Edmund Capon, AM, OBE, has been director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales for more than twenty five years. Under his creative, enthusiastic and influential stewardship the Art Gallery has prospered and undergone great changes. He has overseen major extensions to the Gallery that have enhanced the museum’s fabric and collections. While a China specialist his wide ranging scholarship has encompassed diverse curatorial projects, from Jeffrey Smart Retrospective, Darkness and Light: Caravaggio and His World to Imperial China: the Living Past. Throughout his tenue he has encouraged innovative approaches to developing the Gallery’s audiences, mainly through engaging programs focused on enhancing the visitor experience.

ABSTRACT

A people’s palace for the elite

As the title suggests, I want my cake and to eat it too.
We, the art museums, want to be both exclusive and popular; exclusive in the experience as personal experience can only be, but popular in the opportunity.  Keeping the balance between being a place of learning and a place of enjoyment is the happy task of the public art museum director – and a happy task it is too – provided we are not tempted by the lure of fleeting fads and fashions or distracted by the seemingly endless if transient imperatives of changing political landscapes.   Anyway both art and the institutions well outlive such things.

I certainly do not subscribe to that appalling artistic conceit that if it’s popular then it cannot be good.  A work of art may be good but not popular; it may be popular but not good; but neither condition means that a work of art may not be both good and popular.   A similar logic applies to the art museum: it too may be both popular and ‘good’ in that it maintains its value as a place of learning and of an informative and hopefully expanding experience.   However, we are no longer manifestations of just civic pride or individual passion, we are now very much in the public domain and accountable, it seems, to all.  The pressure on us to perform political, social, educational, entertainment and even economic circus tricks is becoming a serious diversion, and I believe, like most diversions, temporarily amusing but unnecessary.