Art - Charles Darwent on the rise of the European curator in British galleries
Above the general din of self-congratulation in British public galleries this year, you may have heard another sound: the mild but bitter saloon-bar harrumphing of Little England. Damn good, of course, for the country to be seeing in the millennium with all these new art venues - but do so many of them really have to be run by, well, foreigners?
You can see what the Little Englanders mean. When the Tate Modern finally opens its £134m doors on 12 May, it will do so under the watchful blue eye not of a Briton, but of a Dane called Lars Nittve. Nittve has been running the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art near Copenhagen since the early1990s, and running it brilliantly. His tenure has seen the city transformed, curatorially and physically, into one of the major stops on the international contemporary art circuit. No one doubts his ability to do the same for the brick monolith on Bankside, and wistful hopes have even been expressed that it may be Nittve who finally stands up to the Tate's notoriously orderly boss, Nick Serota.
Northward, in Gateshead, the same kind of national yes-buts have been muttered about a Swede, Sune Nordgren. Like Nittve, Nordgren's CV is impressive: a background in both academia and art criticism; a spell running the trendy Malmo Konsthall; another directing the impeccably cosmopolitan International Artists' Studio Programme in Sweden. Nordgren's multiple pedigree made him the obvious candidate to run Gateshead's Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, which is due to open next year. This hasn't prevented a degree of local (and more than local) grumbling about the appointment, prompted by the fact that Nordgren is Swedish.
And that's just the new galleries. The eternally provoking director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Philip Dodd, has recently set the national cat among the pigeons by announcing the appointment of three new associate directors at the ICA, all of them from out of town. One, Cristina Ricupero, currently works at the Pompidou Centre in Paris; another, Martijn van Nieuwenhuyzen, is at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. That the third, Toby Webster, comes from Glasgow's Modern Institute offers little comfort. Dodd sees Scottish cultural traditions as being European rather than British, tersely observing that Edwin Muir translated Franz Kafka before any English writer could get around to it.
Dodd's point is interesting. To some extent, the number of recent foreign appointments to British art institutions is simply to do with there being more new openings than could reasonably be filled locally. Britain has never really managed to produce an institutional officer class: curators have tended to be either gentlemen (such as John Pope- Hennessy), academics (such as the National Gallery's Neil MacGregor) or three-ring showmen (such as the Royal Academy's Norman Rosenthal). Curating courses such as those now offered by Goldsmiths College and the Royal College of Art are a new phenomenon, their graduates as yet too wet behind the ears to handle the kind of jobs taken up by foreign appointees such as Nittve and Nordgren.
What may be significant, though, is not so much the calibre of these appointees as where they have all come from: that is to say, Continental Europe. When the Oxford Museum of Modern Art was looking for a new director three years ago, it did the traditional thing and turned - as it had done for its acronymic name, MOMA - to the United States. Kerry Brougher was brought over from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, soon to be followed by more Americans such as Michael Tarantino. The logic was obvious. Contemporary art was an Anglo-US fiefdom, produced by people with names like Barney and Hirst, and dealt in by others called Gladstone and Jopling. As the market, so the museum. Hiring foreign curators is not a new phenomenon in Britain; it is simply that its centre of gravity has recently shifted eastward.
Why? That's a harder question to answer. Four curators (five, if you count Glaswegians as Europeans) do not necessarily make a summer, and it may simply be that they all happened to be in the right place at the right time. However, the past year has also seen a number of other significant moments of European curatorship in Britain.
First, the Swiss wunderkind, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, was allowed to take over the entire Sir John Soane's Museum and turn it into what was, in effect, an advertisement for his own curating skills - a show called "Retrace Your Steps: remember tomorrow", in which Obrist out-Soaned Soane by dotting specially commissioned works from artists such as Anish Kapoor among objects in the museum's own collection. Then the Saatchi Gallery - always a bellwether for changes in the international art market - put on a series of shows called "Eurovision", featuring the work of little-known European artists such as Ugo Rondinone and Juan Usle. This, in turn, indicated a novel interest on Charles Saatchi's part in collecting new art from Europe: a sea change that might cause a tremor in dealers who have made their living on the backs of the Young British Artists.
The most obvious reading of the Europeanisation of British curatorship is that the Anglo-American special relationship in contemporary art - of which the YBAs were the most obvious beneficiaries on this side of the Atlantic - is, if not dead, at least in decline. There are all kinds of reasons why this might be so, not least because British and American art both tend to be expensive. It may just be, though, that British artists and the institutions that show them have begun to think of themselves as European: a curious thought, and probably not one to be put about in saloon bars.
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