With several major British arts institutions celebrating landmark birthdays this year, Hettie Judah asks their directors if they are ageing gracefully.
It’s a bumper anniversary year for British arts institutions. In London, the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) turns 75 and the Barbican 40, the Midlands Art Centre (MAC) in Birmingham will be 60, Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP) 45, and BALTIC in Gateshead, the baby of the bunch, turns 20. After 12 years of austerity and pandemic funding cuts, no one’s splurging on Urs Fischer party candles or Keith Haring bunting. Still, it feels a moment worth marking, if only to ask how these institutions’ founding principles are holding up. Have they aged – in the best possible way – disgracefully?
New public arts organizations are often promoted in socio-economic terms: to bring money to a region and boost employment; to contribute to quality of life and improve mental health; to enrich education. Artists and their concerns can seem a low priority. Founded by artists, poets and critics in 1947 (as a charity with a broadly educational remit), the ICA was imagined as a radical forum for exchange between artists and thinkers across disciplines...Keep reading on Frieze.
It’s a bumper anniversary year for British arts institutions. In London, the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) turns 75 and the Barbican 40, the Midlands Art Centre (MAC) in Birmingham will be 60, Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP) 45, and BALTIC in Gateshead, the baby of the bunch, turns 20. After 12 years of austerity and pandemic funding cuts, no one’s splurging on Urs Fischer party candles or Keith Haring bunting. Still, it feels a moment worth marking, if only to ask how these institutions’ founding principles are holding up. Have they aged – in the best possible way – disgracefully?
New public arts organizations are often promoted in socio-economic terms: to bring money to a region and boost employment; to contribute to quality of life and improve mental health; to enrich education. Artists and their concerns can seem a low priority. Founded by artists, poets and critics in 1947 (as a charity with a broadly educational remit), the ICA was imagined as a radical forum for exchange between artists and thinkers across disciplines...Keep reading on Frieze.