Are we doing everything we can to make our galleries accessible?

I was in two arts venues in one of our fine cities last week. On both occasions I had to walk past an information desk, a ticket booth, a shop and around five gallery assistants before reaching the café (I like a brew before I broaden my mind). In both twenty yard walks I received not one flicker of recognition or smile.

Now, I’m not insecure enough to need a fanfare everywhere I go. It’d be nice, obviously. But I was left feeling disgruntled nonetheless. I visit a lot of galleries, from fine art to contemporary installations. I’ll be brutally honest, I felt as though I wasn’t the kind of person they wanted there. I wasn’t cool enough, or edgy enough. I wasn’t THEIR type of person. It’s all bravado obviously and I know that. But what if I’d never walked into that venue before? Would I ever go back?
I’m adding an affidavit here. I firmly believe front of house is the most difficult job in an arts venue. It’s demanding and tiring. You have to be everything to everyone: guide, confidante, advice centre, toilet director and occasionally line of communication between the audience and the curator. When it’s done well, it’s so good you hardly notice, when it’s done badly, obviously you get people like me feeling upset.
But this is part of a bigger issue. We are going to be asking people, whose finances are stretched enough, to start digging into their pockets and helping the arts out. Why would you do that if, even for a moment, you felt unwelcome or unworthy?
Even if you make it past the front desk you then have the gallery itself to contend with. Perhaps, sometimes we forget how daunting it is to walk into a gallery you’ve never visited before. Particularly if that gallery is dark or the entrance isn’t clearly marked. Am I starting with the right picture? Am I showing my total ignorance by beginning with this portrait on the left rather than that one on the right? Just because we know how to navigate an arts venue, it doesn’t mean everyone else does.
Then, bugbear of all bugbears, language. I know after the front of house team the one that usually gets a kicking is the marketing team but too often language is academic, jargon-fuelled and, quite frankly, exclusive.
I just put ‘New Art Exhibition’ into Google and selected pages from the UK. From the first three pages that came up I took the phrases a “key number of powerful female artists who give form to the interior world” an “ambitious survey exhibition” and finally and possibly most obliquely an artist that makes “a kind of celestial confetti, a serene fusion of light and the motes dancing in it”. Honestly I have two degrees and I’m unsure about what that means.
I’m not advocating dumbing down, far from it. I want to walk into an exhibition and be challenged, have my mind, my senses and my understanding pushed to its very limits. If you want to make me as angry as the Daily Mail might, or as inspired as Atticus Finch does then I am all for it. But I can’t help but feel that language sometimes makes us look as though we are standing on a parapet looking down on the hoi polloi. It feels like sneering. It isn’t inclusive. Art isn’t for only the most articulate or educated, it’s meant to be for all of us. And increasingly it’s going to need to be if we are to survive.
I used to work in BBC Local Radio, whose target market is 55+. Problem is, people don’t turn 55 and suddenly stop tuning in to the radio station they’ve been listening to for twenty years. You’ve got to give them a reason to change the dial. If it’s not in people’s habits to go to a gallery you’ve got to change their habits and put as few obstacles in their way to make it happen.