problems:

• A rejection of the adult audience
• A preference for emotion over scholarship
• An indiferrence, if not outright hostility, to historical context

(The first of these is perhaps the most forgivable - the bulk of CMAG visitors are families.)

The "Love" exhibition contains some marvellous works. The concept - supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund, the Northern Rock Foundation, the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation and in London by the Bernard Sunley Charitable Foundation - is as follows:

Arguably love has been the inspiration for more great art than any other human emotion. Nevertheless it presents a challenge to the visual artist. How do you depict love? How do you convey its complexity and intensity?

The exhibition purports to answer this question through a collection of installations and paintings. There is the obligatory Tracy Emin, along with a piece of Marc Quinn's faux sculpture, mercifully redeemed by some breath-taking canvases. But there's very little to connect them all together. It's all very well saying it's an exhibition about "Love", but where does that get you? The emotional hook doesn't help the viewer to understand the artist's vision, the work's historical context or even the subject matter. There's too much ground to cover; too much exposition needed; too much distance between the artist and the viewer.

The programme accompanying the works isn't much use, either. The CMAG team have chosen to present the works through the eyes of a "People's Panel" who have provide commentary on their favourite works, created a "Love trail" and written their own poetry. For example:

We don’t need anyone else,
We only need each other.
Sad when we are apart,
Optimistic when we are together.

by Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings The People's Panel

At least in an Art Gallery, you can disregard the official themes and take advantage of the opportunity to see rare works, even if you have to do your own legwork to understand the artists and periods (having the Internet on your mobile phone helps). But what about Museum exhibits?

The CMAG has recently relaunched their Egypt gallery. As with the touring "Love" exhibition, the conceptual framework is not the stuffy, traditional, scholarly approach of placing exhibits in their historical context. Instead, perhaps drawing inspiration from the Crystal Maze, there are four themed zones:

‘Belief’ - the religious beliefs of the ancient Egyptians, including their views of creation, their gods and their rituals.

‘Life’ - the social structure in ancient Egypt, childhood and a variety of different jobs from Pharaoh to farm labourer.

‘Death’ - funerary belief, preparation of the body for mummification, coffin symbolism and tombs.

‘Afterlife’ - the ancient Egyptians' beliefs about what happened after death, and the need for grave goods, servants, food offerings, and possessions.

You have to poke about on the computer for a while before you find out anything about "The Old Kingdom", "The Middle Kingdom" and "The New Kingdom", let alone the Ptolemaic Dynasty.

Did I forget to mention the "satellite" areas discussing ‘Egyptian Identity’, ‘How do we see Ancient Egypt?’, and 'The Ethics of Displaying the Dead’?bSuffice to say, your knowledge of Ancient Egypt at the end of your tour will not be much greater than if you'd rented "The Mummy" from Blockbuster.

It's not clear whether there is any genuine archivism or scholarly work (from this generation) underlying the exhibits. It's all beatifully designed, though, and the computers are terribly modern: lots of touch screen technology, pictures of exhibits and the option for visitors to leave comments on specific exhibits via the "Explore and Respond" area. It would be a step in the right direction if all the content and pictures on the in-museum computer systems could be made available via the Internet.

This doesn't bode well for the Museum of Bristol. Setting aside for one minute the absurdity of spending £25 million on another Museum at a time of financial crisis, the recent appointment of Londoners Event Communications Ltd. suggests we'll be seeing the same design-heavy, knowledge-lite approach.

You've only got a couple of weeks left to visit the "Love" exhibition, and remember to take a pen so you can write something on Yoko Ono's Secret Pieces III collaborative, conceptual art tosh. Mrs Barlow confiscated my pen, so I wasn't able to contribute.

The Museum of Bristol (hereafter MoB) is an odd project. At heart it's a rebranding of the old Bristol Industrial Museum (hereafter BIM), which was a big shed full of well-researched and interesting bric-a-brac organised by an appropriate taxonomy . (just like every other traditional museum in the world).

But there has been a laying-on of hands by grant awarding bodies, diversity officers, cultural commentators, sustainability consultants, transport planners, and other nabobs of the collectivist class. So what is the current rationale for the new MoB?:

"Its relevance to the people of Bristol in providing a cultural lever for engagement and
regeneration within the city is pivotal to the projects[sic] success."

I know what all these individual words mean, but when you put them together in this order I don't really get it. I'm not sure what a cultural lever looks like, but I reckon you could get one for less that £25 million.

The rebranding has been kicking around since 2001, but the current plans are driven by the availability of funds from the Hope Tax - the Heritage and Lottery Fund of the National Lottery - specifically a grant of £11.2 million.

Here's a quick run-through of the key documents*:

In September 2004, Bristol City Council conducted a consultation exercise about the MoB, which has yet to be published.

The Cabinet Agenda from 9th March 2006 (Item 12) links to the report that justified the go-ahead to apply for the grant.

The Cabinet Agenda from 23rd November 2006 (Item 6) links to the report that justified acceptance of the HLF funding.

