Art Galleries Part Of Show Business

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30453, 29 May 1964, Page 7

Art Galleries Part Of Show Business

Art galleries should regard themselves as part of show business, Mr Eric Westbrook, Director of the National Gallery of Victoria, told Canterbury Society of Arts members last evening.

Galleries should be places of constant entertainment and stimulation for the public, he said. Press columns made people aware that the arts and especially the visual arts were In a shocking state. People felt that somewhere things had gone wrong. However, this feeling of something being wrong had been expressed in each past generation. The reaction was particularly true of the middle-aged when their aesthetic senses were dulled and their responses to art came out wrong. The same situation was found in politics where an old revolutionary considered that his revolution could never be equalled. Art And Politics

The work of artists in Communist countries today was strangely in the same pattern of art as were those who in 19th century England had accepted the demands of the monied class, said Mr Westbrook. They became propagandists. However, things in the West were little better for the artist. Official Government collections, especially American, had taken the work of extravagant and extraordinary type and used it to show that things were free because they were tolerated. Governmentsponsored exhibitions were using the artist as a political weapon and to the bureaucrat the artist was expendable as there were more where he came from. This was not a good thing said Mr Westbrook. There existed today, because of wider education, a vast number of people economically secure, people who were eager to know of art. “However these people are not able to make serious judgments of art,” he said. Art Perversions Art reproductions had become a status symbol. However taste developed from re-

productions was “uncertain” he said. Many reproductions and especially colour reproductions were quite false. Reproductions, of necessity, lost the surface vitality of the original and were distorted in scale. What was worse were some books of reproductions which were deliberately printed to pervert the original. Dealers had their place but they were tied to an extent to what sold. The gallery had to supply the missing link. For a gallery not to purchase the work of a living artist was deplorable as it avoided facing the need to bridge the gap between artist and people. Against Committees To buy the work of contemporaries w’as a “gamble” and the men Who should undertake it were the trained people in galleries and not committees. Committees tended to buy the mediocre as they had to compromise. A greater part of the art at any one time was mediocre and it needs the trained hand to pick what was good. A gallery had to be courageous or it was failing the public and Government and local bodies would have to be more generous in their financial support. “It was not enough to say that the money was providing drains,” he said.