Lockdown Essay

Author, critic, and traveler, Marina Vaizey reflects on her experiences of the international art world, in a career spanning six decades, including eighteen years as the chief art critic at the Sunday Times.

I can offer a lecture, very short, on the art world post war until now. Here it is. More.

More artists, more money, more collectors, more collections, more scholarship, more publications, more museums, more galleries, more countries involved publicly world wide: Just - for good and ill - more.

The expansion of museums and galleries is almost overwhelming. Just a few at random: The Pompidou in Paris, 1977; the Louvre almost doubled its public spaces with a huge reclamation of existing spaces within the palace; and its branches, eg the Louvre-Lens; Tate Modern (2000) which nearly doubled with the Blavatnik building, Tate Britain with the Clore; V & A Dundee, and the V &A East project; the Getty in Los Angeles, the Guggenheim in New York (1959) and in Bilbao (19970). The new museums throughout the Emirates, the new museum of modern art in Capetown, the Zeitz MOCAA, 2017; throughout West Germany enormous new collections have been made post war (for interesting psychological reasons) and often with museums to match, the Ludwig say in Cologne, and David Chipperfield’s masterly rejuvenation of the Neues Museum on Museum Island (2009) with the adjacent James-Simon-Galerie (2019). The last is typical too of what museums now offer, for the newest addition houses amenities such as the café and the shop rather than art galleries. Austria has its modern museum island in Vienna, based on the Ludwig collections, and almost any established museum has expanded and refurbished: the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge, the Ashmolean in Oxford. This is just a tiny glimpses; every city world wide has been at it, not to mention finding musuems and galleries in the most remote locations. The list is endless, and the roles of museums, not to mention art and artists, continually evolving MV London August 2020