The rise of blockbuster art shows

By Ray Furlong
The World Tonight, BBC Radio 4

The Tutankhamun exhibition is expected to be hugely popular

When the Tutankhamun exhibition opens at London's O2 arena on 15 November, it will face much more competition than it did the last time it came to the UK in 1972.

Since then, the phenomenon of blockbuster art show has exploded.

"Museums now have to do blockbuster shows to get the people in," says Paul Williamson, director of museum and gallery work at Constantine, which specialises in transporting works of art.

"They're under financial pressure to tour the exhibitions: so various exhibitions may undertake a five, 10 or 15-venue tour around the world."

And packing techniques have also changed since Constantine packed the original Tutankhamun exhibition in 1972.

"I would say it's advanced tremendously - 500% - and it changes every year."

Dangers of transit

Mr Williamson says his company has a 100% safety record. But accidents do happen to art in transit.

A Picasso was lost in an air crash in 1998, while more recently a Damien Hirst sculpture of a cow preserved in formaldehyde started to leak after being transported to Norway.

Charles Dupplin of Hiscox art insurers says claims for damage are rare but expensive.

"The insurance market has become, through bitter experience of many claims, much better able to give advice to people to prevent claims from happening," he says.

"But you can never prevent claims totally from happening and when they happen they can be quite big.

The transportation of the Terracotta Army was a painstaking task

"For instance there was a claim not so long ago when a forklift driver at Heathrow drove his forks through a painting - and it was a very well-known painting that was very lovely."

Critics say accidents like that are inevitable with so much art now on the move.

Michael Daley, from a pressure group called Artwatch, says blockbuster exhibitions have become a menace.

"Any movement is bad for works of art. They're always fragile.

"In moving works of art they get shaken, vibrated, they get much more frequently damaged than is ever admitted.

"Temporary exhibitions can be charged for, they generate merchandising and publicity. It's a money-driven thing."

There is certainly plenty of merchandising at the British Museum's Terracotta Army exhibition - with T-shirts, mugs and figurines in the museum shop.

But visitors say they were fascinated by the exhibition itself. Andrew Burnett, the Museum's deputy director, says large shows like this are central to what the institution is about.

"This exhibition has provided an extraordinary opportunity for a huge number of people and we're expecting something like half a million people at least to see material that otherwise they would never be able to see unless they went to China.

"Last week [former French president] Jacques Chirac came to see the exhibition, and he said to me: how long did it take you to get it?

"So I said we talked to the Chinese for about two or three years. So he said: I always talked to them but I could never persuade them to send it to Paris."

'Visiting cards'

Politicians like being associated with big exhibitions. But sometimes their involvement is unwelcome.

Earlier this year the head of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Antonio Natali, had a huge row with the Italian culture ministry, which forced him to send a Leonardo da Vinci work to a trade fair in Japan.

The Louvre is to have a branch in the United Arab Emirates

One of his supporters, an Italian senator, even chained himself to the railings of the gallery in protest.

"In principle, I think it's right for museums to lend even very important works to each other, if a particular work is necessary for an exhibition," says Mr Natali.

"But what shouldn't be permissible is box office loans or loans which act as visiting cards for an entire nation - the loan, say, of a Botticelli or a Leonardo simply to show how brilliant a nation is.

"Two years ago, there was a Leonardo exhibition at the Uffizi and I was asked to bring three canvasses from where they were hanging on the second floor, down to the first floor.

"I argued the works couldn't be moved. The risk just wouldn't have been worth it."

But the trend towards more art moving more often looks set to continue as museums and galleries develop as worldwide brands.

The Louvre has opened a branch in Atlanta and another is planned in Abu Dhabi.

Under the deal Abu Dhabi will pay more than £600m for the right to borrow art from French museums. But curators signed a petition against it, saying: "Our museums are not for sale."

"There is something very new in France, which is the power of politics in culture, which is very dangerous," says Francoise Cachin, who formerly worked for the Louvre's acquisition committee.

"I have been in museums for nearly 40 years. I have never before had a political order to organise an exhibition or to send something somewhere."