404 World of Museums

The risk of multiple reflections being generated within the greenish glass walls is minimised by their orientation between the dark transverse slots in the ceiling and the use within them of projectors to illuminate from a high angle the picture surfaces and frames only, not the glass behind. The portrait sculptures on their elegant curved pedestals of painted steel echoing the forms of the ceiling are marginally less problematic to illuminate, but they contribute additional elements of restrained visual richness and sophistication to the cool interior with its blue-grey silk covered walls. The six angular steel-framed display cases with perforated aluminium backboards are disposed through the gallery and house changing selections of works on paper. Consequently, in the light of the enormous care taken over the details, it is disappointing that greenish plate glass should have been used throughout when clear iron-free plate glass is easily obtainable in the United Kingdom.

Piers Gough was trained at the Architectural Association School in London and founded the partnership CZWG with fellow former students Nick Campbell, Roger Zogolovitch and Rex Wilkinson in 1975. The practice was responsible for the design of the memorable Lutyens Exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, London, in 1981-2; and that of Alfred Gilbert at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1986. Piers Gough was short-listed for the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery, London, but the National Portrait Gallery refurbishment is his first formal art gallery project to be completed. The cost has been quoted as fI..Zm, paid partly from the grant-in-aid from the Department of National Heritage to cover the upgrading of the technical services, and the remainder funded from the profits earned from the travelling exhibition, Treasures of the National Portrait Gallery, shown at five centres in Japan.

Photo Credit National Portrait Gallery, London.

PETER CANNON-BROOKES

Popular Preferences in Painting

Curatorial distrust of popular taste-or the lack of it-is often criticised for being elitist and based on biased opinions rather than hard fact, but contemporary populist politics and the replacement of museum ‘visitors’ by ‘customers’, have encouraged art museum directors to look more closely at the various products they are marketing. In most of the Western World the Modern Movement took over control of the visual arts establishments during the decades following the Second World War and Western societies have now enjoyed the benefits of two full generations of those who have grown up and passed through the educational systems under the ascendancy of the Modern Movement. However, popular taste remains as obstinately conservative as ever, often reflecting preferences which were in the ascendant a century or more ago. In a

World of Museums 405

democratic society which places particular importance on the validity of the majority vote, the fundamentals of the dilemma faced are obvious. After more than half a century, the majority still does not like the products of the Modern Movement, notwithstanding the assiduity of the enthusiasts for it and the strong bias in its favour embodied in the educational curriculums and the activities of the various arts councils and ministries of culture.

However, it has always been assumed that this attitude was essentially negative and that the so-called popular tastes were both ill-informed and incoherent. The economic strength of popular taste was illustrated well in the United Kingdom around 1980 when it was demonstrated that personal expenditure on popular art, both fine and applied (including glass, ceramics and metalwork, for example, acquired for decoration rather than use), far exceeded that on ‘high art’ of which the products of the Modern Movement accounted for only a part. That negative assumption was never fully tested because the accumulated experience of the manufacturers of popular art and that of the marketplace suggested that it would be a waste of the limited resources available for research of this nature. Furthermore, the presumption that popular taste was incoherent as well as ill- informed provided a certain legitimacy for the leadership adopted by the Modern Movement which, for all its imperfections, claimed to possess a certain consistency of approach. Enormous resources are allocated by the commercial sector to all aspects of market research, and no manufacturer today would dream of releasing a new product if previous market research had not revealed a demand for it, just as supermarkets do not allocate sales space for new lines on the off- chance that they will prove acceptable, but producers of art-outside the coloured reproductions and posters industry-have in recent decades preferred to follow their own instincts instead. Consequently any research project which provides evidence that certain aspects of popular taste may in fact be coherent is of great interest to all public art museums operating in democratic societies. Hence the significance of reports of the work undertaken by Melamid and Komar.

Alexander Melamid and Vitaly Komar, Russian-born artists trained in Moscow and resident in the United States of America since 1978, decided to apply the standard techniques of market research to try to define the preferences of ordinary people rather than those of the creative artists. From 1994 they have commissioned a series of national market research polls in an attempt to clarify what each national grouping most likes to see in paintings and what they most dislike. Contrary to expectations, the results obtained for the first fifteen nations (including countries as diverse as China, France, Iceland, Kenya, Russia and Turkey) have proved to be remarkably consistent (as reported by Christina Lamb, ‘What the world likes best’, The Sun&y Times, 29 December 1996). Professional market researchers have been employed to obtain responses to the more than 100 questions directed to each respondent and to analyse the results. On the basis of these Melamind and Komar set about painting pictures intended to accord as closely as possible with the preferences expressed. This has involved the soul-destroying task of painting more than 100 variants in succession as the particular pattern of likes and dislikes of each nation was clarified. Originally Melamid and Komar intended to organise a travelling exhibition in which to explore the presumed diversity of national tastes, but to their surprise the process yielded repeatedly the same most liked and disliked compositions.

406 World of Museums

The first survey was carried out in the United States of America and all the different social classes, ages and ethnic groups are claimed to have indicated their preferences for the same basic composition and colours: a pastoral landscape painting in which blue predominates, preferably including mountains, a lake and subsidiary animals/human beings in the foreground. The popularity of pictures adopting this format since the 16th century indicates that the results cannot be dismissed out of hand, while the argument that the verbal data gained from the polls could be interpreted differently by other artists, has been countered by the experience of a television show in the United States when a number of artists invited to paint pictures from the survey findings came up with remarkably similar compositions to those of Melamid and Komar. The preferences of the different national groups varied only in respect of subsidiary details, and all were united about what they liked least: modern abstract paintings with red as the dominant colour. Melamid and Komar have participated in an ongoing international debate on the Internet, with regard to their methodology and to the authenticity of their findings as well as their significance, but of the kitsch character of the most loved painting there is almost universal agreement amongst the proponents of high art. Many directors and curators understandably would prefer not to know with such precision what their publics like best and least in paintings, and find the idea of crudely market-driven selection of art for public display abhorrent, so this is a debate which is guaranteed to run and run.

PETER CANNON-BKOOKES

Art Investment and the British Rail Pension Fund

With the sale in New York (Sotheby’s, 30 January 1997) the long saga of the involvement of the British Rail Pension Fund with the international art market draws towards its end and art museums on both sides of the Atlantic will be relieved that the Pension Fund’s profits have proved to be insufficient to encourage other large-scale art investment schemes in the immediate future. Begun in 1974, the British Rail Pension Fund’s managers spent some f4Om over six years, at first using the professional advice of Sotheby’s and subsequently that of the leading dealers in the chosen fields also. The quality of the Pension Fund’s purchases was almost invariably very high and it was thus competing with museums in precisely the same sector of the market. Notwithstanding the volatility of that market, the Pension Fund managers would appear on the face of it to have enjoyed every advantage. Although both the Pension Fund and Sotheby’s have declined to make public the terms of their agreement, it has been deduced that Sotheby’s departments prepared for the Pension Fund dossiers on each sale, providing it with well-informed advice as to which lots could be good investments and the highest prices which should be paid for them. In the event