Why, MCA?
#572
There’s only one response to the announcement that Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art will begin charging a $20 entrance fee at the end of January - it will be a disaster. Australians are far too accustomed to visiting museums for free. While local audiences might queue up and pay to see a blockbuster it has to be something really attractive, as rising ticket prices have already had a dampening effect on people’s desire to visit exhibitions. We see the same thing happening at the cinema, where the cost of a ticket makes people more inclined to stay home and watch Netflix.
Australians may be willing to pay a fortune to see some superannuated rock star in concert, but they believe a trip to an art museum should be a cheap day out, and the MCA’s new entrance fee can only be viewed as a desperate expedient. It tells us they are broke, and at their wits end. Is the museum to blame for this state of affairs? Yes, but not entirely.
A museum of contemporary art can never expect to be the most popular game in town. There is an element of experimentation that has to be embraced, and this can be a turn-off for audiences. No contemporary artist has the ‘brand’ recognition Picasso enjoyed in his heyday, with the closest candidates being David Hockney, Banksy and Yayoi Kusama. Artists considered superstars by the one percent who collect contemporary art are virtually unknown to the general public. The museum’s current exhibition, Julie Mehretu’s A Transcore of the Radical Imaginatory is a case in point. The incomprehensible title is only the first disincentive. Mehretu may be one of the world’s most successful living artists, but she is a blank to most of the people the MCA needs to attract.
If those who see the show are unimpressed by Mehretu’s relentless, repetitive abstractions, they are unlikely to encourage friends and family to pay a visit. The result is a mere trickle of paying customers when the institution requires a steady stream.
Obviously the MCA needs to rethink the kind of exhibitions they host, but this is no simple matter. A Mehretu show may confer status within the niche world of contemporary art, but it was never going to bring in the crowds. The Zoe Leonard show of 2022-23 was an even more extreme instance of a wellknown international artist who was guaranteed to leave audiences cold. Yet some of the museum’s best shows, such as the David Goldblatt survey of 2018-19, have had no greater pulling power. The Hiroshi Sugimoto, which preceded Mehretu, was an excellent show, but one wonders if it got the numbers.
It may be foolish to get trapped in the contemporary art bubble in which figures like Mehretu and Leonard are treated like sacred idols, but to go in the other direction and dumb down in search of an audience is also a bad option. Exhibitions could be more carefully chosen and intelligently marketed, but quality can’t be sacrificed for popularity. And this is where the NSW government needs to come to the party.
Last year, according to the MCA’s annual report, which may be found on their website, the museum received a paltry $4.2 million from the state government – a sum that allegedly has not increased since 2008, along with $4.8 million in corporate and private donations. As an independent museum, the MCA is proud of the fact that it raises 80% of its own revenue, but the money it receives from the NSW government is vital. From the government’s point-of-view, the funds they give the museum are a benefaction. Because they don’t actually own the place, they apparently feel little responsibility to help it cope with a funding crisis. They’ve taken a Pontius Pilate stance.
The Art Gallery of NSW, which is government-owned, finished the year $16 million in the red, and was given a $12 million bail out. This is enough to make the MCA green with envy, but still miserly. To make up the shortfall, director Michael Brand notoriously said he’d have to make staff cuts.
The glaring comparison, however, is with the Powerhouse Museum – or “Powerhouse”, as it now prefers to be known. I’m not going to start listing the PHM’s extravagances, or the NSW Government’s persistent record of dishonesty and obfuscation. That would require volumes. The most interesting comparison lies with the amount of money that has been lavished on this whitest of white elephants.
According to Kylie Winkworth, who has studied the Budget Papers, and the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences Annual Report for 2023-24, government grants and contributions to the PHM were $155,667 million against the budget of $103,713 million. This represents a $59,954 million increase between September and November when the annual report was released.
As the PHM has been closed since February, she notes that this equates to a a 22.7% increase “for not running the museum.”
Meanwhile, the MCA – which is actually open, with an active exhibition and education program - receives the same $4.2 million it has been getting since 2008 and is forced to consider admission charges. I won’t speculate about how much good a few million dollars would do in the regional galleries.
