No red sticker for plan to merge three galleries

ARTSCAPE:THE PROPOSED amalgamation of Imma, the National Gallery of Ireland and the Crawford Art Gallery in Cork has been Government policy since it was announced last year, though no concrete plans have emerged. And the public forum at Imma on Wednesday was the first open discussion of the proposal. The forum was attended by close to 200 people involved in the visual arts, and speakers included international museum directors, academics, arts administrators, gallerists, artists, and economist Jim Power.

What was striking was that, whatever their background, no-one among the speakers seemed to think the proposed amalgamation was a good idea. More to the point, they spelled out in detail why that was so. Those charged with implementing the policy should worry that even those with considerable experience of amalgamated arts structures, and a pragmatic economist whose instinctive reaction, one might expect, would be to favour the proposal, came down against it.

In fact, Power said he originally came to the issue from one perspective, “that of an economist. But I emerged with another.” What dismayed him was the absence of a plan. Having looked into the amalgamation proposal he concluded: “This thing was not thought through. There was no cost-benefit analysis, for example. It’s like an idea that fell out of the sky and landed on someone’s desk, without any research.”

Of the €22 million of funding that goes into the three institutions annually, he could foresee eventual savings up to only €2 million, and even that might not materialise, and had to be set against the risks. “There’s an extreme danger that the sum will be less than the parts. We’re good at horses, and we’re good at arts and culture. We perform very well in both. We’re world class. At the end of the day you cannot damage the product, and there’s no evidence here that the product would not be damaged. If we’ve learned anything from the banking crisis, it’s that bigger is not necessarily better.”

Both Michael Houlihan (director of national museums in Wales) and Sune Nordgren (founding director of the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo), speaking from their respective experiences, sounded a cautionary note. Houlihan detailed the exhaustive, risk-laden and, incidentally, expensive processes involved in amalgamation. “Amalgamation is not an event,” he pointed out. “It’s a way of life.” Among the risks, he mentioned the corrosive effect of centralisation on individual institutional identity.

When Nordgren (an ex-director of the Baltic in Gateshead) took on the amalgamation of cultural institutions in Oslo, he says, the places he was working with had experienced long-term neglect and were “in the doldrums”. He has since moved on, the amalgamation model is still being developed in practice in Oslo, and he is unsure whether a proposed new building will materialise. He predicted two effects of amalgamation here: “increased costs and more bureaucracy”. Moreover, the three institutions are not in the doldrums. All have strong individual profiles and areas of responsibility.

This was emphasised by two artistic speakers, Hughie O’Donoghue and Jaki Irvine, who separately raised a common point. It was noticeable, as well, that both felt a sense of personal involvement in Imma, the feeling that it really is their museum. (Broadstone Studios director Jacinta Lynch also expressed this feeling.) “My fear,” O’Donoghue said, “is that in amalgamation Imma will suffer.” The National Gallery, he pointed out, has a distinct role in preserving and elucidating a tradition. Imma, on the other hand, “is about what is happening culturally now. I don’t see any overlaps.” Or, as Irvine saw it, “Imma is about living art works. It takes a chance on something.” That is, something that might one day have the established status of a painting that hangs in the National Gallery, but is an unknown now.

Alluding to references by many speakers to the importance of co- operation and collaboration, Irvine thought it worth pointing out that while collaboration is desirable, “sometimes it’s important to insist on difference”.

Noel Kelly of Visual Artists Ireland looked to the business world. Amalgamation equates to merger, he said, and the bad news is that mergers are far more likely to fail than to succeed – a point reiterated by Power. Kelly, like several other speakers, including Pat Cooke of UCD, warned against complacency and emphasised the importance of developing co-operative strategies in the visual arts sector. Communication is vital, he said, and there should be more events like Wednesday’s public forum. Cooke espoused the model of shared services allied to creative autonomy.

Amalgamation posits the dissolution of the individual boards and their replacement by one overall board. Patrick T Murphy, director of the RHA Gallagher Gallery, pointed out that the RHA has taken the opposite route, creating additional boards for different aspects of the organisation’s activities, to considerable effect. A dedicated board raised a huge proportion of the finance for the RHA’s building and refurbishment programme, for example. “In my experience,” he said bluntly, “boards are intimate to an institution. You can’t have a distinct institution without a distinct board.” The chairman of the board of Imma, Eoin McGonigal, made it clear that he and his board are against the idea of amalgamation, a position shared by Enrique Juncosa, director of Imma.

Anthony Cronin, who was instrumental in the establishment of Imma, and served for 10 years on the board of the National Gallery of Ireland, spoke out strongly against amalgamation. It seemed to him, he said, like "a peculiar and expensive step, with a disquieting ring of Big Brotherabout it".