Italian Museums (ctd.)
January 25 2018
Every time I read something from James Bradburne, the director of the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan, I am more in awe. Bradburne is essentially leading the charge to save Italian museums from themselves, and has just given a refreshingly candid interview to Richard Holledge in the FT. He says of his challenge at the Brera:
I am taking on the beast, a museum run as a department of a department of a Soviet-style state bureaucracy. [...]
In Italy people confuse an excellent collection with an excellent museum. Italy has superlative collections but very bad museums, while Cincinnati, Cleveland and Denver in the USA, for example, have far better museums than any in Italy but they don’t have such good collections. The Getty collection is second-rate — sorry if I offend my friends — but it’s a great museum. They do things with the collection that we are barely imagining.
And his new plan to get people to look at art for longer? Simple, a chair:
“If you want people to look longer and see more, you give them something to sit on because nobody learns standing up,” says Bradburne. “I have just ordered 150 portable stools for the Brera.”