The Planning Application is worth a look, as the supporting documentation includes all designs and related plans. It's available via the PublicAccess for Planning web application, searching for either Property UPRN 000000112209 or Application Reference 06/04643/FB

An excellent document in the electronic pile is the design report produced by architects Lab Architecture Studios, whose achingly hip website can be found here. This link might expire, in which case you'll need to search the Planning database using the UPRN above. As well as discussing the history of the buildings, it details the different attempts to develop the site, the directives of various government agencies and the iterations of the design. Best quotes:

In the May 2005 Council Elections, BCC changed from being a Labour Council to a Liberal Democrat Council. Fortunately Cllr Anne White, who had been instrumental in the initial appointment and development of the brief, was re-elected. [...]

After the public presentation of the scheme, and as a consequence of some public disapproval about aspects of the architecture, as well as the concept of the Museum of Bristol itself, a revised brief from BCC was presented to the Design Team. [...] The revised brief was so substantially different from the direction the Design Team had been developing for the last year that it has neccesitated the reassessment of almost every aspect of the scheme [..].

And an honourable mention to:

The revised brief (November 2005) instructed the Design Team to locate the entrance at the centre of the building. [...] The initial project brief requested a..."stunning" entry space.

There's nothing like giving SMART objectives, is there? You know: clear, unambiguous, objective objectives.

Pursuant to the decision of the cabinet meeting of 15th November 2007, the agreed budget for the project is now £24.7 million (up from £20.6 million). £11.2 million of that is coming from the HLF and £10.5 million is being borrowed from the bank (annual interest payments approx £900,000). Imperial Tobacco have also put £250,000 in the kitty.

Given that £1.4 million was spent on the first phase of the project, that leaves £2.65 million to find. Or does it? The trouble is that the grant only covers certain types of expenditure, and the accounting rules on local council capital expenditure also limit what you can stick on the never-never. Plus, if the project needs extra support from another department is that a cost to the project needing new funding, or a contribution from existing council spending?

The project team want £1.5 million from an S106 agreement (Section 106 of the Town & Country Planning Act (1990) probably paid by land developers of other properties around the wharf), and another £2 million from the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, a charitable trust set up by the late Lord Hamlyn. What happens if they don't get the money? Will the council give the grant back to HLF and cut our losses or plough on regardless? Answers on a postcard, please.

Setting aside the project costs for the moment, when this is all complete the annual running costs of the MoB are projected to be £909,000 a year, not including the £442,000 vigorish payable on the extra £5.1 million of project costs voted through by the Cabinet. The operating annual budget for the BIM in 2001 was £329,000, and it received £303,000 funding from the "Renaissance in the Regions" funding - a programme paid for by the Museums, Libraries and Archive Council - which is not guaranteed for the new MoB.

[edit - a reader points out that the money from the MLAC is, of course, also taxpayers' money) 

Let's go through that again in slow motion. The BIM cost £329,000 year to run, funded largely (92%) by a central government grant, and generated a net income of £30,000 a year. The MoB will cost £909,000 a year to run, plus £442,000 juice for the bank manager and no guarantee of operational funding from anyone other than the Bristolian tax payer.

The next time some one tells you that it's free to visit museums in Britain, remember that there's no such thing as a free lunch. Somebody is always paying. In this case, as analysed previously, every council taxpayer in Bristol will be paying a minimum of £7.00 a year to fund the MoB.

Bristol has some impressive museums , but you can see there's a budget crunch coming. One wonders whether the Red Lodge and the Georgian House will find themselves outmaneouvred by the politically sophisticated diversity crew at the Empire & Commonwealth Museum and the new MoB.

Addenda

1. If you look at the "Travel Plan" for the MoB, you will find that

"walking will be the key mode for the vast majority of people visiting the new museum".

Therefore, the projected 250,000 visitors a year (up from 130,000 remember) won't be needing parking spaces, will they? So that's why there are only 25 planned spaces, of which 7 will be permit controlled and 3 reserved for blue badged vehicles, for a total of 15 visitor's spaces for the museum. Oh - and there's no on-site coach parking for the 1-2 coaches a day that are expected either.

15 parking spaces. For a quarter of a million people.

2. There is of course an Equalities Impact Assessment for the MoB "to meet the needs of those disadvantaged by physical, social, intellectual, cultural, economic factors". I'm not quite sure who the intellectually disadvantaged are, or whether they'll want to come to a museum, but we can only hope.

But here's a problem - the summary given to the Cabinet reveals that the Abolition 200 content currently in circulation in Bristol will form a large part of the content of the MoB. Is it likely that you're going to get lots of new punters to come and see these exhibits if they've already seen them at another museum about a mile away?

And, finally

Some fantastic comments received from the public in response to the planning application:

"These buildings were designed to support a lot of weight in terms of cargo/freight. Surely they woud thereore be capable of supporting a swimming poopl/spa on the roof in the same manner as the one recently opened in Bath. The City needs such a pool and the views would be great. One could even imagine piping hot water from Hotwells to heat the pool and beat Bath at its own game"

"How about a model of Concorde on the top or even the real thing."

*I give the public sector a lot of flak about performance and management of taxpayer's funds. Having worked for a few central and local government organisations over the years, I've seen some dreadful decision making and awful project management. But I've seen the same thing in private sector organisations. Some of the best operational management in the world can in fact be found in the British civil service. The reason why some teams get it right where others get it wrong is a combination of having realistic goals and open exchange of information. As a taxpayer in Bristol I can get access to much of the data and documents relating to Council activities with far greater ease than if I were a shareholder trying to find out about the activities of a publically limited company.