Where has all the PHM money gone? Aside from a never-ending series of hare-brained, virtue-signalling, inappropriate projects, it is being swallowed up by the “revitalisation” of Ultimo, which will result in a 75% loss of exhibition space, as the museum is transformed into three large volumes that can only be used for concerts and rave parties, as they are patently inadequate as display areas. No-one seems concerned that, as Winkworth points out, such a use “is inconsistent with the MAAS Act, and with the land use zoning for an information and education facility – Museum.” The other great money sponge is Powerhouse Parramatta, which, when finished, will be just as inadequate. Meanwhile, items from the collection are being farmed out across NSW, with no apparent concern about what happens to them.
A typically pathetic article in the Sydney Morning Herald last week featured an interview with David Borger, the new President of the PHM, and longterm prime mover of the Parramatta project. Putting Borger in charge of operations was a further sign, should one be required, that the government has no intentions of listening to anyone who has criticised this outrageously wasteful project or is warning against the catastrophe that awaits.
From the beginning, Borger has made a huge song & dance about Parramatta being neglected by those snobs and sharpies in the city. In fact, nobody has ever denied the need for a new museum or cultural institution in Parramatta. The problem is that every sensible suggestion has been ignored, while a completely crazy one has been pushed through against the protests just about everybody, apart from a small clique of interested parties, with Mr. Borger being the leader of the pack. It’s not about the western suburbs, it’s about a handful of empire builders in the western suburbs, and the willingness of successive governments to destroy one of the state’s great public assets.
In this brief puff of an interview, Borger told us he is “unapologetic about finding new ways to present the collection.” If what we’re seeing is any indication, that means presenting the collection as a series of props for a range of dubious activities that have nothing to do with the historic mission of the PHM. “We don’t want to be too stuffy and conservative,” he says – but that doesn’t seem to be anything to worry about. Everything we’ve seen so far is completely radical in its stupidity, its utter contempt for museum practice and professionalism. One wonders which earlier PHM shows Borger found too “stuffy”? The Wiggles? Harry Potter? No need to delve into such dense intellectual content in future. The people of Parramatta can enjoy being completely patronised by David Borger’s estimate of what they want.
One of the truly marvellous moments in this interview is when Borger concedes that Parramatta is $27 million short of raising the government’s requirement of $75 million from the private sector. Should he fall short, writes reporter, Linda Morris, “the bill will be picked up by taxpayers.” The complacency of saddling the taxpayer with another $27 million bill is breathtaking when the MCA hasn’t been able to squeeze another dollar out of the state government for the past 16 years!
Once again, all this stuff threatens to lead me down a black hole, there’s so much to discuss. To return to the main theme of this newsletter, the MCA is on the verge of killing off whatever audience it currently enjoys, and the state government is unwilling to lift a finger. Meanwhile the same government has just committed $150 million to a museum that has been closed for the past year. Waste, nepotism and failure are rewarded, fiscal responsibility is punished. Go figure.
There has never been any doubt that the PHM development is an act of cultural vandalism on a grand scale that will lead to taxpayers forking out hundreds of millions to maintain three large buildings nobody wants to visit - but the problem is now spreading. The money pit that is the PHM project has become a vortex that attracts government funding that could be more practically spent elsewhere. Every other museum is suffering because of the government’s weird obsession with one gargantuan project that has zero chance of ever paying its way. By the time it’s finished, close to $2 billion will have been spent, and then we can really start paying.
It's all quiet on The Nightly front this week, so even though I’ve written a piece on Rauschenberg & Johns – Significant Others, a touring show from the National Gallery of Australia, currently at the Geelong Art Gallery, I’ll hold it for a few more days.
The film being reviewed is Sean Baker’s Anora, which took out the Palme d’or in Cannes this year – and deservedly so. The movie belongs to Mikey Madison in the title role, who has put herself on the map with this performance. Now she’ll have wear some ridiculous outfit to the Met Gala, and try to avoid meeting Bono. Or Raygun.
In what is my last newsletter of the year I need to thank everyone for supporting this new, revitalised venture on substack. When what Donald Trump might call the failing Sydney Morning Herald decided they no longer needed an art critic, as it was so much easier to rework press releases, I wasn’t prepared to sit and cry into my beer. I feel like I’ve been let off the leash and have watched the subscriber base of the new website growing week by week. So it’s time to say thanks to The Nightly for picking up the column so quickly; to my mate, Hazel, whose assistance was crucial; and to the readers who have responded so positively. I’m aiming for bigger and better things in the new year.