Art for art’s sake
If a billionaire wants to buy two painting for £300m that’s his business. But how can UK galleries justify buying them for £100m (unless they are planning to flip them to the billionaire and keep the profit?).
Actually, the £300m the Duke of Sutherland’s two Titians would apparently fetch on the open market may not come from a billionaire with more money than sense but from a foreign museum whose funding similarly exceeds its financial nous.
It is the corny question of value and the best answer is usually that an item is worth what someone will pay, even if that buyer is acting irrationally. Clearly art has a value, but even bearing in mind the market tested by the auction houses and the presence of buyers, no rational basis of assessment has been established.
One simple test would be the income a work produces. Open a gallery, charge the public entry and calculate the value of the item on display. It has occasionally been done for single works and frequently for collections. The Japanese department store that bought its Van Gogh would modify the test to say what extra sales and profits were produced – not only while the painting was displayed but for as long as new customers continued to shop there.
London’s National Gallery, which with Scotland’s equivalent, is seeking the £100m to save the Italian pictures for the British nation, has 5m visitors a year. At £20 a ticket the pictures would pay for themselves in 12 months therefore: allow for rent, security and other costs and £2 a visit in perpetuity would probably justify the £100m on a reasonable price-earnings ratio.
However, the visitors see much more than one painting and while the Titians are this year’s capital spending, these situations come round regularly. The National Gallery has recently matched the £35m the Getty Museum in California offered for the Madonna of the Pinks, for instance.
The bigger snag is that the gallery does not charge for entry anyway. When it did charge for the recent Velasquez exhibition the attendance dropped to 320,000 – though that was a record for a paying event there. And that exhibition was sponsored by Santander bank, owner of Abbey.
To justify £100m, tickets would have to be about £30 based on that attendance – except that such a fee would frighten away visitors.
That the equivalent of half a per cent of the UK population (though some would be foreign visitors) paid to see Velasquez is encouraging, but 90 per cent of people will not visit a free gallery and the majority of the country could suggest better uses for such sums.
If the philistines are not to win it would help if museums could justify in their annual reports the basis for paying what they do, other than that benefactors or the state provide the funds. The art would be just as good if it was half the price.
