From London to Llandudno and Dundee, museums are back in business. So now is it to see art, and how are they going to cope with the drastic decline in numbers?
“There’s a moment,” says Andrew Nairne, “when I thought, of course, that we’re like Nottingham Contemporary and Wakefield Hepworth, it says so.” The director of Kettle’s Yard at Cambridge guides me through a gallery that is “in rehearsal” for a socially remote opening in August. “Then I remembered that the others didn’t have a small cabin with small rooms and narrow corridors.”
Today, the National Gallery of London reopens after Covid-19 abruptly closed the doors of British museums in mid-March. But Kettle’s Yard, like many others, takes an increasingly slow approach. The property hosts exhibits in its new and airy galleries, an exhibition through the artist Linder will last until the fall, but at its center is the home of its founder, curator and collector Jim Ede. Take the form of a series of infinite chalets, their clumsy rooms complete with art and sensitive objects. It is intended to be a warm and hospitable place where visitors have the freedom to sit in the armchairs, turn through the books left on the tables and sometimes feel at home. All of this also makes it a nightmare of social estrangement.
Visitors have had to book an eBook for an excursion to Edes’ house. However, they will be a maximum of 18, instead of 72, they will be able to arrive in both one and both hours. Hand sanitizers will be very useful and staff dressed in visors will know how to direct visitors so they don’t bump into each other or valuables. The breakdown has been the subject of heated discussions.
“I said, “For God’s sake, can’t we open a few windows?” says Nairne. The answer was: “No way.” Alfred Wallis’ magnificent paintings require proper climate control, the airflow in the cabin was considered safe. The café, which usually occupies a small space where tables are ingeniously stacked, will offer takeaways for visitors to eat in the garden.
Museums in the UK face dilemmas. Those in England and Northern Ireland, Leicester’s closed bar, have reopened since last week. Scotland and Wales are expecting soft green by the end of this month. “We need to delight in feeling safe, but also welcoming, so that other people are not afraid,” says Alfredo Cramerotti, director of the Mostyn gallery in Llandudno, who hopes to begin a slow reopening e late this month. They will ask others to wear a mask inside the gallery. “It’s better not to preset that everything is normal,” he says. “It’s not.”
When I stopped early on the weekend, the National Gallery looked cleaner and fresher than ever. A selection of one-way itineraries is now prescribed, and it is mandatory to book a schedule (although always, of course, free). Being able to see art in a museum again, after only 4 months, cheerful. Those who can make a stop in will delight in a memorable experience, without the same crowd. “Normally,” says director Gabriele Finaldi, “we expect about 15,000 climbers a day. At first, we waited between a fifth and a quarter.”
But months of general closure, followed by drastic relief in the number of visitors for the foreseeable future, are a monetary disaster. This is also true for museums that qualify for admission and for those that are on the loose but rely on visitors spending cash at department stores and restaurants and buying tickets for unique shows. Finaldi tells me that he is losing 8 to 12 million pounds with a turnover of 48 million pounds. He cancelled an exhibition of Dutch paintings and an exhibition through Raphael from 2021 to 2022.
Kettle’s Yard will drop about 400,000 euros, with a turnover of 1.8 million to 2 million pounds. Tate’s director, Maria Balshaw, enthusiastically receives the government’s rescue package announced Sunday, with a hundred million pounds for national museums and English heritage, and a major encouragement for national art councils. But, it’s a short-term lifeline, the package won’t bring time to the world before Covid-19. “We earn 70% of our income,” she says. “We are a company with a turnover of one hundred million pounds. We can’t close for a third of the year and then open a third of our visitors. It’s a cliff.”
Maximum marketed museums would possibly have the most difficult to recover. Andrew Lovett, director of the Black Country Living Museum in Dudley, runs a 26-acre site with plenty of outdoor space. This facilitates reopening, and plans to do so on August 1. But the museum earns 94% of its revenue and has virtually no depreciation, apart from the government’s job maintenance program, of the raw realities of what it means to avoid trade.
“We’re a high-volume, low-margin operation,” he says. “During the confinement period, we would have had about 100,000 people through the door, with an expense of about 20 euros.” It is also a highly seasonal attraction, with most visitors coming in summer. Not this year. “It’s like 3 consecutive winters.”
The price, for some, of reopening very few visitors is considered too high at this time. For museums run by local councils, the removal of staff or the redistribution of staff from museums of others would possibly require sensitive calculations of the relative social price. The Royal Albert Memorial Museum is controlled and funded in a giant component through Exeter City Hall. “The reopening,” one spokesman said, “must balance the price of the museum with the social, economic and cultural life of the city and the desire to maintain the council’s scarce monetary resources.”
In other words, cash is needed elsewhere; A reopening date has not been set. You might think that being closed anyway for a new assignment, as is the case with the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh, would be a coincidence. But a complete closure, followed by socially remote work, means a late assignment, which means charges. “Right now,” says Fiona Bradley, its director, “I feel away from people’s concerns about hand sanitizer and one-way systems.” The renovated gallery was scheduled to open in August. The date now given is February. “Covid-19 charges us a share of a million pounds,” Bradley says.
One irony is that organizations that are less and less dependent on public cash are now the most vulnerable. Tullie House in Carlisle was preparing for a drop in investment from his local authority who suffered and enjoyed a fair number of visitors with his Treasures of China (now extended) exhibition. But between March 24 and July 1, he lost 388,000 pounds; Its turnover is approximately 1 million euros. Reservations have allowed the team to fend for themselves so far, however, they will be watching the government’s emergency program with a wonderful deal.
“We desperately want donations from our consumers and members and some kind of rescue,” says director Andrew Mackay. “Otherwise, I don’t see us surviving.” All the museum administrators I talk to say the same thing: donations from supporters and visitors are more than ever wanted.
There will be sacrifices when visits are so highly controlled, across resectable time slots. Finaldi says she will miss casual passengers or passers-by who will travel to the National Gallery for a few moments before exercising near Charing Cross station. “We have a learning area that is sometimes open 361 days a year, with many craft and artistic activities,” says Beth Bate, director of Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA). Families can usually just walk. It will now require a reservation system. “We’ll lose something,” she says.
All museum directors, giant and small, say that reopening safely and postponing exhibitions is the simplest part. The difficulties will come in a year or two. The highest dependents of foreign tourism do not expect the number of visitors to recover for some time. There will be no V-shaped recovery here. Budgets will be tighter. “There will be fewer and fewer blockbusters,” Finaldi says.
The emergency package will not bring a quick fix and all eyes will be on Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s autumn statement. Everyone is thinking about how to paint differently, how to make more money, how to spend less. “This is a wonderful time to use our collections, to put them in percentage with our nearby neighbors,” says Simon Wallis, director of Hepworth Wakefield, which plans to reopen on August 1, Yorkshire Day. “We can save cash by not transporting art from all over the world: insurance prices in recent years have been impressive.” Not to mention, he adds, the prices to the planet.
Meanwhile, Bate is reflecting on how DCA can paint even more strongly with his local authority in Dundee about problems such as the cohesion, fitness and well-being of netpaintings. In the midst of all the overwhelming uncertainty, there is still a sense of defiance and hope. “I never realized that other people do so much with so little,” Wallis says. “We will be offering imaginative solutions. If we don’t move on to the arts, who will?
This item was amended on July 10, 2020 because Kettle’s Yard will welcome 18 visitors according to the time, not the day, as noted in an earlier version.