Visitors to New Art Exchange in Nottingham were – until last autumn – confronted with a series of large cubes on the street outside. The idea of this ‘street gallery’, providing excerpts from exhibitions inside, was that ‘even if you don’t come to the gallery, the art will come out to engage with you,’ the art centre’s chief executive, Saad Eddine Said, explains.
However, a group of local residents selected from the surrounding neighbourhood of Hyson Green thought otherwise. Thanks to the input of this group, which the gallery calls the VOICE Assembly, the giant cubes went ‘in the bin’.
It may have seemed a drastic move but, looking back, it makes perfect sense to Said. ‘If you don’t want to engage with a gallery, we’re already screaming at you that we are a gallery. [Now], when you come near the building, the first thing you see is the cafe. And that’s a very familiar space.’
New Art Exchange is one of just two cultural institutions in Britain – the other being Birmingham Museums Trust – that have put randomly selected members of the public at the heart of their decision making. The movement seems to be growing.
In August, the National Gallery announced NG Citizens, a project to ‘shape its programmes and priorities around the needs and aspirations of communities across the UK, seeking to build meaningful and lasting connections’. The first meeting will take place before Christmas, but decision making is not on hold until then – as shown by this week’s announcement of a £400 million competition to build a new wing of the gallery between Trafalgar Square and Leicester Square. Amid the grand ambitions – and inevitable accusations of ‘wokery’ – is this democratic exercise really likely to shift the museum’s direction?
Citizens’ assemblies have been used by governments to resolve tricky constitutional issues – most notably in Ireland, where the 2012–14 ‘Constitutional Convention’ recommended legalising same-sex marriage, which was then approved in a referendum and passed into law. An exercise in Scotland, which addressed a much wider range of issues and ran from 2019–21, has quickly faded from memory and its report can no longer be consulted online.
Assemblies recruit participants via a process known as sortition, which has its roots in Athenian democracy. Most public officials in ancient Athens were chosen by lot, a process considered preferable to and more democratic than voting because it reduced the ability of corrupt officials to buy their way into office.
Modern assemblies seek to recruit a representative sample of society – taking into account characteristics such as age, race, gender, disability and geographic location – into focus groups, though whether they are consultative or autonomous remains a matter of contention. For the National Gallery, which has awarded a contract worth £250,000 to a company with relevant expertise to deliver the project, paid participants will be picked on the basis of their engagement with the museum, too. ‘We’re really keen that it’s a spread of people who already know about us and engage with us, right through to those who perhaps have not done so already,’ says Jane Knowles, director of public engagement. The chosen ones will be brought together for a series of online and in-person meetings, hearing from gallery officials and external speakers, and deliberating over the institution’s direction.
Dexter Govan, a historian who leads research for The Constitution Society, a think tank that works to improve the discourse around constitutional reform in the UK, says citizens’ assemblies have a ‘mixed record’ in practice. ‘They have a habit of reaching the same conclusions as those who commission them, and often prove more representative of people with the time, resource and inclination to contribute to discussions than the public as a whole,’ he says. While acknowledging that the detail of this plan ‘might convincingly address these points’, he wonders if it could become ‘just a rather expensive sounding board cloaked in democratic language’.
At Birmingham Museums Trust, the decision to host a ‘citizens’ jury’ came amid the city council’s effective declaration of bankruptcy. The council is now being supervised by Whitehall-appointed commissioners, who have recently been accused of ‘preventing scrutiny’. ‘There was kind of an understanding that the city has very little money, and we need to be very careful how that money is spent,’ the trust’s director of transformation, Rob Lewis, says. He recalls that many of the jury’s recommendations were ‘in line with where we felt that we should be, there was a confirmation and a validation that we were on the right tracks’. But jurors also pushed for a greater focus on the city’s musical heritage, which resulted in the Ozzy Osbourne exhibition ‘Working Class Hero’, still running at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery after being extended due to popular demand.
As other museums struggle to attract audiences back after Covid, Said credits citizen engagement with increasing both visitor numbers and revenue at New Art Exchange. That’s something the National Gallery could do with. Despite an increase last year, visitor numbers were still down 47 per cent on 2019 levels.
NG Citizens comes after the film My National Gallery, released last year to mark the gallery’s bicentenary, which likewise cast the museum as a truly national institution, prepared to grapple with its history and perceptions of elitism.
Knowles says the National Gallery’s conception of its audience as wider than visitors is nothing new. She points to the Whig politician and founding trustee George Agar-Ellis’s comment (in 1824) that the national collection should be hosted ‘in the very gangway of London’ – accessible to the rich and poor in equal measure.
The museum’s position, gazing down Whitehall from Trafalgar Square, has been most significant at key flashpoints in recent history. Just Stop Oil protesters Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland were jailed last year for throwing soup over Van Gogh’s Sunflowers (1888). And when National Gallery staff went on strike in 2015 in protest at their jobs being outsourced, it attracted far more attention than most trade disputes, with a debate in Parliament and a large demonstration in Trafalgar Square. Ten years on, outsourced public-facing staff who might reasonably have expected to be consulted about an initiative such as NG Citizens say they have not been involved in discussions. ‘It’s presenting an image of itself to the world while turning a blind eye to a lot of people who work in that building,’ says one gallery worker.
Could the deliberative approach of the citizens’ assembly help the National Gallery navigate certain confrontations and gain a clearer sense of what the public expects of it? For Knowles, ‘This is about engaging with people to understand their motivations, their emotions, their experiences of art, their opinions about art, and how we can evolve what we offer so that it’s meaningful with people and their lifestyles in what is a rapidly changing world.’
Whether discussing programming, corporate sponsorship or catering facilities, a representative group of people might clash with management even if reaching consensus among themselves. At New Art Exchange, the scrapping of the street gallery was an example of a ‘counter-intuitive decision made by our community that clashed with our intention’, Said acknowledges. But having committed to citizen engagement, he felt no choice but to trust that ‘collective intelligence is always going to be more insightful.’